Read Online The Serial Killers by Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman - Free Book Online Page B

target for the sexually-motivated killer. They symbolise carnality; they actively invite an approach, often touting for custom; and no potential ‘high risk’ victim ever risks injury or death more readily than by entering the nearest dark alleyway with a total stranger. Because of widespread poverty, and the influx of workless Irish and East Europeans into Britain in the late nineteenth century, the Ripper’s chosen killing ground at Whitechapel was notorious for prostitution. He could guarantee to find victims of opportunity there on every foray he made: whores were as thick on the ground in the East End at night as were the fleas in their doss-house bedding.
    Hindsight apart, contemporary written evidence exists which appears to confirm that the Ripper had targeted whores as his intended victims before he committed at least three of the five murders attributed to him. In a letter, thought to be genuine, to the Central News Agency in London and post-marked 27 September 1888 (i.e. three days before the ‘double event’, and six weeks before the murder of Mary Jane Kelly), the writer – who signed himself ‘Jack the Ripper’, thus coining the immortal nickname – declared: ‘I am down on whores and shan’t quit ripping them till I do get bucked’.
    This trait, of first choosing a type of victim to murder and then staking out a likely locale in which to trawl for them, can be identified time and again in the behaviour of modern serial killers. Dennis Nilsen, the thirty-seven-year-old homosexual British civil servant and serial killer, prowled the ‘gay’ bars of Soho for four years between 1979 and 1983 looking for homeless, vulnerable youths. His modus operandi was to ply each ‘pick-up’ with drink, offer him a bed and then strangle him with his tie as he slept. Next morning he would either secrete the body beneath the floorboards of his home in Muswell Hill, north London, or dismember it and dispose of the pieces elsewhere. Each murder left Nilsen ephemerally replete but wholly unmoved, like a spider despatching a fly. He described his reaction after he deposited victim number ten (and third corpse to be dealt with in this way) under the floorboards. ‘That was it. Floorboards back. Carpets replaced. And back to work at Denmark Street’ (the offices of the Manpower Services Commission). Sheer carelessness in disposal of body parts led directly to Nilsen’s arrest. His practice wasto boil the severed heads, or burn them with the trunk and limbs on bonfires and flush the lesser remains down the toilet. Instead he blocked the drains – and was caught.
    Peter Sutcliffe, the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, scoured the red-light districts of Bradford, Leeds, Sheffield and elsewhere during a six-year search for victims prior to his arrest in 1981. Like Jack, he targeted prostitutes: and in that period he intercepted thirteen ‘victims of opportunity’ – by no means all of whom were streetwalkers – and killed them all with exceptional violence. His compulsive urge to murder whores led him to presume that every woman he encountered in those areas where he lay in wait was a prostitute: in fact, five of the thirteen were respectable passers-by. All were subjected to the same degree of violence, and most of the bodies were mutilated after death.
    On one occasion Sutcliffe returned to the murder scene days after the attack, and further mutilated the still-undiscovered body by attempting to sever the head with a hacksaw. To return to the scene of the crime is a common behavioural characteristic in certain serial killers. They do so for a variety of reasons: to check on the progress (if any) made by the police, to relive the fantasy which inspired the murder, and to commit acts of further mutilation and/or necrophilia.
    Prime importance is placed by FBI analysts on the role of fantasy in serial murder. Detailed, ongoing research shows that some convicted serial killers enact violent fantasies – including acts of murder