The Serial Killers by Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman Read Free Book Online

link between political brutality – of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini – and the gradual decay of faith in rational certainty that had occurred over the past two centuries. His argument was less far-fetched than it sounds. For practical purposes, the philosophy of revolution can be traced back to 1762, the year Rousseau’s Social Contract appeared, with its famous opening sentence: ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.’ The corollary was that he is not free because various wicked authorities have entered into a conspiracy to deprive him of his freedom. Rousseau was weak and neurotic, and he urgently wanted to find somewhere to lay the blame for his own unhappiness. So he created the myth that there was once a golden age when all men lived together in perfect harmony, and that this came to an end because a few evil men seized power and enslaved the rest. It followed, of course, that the answer to the problem was for the oppressed to strike off their chains and overthrow the oppressors. His philosophy, as developed by Marx, has eventually come to dominate half the globe, until it is a part of the air we breathe. We take it for granted that all right-thinking young people hold strong views about social justice, and to regard ‘protest’ with favour and authority with disfavour. We even take it for granted that most people hate the police. The tendency to ‘look for somewhere to lay the blame’ has become a part of our intellecutal inheritance, and it is impossible to understand the psychology of the serial killer without taking it into account.
    In practice, the kind of violence typified by the Red Army Faction – and the kind of irrationality that seemed to lie behind it – produced a powerful backlash. There was a general feeling that people who are willing to commit murder for their political ideology are dangerous cranks who have no place in a civilised society. Groups like the Japanese Red Army, the Italian Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Symbionese Liberation Army were hunted down with the full approval of the public. The suicides of Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader in 1977 seemed to symbolise the end of an epoch. By the mid-1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika had made the politics of violent revolution seem oddly irrelevant. Yet it was at about this point, when a new age of reason seemed to have dawned in politics, that the general public became aware of the emergence of the serial killer.
    In England, it was the case of the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ that brought a general awareness of the problems of tracking down a random killer. It was appropriate that the press should have labelled him the Yorkshire Ripper, for he was the most notorious serial killer in Great Britain since the days of Jack the Ripper. The first three attacks occurred in the second half of 1975. Two women were knocked unconscious by hammer blows dealt from behind; in the first case, the attacker had raised her dress and was about to plunge the knife into her stomach when he was interrupted and ran away; in the second, he made slashes on the woman’s buttocks with a hacksaw blade. The third victim, a prostitute, was knocked unconscious with the hammer, then stabbed to death. She was the first of thirteen murder victims over the course of the next five years. Some were prostitutes; some were simply women or girls who happened to be out walking in the dark. In most cases, the victim was stabbed and slashed repeatedly in the area of the stomach and vagina, although the killer stopped short of actual disembowelment.
    By early 1978, the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper had become the biggest police operation ever mounted in Britain. Yet the problem facing the police – as in all such cases – was the sheer number of suspects. In the early years of the twentieth century the great criminologist Edmond Locard had stated the basic tenet of forensic detection: ‘Every contact leaves a trace’; but in