The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes Read Online Free Page B

precisely upon this idea that behaviour always reflects personality. Therefore, if you can see how the murderer behaved towards his victim, you can work out what kind of man he is. To this end, a team of FBI agents conducted extensive interviews with thirty-six convicted sex murderers between 1979 and 1983 in order to discover what they had in common, and use the results to make a composite picture of the typical offender. They found, for example, that nearly half of them had been sexually abused in childhood and most of the rest at a later stage. Seventy per cent of them had problems functioning as sexual adults and had to use pornography as a stimulus. They enjoy watching somebody look terrified, and had a compulsive itch to dominate and control somebody else. Pornography, the FBI concluded, was never the cause of the murder, but the fuel of a unrealized fantasy which might include murder. When inhibiting factors were weak, the fantasy might explode, so it was another characteristic of these men that they had little capacity for self-restraint and poor self-esteem.
    (Incidentally, the film Silence of the Lambs purported to show an FBI agent interviewing serial killer Hannibal Lecter. Just one of the fraudulent aspects of that film was that agents always operate in twos when in close contact with a dangerous convict).
    The value of the psychological profile is debatable. It is obviously useful in eliminating suspects who might be happily married clergymen or clubbable classical lexicographers, but the rather general characteristics which are left can cover an awful lot of people. Ted Bundy, the plausible good-looking young man who killed and disfigured several girls in various of the United States in the 1970s, was not caught by the FBI’s profile but because he fired on a traffic policeman who gave chase when he was driving a stolen car. He had killed for years undetected. Once in custody, however, he was identified with the help of the profile, which for the defenders of this method is sufficient justification. For its critics, there is just too much reliance placed on hunches, which can often be quite unsupported.
    Paul Britton said the murderer of Rachel Nickell would have a strong inclination to sexual fantasy, would seek a young submissive adult woman for sexual gratification, would seek to dominate and control her and would be excited by her fear. More specifically, he would look for buggery as well as vaginal intercourse. All this was, frankly, fairly commonplace, in so far as this kind of murderer is always an isolated fantasist, inadequate on a social level and dangerous only when the fantasies are unleashed into the real world. Britton suggested that the use of a knife indicated that the murderer belonged to a very small category of sexual sadists, and he was probably thinking of those described by (his almost namesake) Robert Brittain in Medicine , Science and the Law in 1970. But again, he went further in proposing that Rachel’s killer would be interested in so-called satanic rituals. It is difficult to see why that should be so, except as a wild idea.
    So the police had to find somebody whose sexual fantasies were rather less innocuous than yours or mine—not an easy task given that fantasies are necessarily private. By a lucky chance, they were approached by a girl called Julie Pine who had been in correspondence with a man contacted through a lonely hearts column. This man’s third letter was so disgusting that she thought the police ought to know. His name was Colin Stagg, unemployed, thirty years old and still a virgin. His file was brought out again, and it revealed that his bedroom was painted black and he possessed some books on cult subjects. (So do I, and my room was painted blood-red thirty years ago, but never mind.)
    Investigators then instigated the undercover operation designed to elicit a confession from Stagg. A woman police officer, using the fictitious name of Lizzie James, wrote to Stagg