What makes a man kill five prostitutes and what does his crime say about our society? David Wilson has confronted those questions in
a fascinating new book – and his answers make for uncomfortable reading. JIM GILCHRIST meets the Glasgow-born criminologist
TO DAVID WILSON, the solitary, appalling image of a young woman's dead and naked body jammed in a rain-swollen stream is a powerful indictment of the way we treat all of society's most vulnerable members.
Glasgow-born Wilson, Professor of crimino
logy at Birmingham City University's Centre for Criminal Justice Policy and Research, is a leading "profiler" of serial murderers and a familiar face on TV programmes such as Crime Squad, who has worked on a one-to-one basis with psychopaths, but habitually sets them and their repellent acts in the bigger picture.
In his new book Hunting Evil (co-authored with journalist Paul Harrison) he focuses on the Ipswich serial murders of 2006, and on Steve Wright, the man who committed them. Naming the five dead women, Wilson writes: "Ultimately, the deaths of Tania, Gemma, Anneli, Paula and Annette are not so much a story of Ipswich or Suffolk, or of prostitution, drug addiction and serial murder, but rather their stories tell us much more about what it is to be young, poor and working-class in Britain in the 21st century." A strong statement?
"Absolutely," he says to me, "and it becomes even more difficult in a globalised economy, because a lot of the kids who in our generation would have gone to work in factories, shipyards, the mines… those options have gone for them and it's far cheaper to outsource labour to the developing world: therefore, what do we do with our young working class?"
We're sitting in the Wellcome Trust library café in London's Euston Road, where the 50-year-old criminologist is waiting to go for yet another interview about the book. It is the most vulnerable and marginalised sectors of this society, Wilson repeats, which provide ready targets for serial killers like Steve Wright – sex workers, the elderly, gay men, young runaways and children. "What I can do, as an academic, is reach out to people who are interested in serial killers, because there is an endless fascination with them, and try and harness it to a public political agenda that might reduce the phenomenon of serial killing."
Wilson cuts a stocky figure, and in sweater and open-necked shirt looks more like the occasional rugby player he still is, rather than an academic. His career path has been an unusual one, having gone from Cambridge into the prison service, eventually to become Britain's youngest ever prison governor until he quit in 1997, in protest at prison conditions. He is also an outspoken critic of the criminal justice system.
It was as an acknowledged profiler of serial murders, however, that he was engaged as a consultant by Sky News in 2006 after the body of a missing young prostitute was found in Belstead brook, on the outskirts of Ipswich. He joined the channel's reporter, Paul Harrison, just as a second body was found in the vicinity and remained as the bodies of three further sex workers were found outside Ipswich. He stayed for the subsequent trial of Steve Wright, a 49-year-old forklift driver.
The bodies – of Gemma Adams, Tania Nicol, Anneli Alderton, Paula Clennell and Annette Nicholls – were found in isolated locations around the Suffolk town. DNA evidence – Wright's DNA was on the national database, as he'd been convicted of the theft of £84 five years earlier – plus a tell-tale strand of carpet fibre from his car found in Tania Nicol's hair played a significant part in the case. A taciturn Wright, who admitted having sex with four of the girls but denied killing them, received a life sentence after being described by the prosecution as "a man without explanation".
Wilson is in the business of trying to explain why someone may be driven to act in this way. He has twice written to Wright in prison, asking if he can meet him, but the murderer has refused. Wilson did, however, interview Wright's father (while Harrison interviewed Wright's partner, Pam), and is currently working with the killer's family.
Steve Wright always dressed smartly, was a member of his local golf club and had a reputation as a ladies' man. In reality, he had a chain of failed jobs and two unsuccessful marriages behind him, was heavily in debt, had twice attempted suicide and, while his partner worked night shifts, was regularly trawling Ipswich's red light district, sometimes cross-dressing, sometimes engaging in rough sex. Some of the street girls who were familiar with his blue Ford Mondeo regarded him as a "straight" regular; others, however, refused to get in the car with him, one later commenting: "He freaked me out."
Wright, says Wilson, was very much an "organised" serial killer, who knew exactly what he was doing – strangling his victims while wearing gardening gloves he kept for the purpose, and meticulously cleaning his car afterwards. His desire to kill, suggests Wilson, did not come from a sexual motive so much as an ultimate way of putting power and control back into what he saw as a failed life.
"Every serial killer I've worked with has been incredibly socially conservative," says Wilson. "So the first thing to understand with them is that reputation means a great deal, and they often come from quite professional backgrounds. Peter Moore (who murdered and mutilated four men during 1995] was a well-known businessman, and (once appeared] on BBC Wales TV to talk about his new cinema before going out and killing that same night. Our worst-ever serial killer, Harold Shipman, was a respected GP. There was a phrase often used by Ian Brady (the Moors murderer], who described it as being 'a house divided'. The benefit for us is that, if you are a house divided, you ultimately fall."
However, the fact that such people target the more vulnerable sectors of society makes it much easier for them to kill repeatedly. So what happens to the basic scruples which most of us harbour, to a greater or lesser extent?
"A lot of serial killers will objectify their victims, even after they've been arrested," explains Wilson. "They objectify through a fantasy process that this is no longer a human being they are killing, this is just somebody who meets their own particular needs. It's like a parallel universe, with their social conservatism allied to a moral worldview which is at the same time killing people, which, I have to say, is why they're so fascinating."
This brings us to the whole business of offender profiling, a technique which has been much mythologised by TV series such as Cracker – not to mention a whole fiction genre spawned by Thomas Harris's Red Dragon. Wilson stresses, not without good humour, that profiling is "absolutely nothing to do with 'entering the mind of the killer'. It's more about understanding how they will behave in certain circumstances. The mythologising definitely began with that Thomas Harris novel, but it isn't like that at all, certainly not in my experience."
Then there's the "E" word. "One thing that people invariably ask me is, 'Are these people evil?' I don't see them in religious terms; I see them as having absences, having a sort of parallel moral world in which the gears judder and scrape when you talk to them."
So when he takes some of his students to debate with prisoners at Grendon psychiatric prison in Buckinghamshire, he briefs them beforehand that they will not be confronted by "wild, scary men with horns". "Most psychopaths are incredibly charming and seductive and are not going to be violent unless it is to get what they want," he says.
In his dealings with such offenders, has he ever been in fear of his life? "Not from murderers. I got freaked out once by someone who was a burglar. Usually you can tell if a person you're talking to is going to explode and you can do things to get out of the room. But say that, on a scale, one represented you and I talking, and 100 represented an explosion, he could move from one to 100 without any clues. He didn't sweat, didn't change posture." And did Wilson feel threatened? "Oh yeah," he chuckles.
He and another academic are currently carrying out a research programme with convicted paedophiles and their use of pornography. He, his colleague, and the secretary who transcribes the recordings, all receive counselling after every session. It can all get profoundly depressing, he admits. The saving grace, he suggests, is the fact that such people are exceptions, and it is vital to discover what makes them tick. Also, by publishing such knowledge, he feels he is potentially influencing agendas which government is slow to pursue, both in the management of prostitution and of the endemic drug problem which often forces women on to the streets.
Later this year he'll return to Scotland, with co-writer Harrison, for a follow-up book, Evil Returns, about a recent Scottish rape and murder case.
Finally, referring back to Ipswich, Wilson believes police should re-open earlier cases that he feels certain could be linked to Wright. He is also concerned that lessons learnt from the case are already being forgotten, pointing to the sex worker Louise Heath who was recently fined £100 and thrown out of her council flat for soliciting on those same streets that Wright had prowled, after police lifted an amnesty on soliciting.
"So they're already arresting women working in exactly the same streets, and exactly the same circumstances, as the five who were murdered.
"It's almost as if they've put the bogeyman behind bars and therefore we can forget about it. But these issues will not disappear unless we tackle the underlying causes."
• Hunting Evil is published by Sphere at £6.99
BRITAIN'S MOST NOTORIOUS SERIAL KILLERSPETER MOORE
MOORE, a businessman and cinema proprietor from Kinmel Bay, North Wales, was jailed for life in 1996 for murdering and mutilating Henry Roberts, Edward Carthy, Keith Randles and Anthony Davies. He also attacked more than 50 other men in what the judge described as "20 years of terror".
FRED AND ROSEMARY WEST
THE Wests murdered an unknown number of women over a 20-year period, burying many victims under the floorboards of their home in Gloucester. Rose was convicted of ten murders, while Fred killed himself before he could stand trail on charges of murdering 12 people, including his first wife and a daughter.
BEVERLEY ALLITT
A PAEDIATRIC nurse at Grantham and Kesteven Hospital, Lincolnshire, Allitt – branded "the Angel of Death" – was convicted of killing four children and harming nine others, at least one of whom was brain-damaged. Allitt, who was diagnosed with mental illness, injected her victims with insulin or potassium to put them into a coma.
PETER SUTCLIFFE
"THE Yorkshire Ripper", as he was known, lorry-driver Sutcliffe murdered 13 women in the north of England during the 1970s, claiming he was told to do so by God. After a massive manhunt, he was caught and sentenced to a minimum of 30 years by Mr Justice Boreham, who described him as "an unusually dangerous man".
MOORS MURDERERS
IAN Brady and Myra Hindley were given indefinite life sentences for murdering three young children in the 1960s. In 1987 they confessed to having killed two more. Hindley died from heart disease and pneumonia in 2002, while Brady will likely remain in psychiatric hospital for the rest of his life.
DENNIS NILSEN
AFTER human flesh was discovered by drain engineers at Nilsen's Muswell Hill flat in north London, he confessed to having killed 16 young men by luring them into his home for a drink, then strangling and mutilating them. Nilsen, a civil servant, was convicted of six murders and two attempted murders in 1983 and jailed for life
DR HAROLD SHIPMAN
BRITAIN'S most prolific serial killer, Harold Shipman, a GP, was jailed for life for murdering 15 patients in Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire and forging the will of one of them. He denied the charges and hanged himself in his cell in 2004, but a later report suggested he may have killed as many as 250 people over 23 years.
The full article contains 2069 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
