| " 'And it will be buttoned,' I said. I opened my eyes. Without another word, they left."
A suspect soon emerged. He was George Metesky , an unmarried Slavic former employee of Con Edison. They raided his house at midnight. He opened the door in his pyjamas, immediately confessed to being "the mad bomber", went to get dressed and reappeared wearing a double-breasted suit, buttoned. And, with that, criminal profiling was born.
Not much happened in the immediate aftermath of the Brussel triumph. He was considered a bit of a one-off genius, and in the 1960s profiling didn't really enter the fabric of police investigations. But in 1972 a Brussel fan and student, an FBI officer called Howard Teten , created a profiling unit at the FBI academy in Quantico, Virginia. Straight away they scored a hit. A seven-year-old girl had been murdered and the profilers at Quantico determined the killer to be a young, white male who killed for sexual gratification and may have kept body parts as souvenirs. The profile led them to David Meirhofer , who confessed and a few hours later killed himself.
And so it continued, throughout the 70s and 80s, with eminent Quantico profilers such as John Douglas becoming national celebrities and bestselling authors. In his 1995 memoir Mindhunter, Douglas writes: "What I try to do with a case is to take in all the evidence I have to work with… and then put myself mentally and emotionally in the head of the offender. I try to think as he does. Exactly how this happens, I'm not sure, any more than the novelists such as Tom Harris who've consulted me over the years can say exactly how their characters come to life. If there's a psychic component to this, I won't run from it."
Of course, the likes of Douglas were more studious than psychics. They'd travel America interviewing serial killers, attempting to put the minutiae of their behaviour into categories such as "Organised" (the killer takes time to meticulously select and stalk the victim) and "Disorganised" (the killer has no interest in the victim and will sometimes cover their face or knock them unconscious to obliterate their personality). But it was the magical element – the trance-like state that some profilers would go into before emerging to make startling pronouncements – that was most attractive to the police and public.
Britain had no great James Brussel or John Douglas back then. Instead there was a serious young criminology professor at Liverpool University called David Canter who was, with little fanfare, teaching his students concepts of his invention such as geographical profiling. His theory basically stated (and I'm paraphrasing) that if you have a circle of attacks, the killer probably lives in the middle of it. Canter's scrupulous research was proving highly accurate but a bit undramatic. He did not set the public's imagination on fire.
And then Paul Britton came along.
For weeks I've been trying to track down Britton with no success. Although he had at one time been Britain's most renowned criminal profiler, he's become a lot less conspicuous these past years, ever since he became mired in what must surely be his profession's most notorious incident. In fact, if any man could be said to personify criminal profiling's soaring highs and terrible lows, it is him. Now I am grocery shopping when my phone rings. It comes up as "Blocked".
"I'm sorry," says the voice. "My name's Paul Britton. I'm aware you've been trying to… sorry…" He sounds hesitant, self-effacing. I ask him if he'd be willing to talk to me about his criminal profiling days. I hear him sigh. He says he's a jobbing hostage negotiator now.
"Spending your life literally in the entrails of some poor soul who has been butchered is no way to pass your time," he says. (The use of the word "literally" isn't totally accurate. Criminal profilers rarely visit crime scenes. The entrails he went into would have been in police evidence photographs, and in his imagination, when he attempted to visualise the murderer.)
"Will you talk to me about it anyway?" I ask.
"There's a new Premier Inn next to Leicester railway station," he says.
He arrives at the hotel wearing a dramatic long black coat. We order coffee. "I don't know if I should tell you a little about how it all began for me?" he says. "Is that OK? Sorry. You need to stop me trundling off if I'm being redundant. I won't be remotely offended by that. But may I…?"
"Yes, yes, please do," I say.
"It started back in 1984," he says, "when a chap called David Baker, one of the finest detectives you could ever come across, visited my office…"
A young woman's body had been found on a lane near the NHS hospital where Britton then worked as a qualified clinical psychologist. She'd been stabbed while out walking her dogs. There were no suspects, and some instinct motivated David Baker to seek Britton's opinion.
"David is really the father of profiling," Britton says, "because he came and asked me the question. Do you follow me? If David hadn't come and asked, I would have had no reason to get involved."
It is quite obvious he wants me to say, "Oh, but you're the father of criminal profiling."
"Oh, but you're the father of criminal profiling," I say.
"I'm the first person who did it," he concedes. "Yes. But it wouldn't have happened if David hadn't come. Do you follow me?"
"Yes," I say. "I follow you."
And so Baker listened as Britton told him that the killer would be a young man in his mid-teens to early 20s, lonely and sexually immature, probably living at home with his parents, a manual worker comfortable with knives, and possessing a large collection of violent pornography.
"It turned out to be entirely correct and they were very quickly able to lay hands on the person responsible," Britton says. "A man called Bostock, I think it was."
Paul Bostock, who did indeed fit Britton's profile, confessed to the murder, and Britton became a celebrity. Glowing newspaper profiles called him the UK's James Brussel. The Home Office brought him in to finesse a newly created Offender Profiling Research Unit and asked him to appear in an ITV documentary series called Murder In Mind. He says he was reluctant to do it and agreed only after they explained they wanted to be seen to be at the cutting edge of psychological profiling and reminded him that "everything I'd done was very successful".
As the months progressed, he correctly profiled lots more sex murderers, almost all of them young men in their mid-teens to early 20s, living alone or at home with their parents and owning a big collection of violent pornography.
"There is a criticism…" I say.
"A criticism of what ?" Britton unexpectedly snaps.
"That many of the murderers you successfully profiled were practically identical personality types," I say.
"Oh, well, that's after the event," he shrugs.
In fact during these golden years he did, according to his bestselling memoir The Jigsaw Man, successfully profile criminals who weren't the archetype. For instance, a blackmailer who slipped razor blades into Heinz baby products turned out to be a former police officer, just as he predicted. He was riding high.
And then it all fell apart.
On 15 July 1992, 23-year-old Rachel Nickell was found murdered on Wimbledon Common. She'd been stabbed 49 times in front of her two-year-old son. The police, as had become customary in cases like this, asked Britton to draw up an offender profile. Britton visualised the crime scene: "Closing my eyes I tried to step back into the pretty woodland glade on Wimbledon Common... I rubbed my eyes until white stars bounced across the ceiling," he later wrote. "I'd been concentrating so hard it was difficult to refocus" – and emerged to say the killer would be a single man, a manual labourer who lived at home with his parents or alone in a bedsit within walking distance of Wimbledon Common, and owned a collection of pornography. His deviancy would be escalating, he added. This would be his first murder (it was messy and amateurish) but he'd already be known for minor sexual offences.
It is, in retrospect, sort of understandable why they wrongly believed Colin Stagg was their man. In a terrible twist of fate, he fitted Britton's profile even more snugly, in fact, than the actual killer, Robert Napper , would turn out to. For instance, Stagg did indeed live in a bedsit a short walk from the common, whereas Napper lived 17 miles across London, in Plumstead.
Stagg had previously been cautioned by the police for sunbathing naked on Wimbledon Common and writing an obscene letter to a woman called Julie he'd contacted via a lonely hearts page in Loot magazine. A sign on his front door read, "Christians keep away. A pagan dwells here." Inside was a collection of pornographic magazines. However, there was no evidence he was in any way sexually deviant. As he writes in his memoir, Who Really Killed Rachel? , "I consider myself to be a perfectly normal person… a normal red-blooded male who yearned for the company of women… what I really craved was a solid, dependable relationship ultimately leading to marriage and children."
But yes, he told the police, he'd been walking with his dog on Wimbledon Common the day Nickell was murdered, as he did every day. The police, strongly suspecting they had the killer, asked Britton if he could devise a clever way to elicit a confession from Stagg, or eliminate him from their inquiry. He suggested that a covert officer should make contact and allow Stagg to befriend them. The police instructed an undercover police woman – "Lizzie James" – to write to Stagg, claiming to be a friend of Julie, the lonely heart from Loot.
And so she did. Unlike the prudish Julie, Lizzie wrote, she couldn't get his erotic letter out of her mind. To hammer home the hint, she added: "I have an odd taste in music, my favourite record being Walk On The Wild Side by Lou Reed."
Stagg, clearly bowled over by this wonderfully unexpected turn of events, responded immediately. "I'm painfully lonely," he wrote, asking Lizzie if she'd mind terribly if he could send her some of his sexual fantasies.
Lizzie replied that it would be a treat: "I'm sure your fantasies hold no bounds and you are as broad-minded and uninhibited as me." And so Stagg wrote back, detailing the two of them making gentle love in a park while whispering, "I love you."
The police were thrilled: Stagg had introduced the location of a park. Britton advised caution. It would clearly have fitted his profile better if Stagg's fantasy had been less tender and more, well, vicious. So, in her next letters, Lizzie upped the ante. Stagg mustn't hold back, she wrote, "because my fantasies hold no bounds and my imagination runs riot. Sometimes this worries me and it would be nice if you have the same unusual dreams as me… I want to feel you all powerful and overwhelming so that I am completely in your power, defenceless and humiliated."
"You need a damn good fucking by a real man," Stagg gamely replied. "I am going to make sure you scream in agony." He immediately clarified that he wasn't really a violent person. He was just saying it because it was the kind of erotic fantasy he gathered she wanted to hear – "If you found it offensive I can't apologise enough" – and it would be brilliant if she'd go round to his flat so he could cook her "my speciality rice bolognaise followed by my homemade raspberry mousse".
Nonetheless, Britton "noticed distinct elements of sadism" in Stagg's letters.
And on it went. Under Britton's direction Lizzie dropped hints to Stagg that she had a "dark secret", something "bad" and "brilliant" she'd done in her past, which aroused in her "the most exciting emotions". Stagg replied that he'd love to hear her dark secret and he had one, too: the police wrongly believed he had murdered Nickell, "because I am a loner and I have ancient native beliefs".
Lizzie responded that she rather wished he was the murderer: "It would make things easier for me, cos I've got something to tell you." It was her "dark secret". Maybe they should have a picnic in Hyde Park and she could reveal it then.
Stagg replied that he'd be thrilled to have a picnic and hear her dark secret, but it was only fair to inform her he definitely hadn't killed Nickell. Still, he inelegantly added, perhaps they could have sex and he could yank her head back with a belt while "indulging in carnal lusts every five minutes".
Lizzie's "dark secret" – as she finally informed Stagg in Hyde Park, a large team of undercover officers monitoring their every move – was that when she was a teenager she'd got involved with some "special people" and "a baby had had its throat cut. And then the baby's blood was put into a cup, and everybody had a drink, and it was the most electrifying atmosphere." After she and her satanic cult had drank the baby's blood they killed its mother: "She was laid out naked and these knives were brought out and this man handed me one of the knives and he asked me to cut the woman's throat, and I did, and then there was this big orgy, and I was with this man, well, this man was the best ever."
Lizzie looked Stagg in the eyes and said she could only ever truly love a man who'd done a similar thing. Stagg replied: "I think you're aiming a bit high."
During the weeks that followed, Lizzie persevered: "The thought of [the killer] is so exciting. It's a turn-on to think about the man that did it… I want someone like the man who did this thing. I want that man… If only you had done the Wimbledon Common murder, if only you had killed her, it would be all right."
"I'm terribly sorry," Colin would sadly reply, "but I haven't."
Still, he dutifully sent her increasingly violent sexual fantasies, involving knives and blood, etc, and when Britton read them he solemnly told the police: "You're looking at someone with a highly deviant sexuality that's present in a very small number of men in the general population. The chances of there being two such men on Wimbledon Common when Rachel was murdered are incredibly small."
Soon after, Stagg was arrested, charged with Nickell's murder, and spent the next 14 months in custody, during which time the real murderer , Robert Napper, killed a mother and her four-year-old daughter, Samantha and Jazmine Bissett, near his home in Plumstead. Finally the case went to the Old Bailey. The judge took one look at it and threw it out. He said the honey trap was "deceptive conduct of the grossest kind". And with that Britton's reputation, and the reputation of the criminal profiling profession, was ruined.
Now, at the Premier Inn, I say, "I'd like to talk about Colin Stagg ." At this, Britton holds up his finger, silently riffles through his bag, and hands me a sheet of paper. It takes me a moment to understand what I'm reading. Then I get it: it is a statement, prepared by him, for anyone who might ever ask that question.
At the very beginning of the Nickell investigation – his statement claims – he told the Metropolitan police that Napper was their man. But they wouldn't listen because he had an alibi.
I look up from the page.
"Did you really tell them that?" I ask. Britton nods. "Can you give me proof?" I ask. "Is there anybody out there who'd be willing to say, 'Absolutely yes, this is totally true'?"
"There are a number of people who could say that. None of them will."
"Because of their vested interests?"
"Because of their pensions and their situation and their interests. But I had a phone call from two people who said, 'I was there. I know what happened. You're right. Forgive me for not saying anything. Maybe when I've collected my pension I'll say so.' "
"I don't suppose any of them have collected their pensions yet?"
"Folks look after their own lives. You can't blame them. It's rough and tumble…"
"Oh," I say.
He looks at me. "Let me try and help you with this…" he says.
For the next half-hour he patiently breaks down the events of the honey trap for me to demonstrate that at no point did he do anything wrong. His rule throughout was that "the suspect, Colin Stagg, must be the person who introduces every single element. What you may then do is reflect that back. You must never introduce it first. If you do, you're fulfilling your hopes, you see?"
I am open-mouthed. "But what about Lizzie's past ritual murders?" I say.
"How… sorry… what are you thinking there?" Britton softly replies, shooting me a hostile glance.
"She said she could only love a man who'd done something similar," I say.
"If someone who you were walking out with said that to you," Britton says, "what would you do?" He pauses. "What would you do?"
"He was clearly desperate to have sex with her," I say.
"I don't know the answer to that," Britton says.
He glares at me and repeats his position. At no point during the operation did he cross the line.
"Not even when you said that the chance of there being two such 'highly sexually deviant' men on Wimbledon Common at the same time was incredibly small?" I ask.
"Well, remember," he replies, "Robert Napper was there, Colin Stagg wasn't. Therefore…?"
"Stagg was there that morning," I say.
"But he wasn't on the common at the same time!" says Britton.
He shoots me a victorious look. There is a silence.
"Do you think Colin Stagg has a deviant sexual personality?" I ask.
"I don't know Colin Stagg," he replies. There is a frosty silence. "Are these the questions you came to ask?" he says.
A few moments later we get the bill.
Two weeks later and I'm attending a conference for criminal profilers organised by David Canter, the now not so young criminology professor, at South Bank University , south London. The spectre of Paul Britton hovers grimly over the proceedings. During his opening address, Canter flicks a switch and photographs of Rachel Nickell and Colin Stagg fill the screen. "This is the bane of our lives," he roars.
Indeed, when Mr Justice Ognall threw out the case against Stagg on the first day of his trial in 1994, he was scathing. "The notion of psychological profiling in any circumstances as proof of identity is redolent of considerable danger," he told the court. "I don't wish to give encouragement to investigating or prosecuting authorities to seek to construct or supplement a case on this kind of basis."
During a break I get talking to Lee Rainbow. He's a behavioural investigative adviser ("profiler" being a prohibited word in this post-Britton world) with the National Policing Improvement Agency . People such as Rainbow – former students of Canter – are now trying to pick up the pieces, make profiling respectable.
"Paul Britton, and people like him, had a mystical status," he explains. "The police would go to them, and they'd give an opinion, and there was no requirement to back that opinion up. And the police were seduced by it. They were like deity figures. Psychologists! They were never challenged."
Rainbow says that for the past 10 years he and his colleagues have been quietly "professionalising the discipline", working out of an old mansion in the woods near Basingstoke, trying to turn the pseudoscience into an actual science. I ask if I can visit the mansion and he goes quiet and says they'll let me know.
The conference speakers are scrupulous about presenting only papers based on statistics. And so, as the day progresses, I learn that in New Zealand sexual fantasy rapists (who act out their long-harboured daydreams) are willing to travel 6.62km to commit their crimes, whereas violent, spur-of-the-moment rapists tend to travel only 3.71km. Almost everything here is stranger rape related. It's the meat and potatoes of the profession because, as one profiler tells me, the mind of, say, a robber is not a mystery.
An irrational part of me can't help missing the crazy psychological profilers of old. At least, as they madly flailed around, they sometimes got it magically right. The facts presented here seem so cautious as to be unnecessary.
The next day I email the National Policing Improvement Agency and tell them this. How can these things ever translate into convictions? They email back to say it's a fair point and why don't I come over to Bramshill House , their mansion in the woods near Basingstoke, to see for myself?
The mansion looks huge and impressive as you approach it through the woods. A herd of white deer grazes in the grounds. All this once belonged to the 2nd Baron Brocket, the notorious Nazi sympathiser from The Remains Of The Day , but now the police own it, for free, though they need to spend £1m a year on upkeep. This is where they look after the DNA database and the national injuries database (a computer filled with lots of pictures of wounds) and Missing Persons Bureau .
Lee Rainbow and Sean Sutton (the head of Crime Analysis here) meet me. Sutton points to an ugly low building inside which, he says, his 72 staff sit at computers all day, watching DVDs of rape victim testimonies, feeding every bit of information, however tiny, into a vast "question set", including sex acts enacted or attempted, verbal "behaviour" (were they insulting, apologetic, reassuring?), age, description and on and on, an ever growing bible of data, every permutation considered and cross-referenced.
Sutton smiles. "What we have is a marvellous pot of data. We are the Lloyd's underwriting service of linking analysis."
"And now," Rainbow adds, "if a Paul Britton-type profiler proclaims that the suspect is a narcissistic bed-wetter, the police can say, 'So what?' It may be right, but it's of no use whatsoever, because we have no database of narcissists and we have no database of bed-wetters."
They won't show me the room, nor can I see their "unusual activities box", the part of the computer that contains the anomalies. If a rape contains a highly uncommon element, something evident in less than 5% of attacks, it is stored in this "box". I ask Sutton to give me examples and he dispassionately reels off a disturbing list: "Bleach. Lemon-flavoured Jeyes Fluid . Domestos . Superglue." Later, they email me some more: "Cutting of victim's hair (head and/or pubic). Re-dressing the victim in different clothing. Re-dressing self in victim's clothing. Urinating on victim/asking victim to urinate on offender. Licking victim's shoes/feet."
"These things are extraordinarily rare," says Sutton. "They're almost freebies for us, as they stand out like a sore thumb."
One of these incredibly rare events happened on 27 December 2005. A six-year-old girl was snatched from her bath, thrown into a van and sexually assaulted. One of Sutton's staff fed the data into the computer: "Child victims", "Geography", "Abduction/assault in victim's residence", "Abduction – vehicle involvement", "specific speech" (he was threatening, telling her that if she made a noise she would not see her family again), "Type of sexual activity" and so on. Straight away a tiny number of names popped up. One, Peter Voisey , was arrested, convicted, and is now serving life.
But, they say, their work shouldn't be judged on those rare, easy ones. Nor should it be judged on seemingly wild suppositions they still make around here such as, "If a rapist removes only one leg of a victim's trousers or stockings, it means he uses prostitutes."
"How do you know that?" I ask.
"Because prostitutes only take one leg out, for security," Rainbow says.
I look at him. This does seem quite extraordinary, but he's such a meticulous person, I suppose I have to assume he's right.
When I ask what their work should be judged on, their faces light up and they say, "84%."
"84% of what?" I ask.
"84% of rapists have been convicted of a crime," Sutton says. "Any crime! Parking in a disabled bay. Or robbery. So don't go looking for your sex criminals. Look for your burglars."
"Isn't that a bad fact?" I say. "Surely it doesn't narrow down your suspect pool. How's that fact going to help?"
"It's a great fact!" Rainbow says. "It means we already have the rapist's name! He will have a criminal record."
Until now, Rainbow explains, the supposition propagated by people such as Britton was that rapists and sex murderers graduated from committing minor sexual offences. It sounded like a shrewd theory, one that gave psychological profilers reasons for existing. Indeed, it was one of the main reasons they first went after Colin Stagg. The problem is, Rainbow now says, they've taken the time to do the statistical research and it turns out not to be true.
"There's no data to back it up," he says. Whereas, he says, the 84% statistic is true. His point is that the 84% statistic is not the kind of intriguing deduction that would captivate an old-style profiler. It doesn't tell you much about the labyrinthine mind of the sex criminal. It's an ungainly, dull fact, but it is real. And that makes it lovely. |
