Born Killers. Christopher Berry-Dee
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Sheriff Bill F ‘Hound Dog’ Conway in his office at the Montague County Jail. With his leather-tooled cowboy boots planted up on his desktop, and surrounded by a veritable arsenal of weaponry from six-shooters to assault rifles, ‘Hound Dog’, in his north Texan drawl, always referred quite affectionally to Lucas as ‘Ole Henry’.
No matter who the killer was, no matter what atrocities these people had committed, from state to state, jurisdiction to jurisdiction, it was always the same; Aileen Wuornos became ‘Lee’, and Kenneth Bianchi was simply ‘Ken’. While I was consulting with the Metropolitan Police on the killer John Cannan, DCI Jim Dickie and DI Stuart Ault always called Cannan either ‘Mr Cannan’ or ‘John’. At a temperature of -18 degrees, while interviewing through a misty camera lens inside Russia’s toughest female prison at Sablino, the governor referred to her charges as Victoria, Katya or Svetlana. These women were ruthless serial killers. One of them was even a cannibal - and had bizarrely been appointed head cook in the prison’s kitchens.
You will find in this book that the killers are often referred to by their first names, too. There is a good reason for this. Mindful as we are of the disgusting crimes they have committed, aligned with the heartbreak and distress they have caused to thousands of people, we should also assert that serial killers are, like all of us, human beings too. They were born into the world, for the most part, as innocent children. But unlike the majority of us, almost from the cradle their lives and personalities were abused and distorted by their parents and carers. We cannot blame serial killers for this aspect of their lives at least. This is the approach we have adopted throughout the book. We apportion blame where necessary but we also show compassion or understanding where we believe it is right to do so.
Throughout the book we hope to show how widely different backgrounds and upbringings can lead to the same result – an unrepentant serial killer. The final, lengthy chapter concerns itself with one of America’s most notorious sado-sexual serial killers, John Wayne Gacy. You will see how his boyhood was completely the opposite of someone like Fred West, but how they both became monsters. But at the same time, you will also have seen how others were almost two peas from the same pod. The lesson will be that there is no one route to becoming a serial killer and no easy assumptions to be made. We want our readers to enjoy this often-shocking book, while learning valuable lessons at the same time.
In Born Killers we suggest that by examining the past histories of the offenders included in this study we may learn more about the potential outcomes of a negative and abusive upbringing. We hope that this will go some way to preventing the emergence of serial killers, spree killers and mass murderers in the future.
Christopher Berry-Dee
Group publisher The New Criminologist www.newcriminologist.co.uk May 2006
NATURE V NURTURE BY CHRISTOPHER BERRY-DEE
BORN TO KILL, bred to kill, taught to kill or trained to kill? These are questions that need to be asked and answered if we are to understand a serial killer’s career.
Although it may sound like a strange word to choose, ‘career’ is correct. And it’s as much of a career as any other. Some people choose it, while others say it was something they were born to do – just as much as with any other career, only here the context is so strange that it is difficult to think of serial killing as a life choice. But stop and think for a moment and substitute the words ‘serial killer’ for any other type of career. Do we question whether other people were ‘born’ to their careers or chose them in later life?
Do we ask whether a bus driver was pre-determined to do his job? The consequences of growing up to become a bus driver are simply not interesting enough to a wide sector of society to give the question much thought. But the same applies to more high-profile jobs. Few questioned if the late Pope John Paul II was ‘born’ to his papal calling, or how Dr Christiaan Barnard arrived at his career choice as a pioneering heart transplant surgeon. It is arguable that the minds of such high-flying ‘good’ people are as worthy of study as those of serial killers. However, the one thing the story of a ‘good’ person lacks over that of a ‘bad’ person is the grim fascination we associate with the deeds of the latter. We do not need to know why a ‘good’ person is good. We are simply happy that they are. But we do, at some basic level, need to know why ‘bad’ people are bad. By understanding the dark side of human nature we feel we can protect ourselves from it in some way.
This is what we aim to do in this book. Take the British serial killer Fred West, on the face of it a jobbing builder from Gloucester. He was undoubtedly one of the most sick, twisted and perverted serial murderers that ever lived. In terms of a pack of cards the authors award him the ‘Ace of Spades’. We claim that not only was he born to kill, he was bred and learned to kill, as well. He was a very particular type of serial killer, as evil as they come.
Next, look at Myra Hindley, one of the most reviled women in British history. We argue, in what may be an unpalatable truth to some, that had she not met her partner-in-crime, Ian Brady, it is doubtful she would ever had killed anyone. The fact that they both worked at the same engineering firm was the unhappy accident that set off a tragic train of events. Hindley, we believe, learned to kill. She was not, as the phrase has it, a ‘natural-born killer’.
Then there is the case of Dr Harold Shipman. A general practitioner in the Manchester area, ‘Dr Death’ was trained to save lives and ended up turning his medical education on its head. He is suspected of approximately two hundred and fifty murders, making him perhaps the world’s most prolific serial killer. Many authorities suggest that he may in fact be responsible for up to one thousand deaths. Whatever the actual figure, he eclipses the toll of any other serial killer caught to date and he is as different a type of serial killer from Fred West as he is from Myra Hindley.
John Allen Muhammad and Lee Malvo, aka ‘The Washington Snipers’, offer another contrast, similar in some ways to Brady and Hindley yet different in many others. John had been trained to kill as a US soldier and, in turn, took it upon himself to train seventeen-year-old Lee Malvo as a sniper. Together they shot over twenty-five people, killing at least fifteen.
Jeffrey Dahmer, ‘The Milwaukee Cannibal’, was outwardly an ordinary worker at the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory in Milwaukee. Yet he enticed his victims to his home, where they were drugged, strangled and then dissected. His actions suggest that his motives were more to do with a fascination for mutilation than loneliness or any of the other reasons usually assigned to the acts of a serial killer.
Finally, there is Ivan Milat, the ‘Australian Backpack Killer’, an itinerate drifter who lived off his wits, robbing banks to pay his way. With seven confirmed kills, and possibly as many as twenty-eight, Milat was the stereotypical sado-sexual serial killer. One of a breed that does not simply emerge overnight, Milat’s development followed a career path that led from petty crime, through to sexual assault, rape, serial rape and then to murder.
But can we suggest that any of the names from this hall of infamy were born to kill? Maybe yes, maybe no. With the exception of Myra Hindley and the Washington Snipers we can say, with more than a degree of certainty, that there was within each of them a latent predisposition to commit multiple murders.
It is a long-established fact that the structure and quality of family interaction is an important part of a child’s development, especially in the way the child itself perceives family members. According to the FBI: ‘For children growing up, the quality of their attachments to parents and to other members of the family is most important as to how these children, as adults, relate to and value other members of society. Essentially, these early life attachments (sometimes called bonding) translate into a map of how a child will perceive situations outside the family.’
For some time we have known that human development results from the dynamic interplay of nature and nurture. From birth, we grow and learn because our biology is programmed to do so and because our