The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes Read Online Free Page A

inadmissible. The prosecution dropped the case, and Colin Stagg was cleared of murder. The case also raised questions about the use of psychological profiling, and it was this contentious aspect of the investigation that concerned the British author Brian Masters (b. 1939). He has written about many controversial murder cases in Europe and America since his classic study of the mass murderer Dennis Nilsen appeared in 1985.
    Rachel Nickell was an enchanting, pretty, ebullient girl, described by her father as “a bright star” whose “happiness was so real you could touch it”. On 13 July 1992, she went bouncing out for a walk on Wimbledon Common with her two-year-old son Alex, arriving there at ten a.m. Thirty-five minutes later she was dead, viciously stabbed forty-nine times in a random, motiveless murder which bore all the signs of psychopathic disorder. It had taken three minutes to dispatch Rachel and leave her little boy, bathed in her blood, clinging to her body and pleading for her to get up. No wonder the nation was overwhelmed with pity. And no wonder Mrs Nickell shed tears in court last week when the case against the man accused of killing her daughter was not even allowed to go to trial. I do not know the Nickell family, but having spent many weeks with Bruce and Pat Cottrill, whose daughter Fiona Jones was slaughtered by a stranger in France, I think I know something of their anguish. Being cheated of an answer, a result proclaimed in court, makes it seem that Rachel’s death did not matter.
    But it was not the fault of the court that there was no evidence to connect Colin Stagg to the crime. It was the fault of naïve and increasingly desperate police methods born of understandable frustration. The murderer left no tangible clues. Police had mounted the biggest murder hunt in London’s history. They interviewed hundreds of people, drew up a list of over 500 suspects, cautioned scores, actually arrested and released thirty-two men. One of these had been Stagg, who had been interrogated for three days from 18 September 1992; he had co-operated fully and given a reliable account of his movements. They searched his flat and found nothing of any relevance. Nevertheless, they did not forget him.
    It was not entirely a mistake for police to seek the guidance of an “offender profiler” to describe the sort of man they should be looking for, but it was, perhaps, foolish to attach importance to what can only be intelligent conjecture. Anyway, they had nothing else, so they turned to Paul Britton, a psychologist who works in Leicester and who had helped on other investigations. Offender profiling is not a science; it relies upon the merging of experience with intuition, and was first developed by the National Centre for the Analysis of Violent Crime, a division of the FBI at Quantico, Virginia, as a tool to assist traditional detection. The acknowledged expert there is Robert Ressler, who is frequently called upon to offer an opinion, although the judge at the trial of Jeffrey Dahmer in Milwaukee declined to allow Mr Ressler to testify in court. When American judges have permitted an “offender profile” to be presented in evidence, they have regretted it. Convictions have been secured on seventeen occasions, and all of them have been overturned by a higher court.
    The trouble is, “offender profiling” is an infant art. It is experimental and haphazard. Professor David Canter has written about the “shadow” left by the criminal of himself at the scene of crime, which is a striking image, but he has more reliably concentrated on the clues he might find as to methods rather than as to personality. It is when one starts postulating the personality of an unknown killer that the “shadow” becomes really insubstantial, and this is what happened, sadly, to the Wimbledon inquiry.
    The FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit, where psychological profiling originated as an aid to the analysis of violent crime, was based