The Devil's Garden Page 6
From the way in which the Claremont victims vanish into thin air, it is likely that the killer is organised, social and clever, with an IQ that is probably above average. A person who is used to dealing with intelligent women and able to hold his own in social situations. If single, he will have a history of dating women. If married, he will maintain the façade of being a good husband and father. He could have a history of some form of abuse in childhood but is also possibly well educated and mobile in his work and leisure. His hygiene levels would be high and he would not drive an old car. Before discovery of the body and after, he would very possibly return to the crime scene as an onlooker or participant, and may contact police to offer help.
But regardless of how the serial killer – usually a white male, between the ages of 25 and 35 – acts, one thing never changes. It is never his fault. He is adept at abrogating responsibility, blaming society or someone else. And by shifting the blame, he feels no requirement to examine his behaviour.
It's not his fault. So he will do it again.
13
Macro taskforce investigators engage in official, formal debates. Police on one side, police on the other. Airing ideas and possible scenarios. 'How often do these debates occur?' I later ask a Macro insider. He can't tell me, he says. I will have to talk to Dave Caporn, but he may not wish to answer. It becomes a frequent mantra, bordering on the absurd; the squirrelling of information that could not in any way hinder the investigation if it was made public. 'Why?' I persist. 'Why would Caporn not want to discuss this?' He does not answer.
The Macro taskforce has twice daily briefings, at 7 am and 7 pm, which everyone, from the youngest constable to senior detectives, must attend. No one can plead ignorance or shy-ness. It is a dynamic strategy that pays dividends: by checking and cross-checking information gained during the day, it is often the younger team members with vibrant, fresh ideas that bring the best results. The need to look after the health and safety of the Macro team is also paramount. Everyone is encouraged to have counselling, whether they feel they need it or not. For the older officers the concept is often regarded as 'soft', but they are told to set an example. If someone is not coping, their superiors cut them loose early, putting them back into other areas. The needs of the investigation override those of the individual.
The taskforce adapts the American version of VICAP – Victim Identification of Violent Crime – to help organise the over-whelming amount of data. A comprehensive recording of all details of violent crime, including murder and sexual assaults, it creates a searchable database which is interrogated to find a link between old recorded cases with new cases. It is a quantum leap forward; pre-VICAP, officers who worked the modus operandi section physically examined offence reports and wrote up cards on each particular characteristic of the offence. Time-consuming, it also wasted space: Sergeant Tony Potts, who started at Macro in February 1997 in the role of media officer, recalls there was a drawer full of index cards that identified offenders who had a cobweb tattoo on the elbow alone. Computers could easily store and search that information; however, it was still time-consuming.
Macro officers set about the arduous task of identifying and linking known facts about the Claremont victims to any previous offence in WA, the rest of Australia and overseas and any known or recorded modus operandi. To do this, they need a system that can expedite the feeding of that information.
In conjunction with VICAP, they settle on the HOLMES system – Home Office Large Major Enquiry System – developed by the UK Home Office in response to identified failings of several British police jurisdictions when investigating the Yorkshire Ripper murders in the 1980s. Murders that changed the face of policing.
The most notorious serial killer in Britain since Jack the Ripper, the Yorkshire Ripper, as he was dubbed by the press, first attacked a stranger in 1969. It was the start of a maniacal killing spree that would stop only with his arrest. Police failures to identify the Ripper's modus operandi started early, when they did not notice similarities between attacks and murders. As late as 1996, the Chief Constable of West York-shire, Keith Hellawell, theorised that judging by the weapon used and other similar indicators in a large number of unsolved murders and attacks, 20 murders could have been the handiwork of the Ripper. For six years, Peter Sutcliffe terrorised Yorkshire residents. Of his 13 victims, eight were prostitutes and other women who had made the simple fatal decision to go out after dark. Sutcliffe's weapon of choice was the knife: the signature of his murders was repeated slashing in the area of his victims' stomachs and vaginas. Many were mutilated after death. By 1978, the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper was the biggest in British criminal history.
Frustrated by the lack of strong leads and with the killer not leaving behind evidence that offered clues to his identity, the UK police were forced to resort to slow, mechanical means: sifting through the huge number of suspects, checking the car registration numbers of vehicles regularly seen in the red-light districts and pulling the drivers in for questioning. Then, a breakthrough. A murdered street worker was found in possession of a new five-pound note, and police started the laborious task of tracing the destination of the batch of notes. At one of the 23 factories traced, Peter Sutcliffe calmly answered police questions about his whereabouts on the night of the murder, offering an alibi that police believed. He would again call on his sangfroid the following year when questioned as to why his car had been seen numerous times in a red-light district, coolly answering that he had to drive through the area to get to work. Sutcliffe again walked away from the questioning and continued to kill for another two years.
It was this, in hindsight, where police recognised they had made their biggest mistake. While Sutcliffe's vehicle registration number was in the computer at police headquarters, there was no corresponding information to link that he had also been interviewed with regard to the five-pound note. The sheer number of suspects' names that had been fed into police computers ensured that cross-checking was laborious. The errors compounded. Reducing the number of factories that could have been recipients of the five-pound note from 23 to three, Sutcliffe was again questioned. The evidence was liter-ally at the policemen's feet: during this questioning, Sutcliffe was wearing the boots he had worn when he murdered his tenth victim. An imprint of the boot mark had been taken, but police did not think to look at his boots.
Something had to give. Public disquiet had reached a frenzied pitch and a fresh approach needed to be taken. A team of examiners was established to take a fresh look at the entire evidence and the sites at which the women had been murdered. Dr David Canter, Professor of Psychology at the University of Surrey, applied his skills in locating what he termed the 'centre of gravity'. It was this that brought another breakthrough: with the aid of a computer centralising the murder areas, investigators homed in on Bradford as the city in which the killer lived. They only needed now to join the dots: Bradford; known suspects; five-pound note; evidence.
Despite the manhunt and the heightened risk of being discovered – or because of a subconscious desire to be caught – Sutcliffe went trawling for another victim. He gave police a false name when he was interrupted sitting in his car with another prostitute he planned to murder, but this time a check of his name proved that the car also had false number plates. Asking to relieve himself before he was taken in for questioning, Sutcliffe disposed of the hammer and knife behind a storage tank. He had been committing murder for six years; finally in 1981, the identity of the Yorkshire Ripper was about to be revealed. Returning to where Sutcliffe had relieved himself, an astute young police officer found the weapons he had secreted behind the tank. When Sutcliffe confessed, he gave police an insight into the disturbed psyche of a serial killer. Driven to avenge a prostitute who had ripped him off for ten pounds, Sutcliffe targeted prostitutes as his victims. In his warped state of mind, any woman walking along the street at night was fair game. After his first murder, revenge intertwined with blood lust. He could not stop.
The
lessons from the Yorkshire Ripper case led to a significant shift in the way British police tackled evidence and suspects in major crimes. Dr Canter had described to police how people use 'mental maps' to centre themselves in an area, marking out their territory with their own idiosyncratic memory of that place. '...Each person creates a unique representation of the place in which he lives, with its own particular distortions,' he wrote. 'In the case of John Duffy [serial rapist], journalists recognised his preference for committing crimes near railway lines to the extent that they dubbed him the "Railway Rapist". What neither they nor police appreciated was that this characteristic was likely to be part of his way of thinking about the layout of London, and so was a clue to his own particular mental map. It could there-fore be used to see where the psychological focus of this map was and so specify the area in which he lived.'
It was a salient lesson that their police counterparts in Western Australia would need to heed – that, and the wisdom of Friedrich Nietzsche: 'Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he doesn't become a monster.'
14
Despite the fact that Sutcliffe had been identified by several different police jurisdictions, a lack of appropriate data storage and a workable case management system meant British police had failed to recognise that he had already come under police scrutiny multiple times. To prevent the embarrassment of this reoccurring, HOLMES was created. The WA Major Crime Squad purchased HOLMES in 1989. Applied to Macro as its case management system, it has provided a database for all information gained during the investigation, identifies common denominators and allows priorities to be noticed and actioned. It also provides a case management tool that identifies how many lines of inquiry are currently active, how long particular information has been with an investigator and the current workload of investigators. With more than 60,000 pieces of information that need to be assessed and prioritised for 'action' or 'information only', it also quickly eliminates people from the investigation. Taking each step at a time, HOLMES picks over the known data. Starting with the capture of information, it moves through priorities, allocation of resources, investigation, suspects' alibis and quality control before it finally archives material.
The system is linked directly to the UK police via a telephone link, which allows the HOLMES system experts access to the data for quality assurance purposes. 'This was 1996, pre-internet days,' Tony Potts says. 'It was an innovative use of breaking technology aimed at ensuring we were doing it right. We averaged around 2000 calls per day to Crime Stoppers for the first few weeks after each disappearance. All that information was channelled into HOLMES.' But if it proved helpful, it didn't provide the one thing police desperately needed. A breakthrough.
Pre-HOLMES, police relied on three prongs to solve a crime: the crime scene, doorknocks and media. The Macro taskforce inveigle the press for help and they receive it. Reporters call in to identify ways in which to keep the case alive in the public eye and to offer clues on what can be packaged as a story. With a background of more than 30 years in journalism, veteran Channel 10 reporter Rex Haw recalls it was a time when the lines between police and the media were deliberately blurred for the sake of the community's safety. 'It didn't mean we didn't kick them if we needed to, but we did work very closely with them. The media is always ravenous for a new angle on a story this big, so that helped.' On one occasion, his cameraman had captured the name of a person of interest penned on the Macro headquarters board. 'The coppers knew we were shooting the image, but this bloke was so litigious, he'd have used every avenue he could to attack the police. We chose to reshoot instead.'
But Haw's efforts weren't always appreciated. Known as a gentleman in an industry that has more than its fair share of unscrupulous reporters, Haw was approached to run a news item regarding the mystery caller whom Don Spiers had desperately willed to call back. The upcoming news item was advertised in television news breaks for it to gain maximum effect, and Haw was startled when confronted later by a furious Spiers at an outdoor concert, accusing him of ruining Don's chances of hearing from the man because advertise-ments for the story had scared the caller away. It was a verbal attack that stung. 'I was trying to do the right thing, getting maximum exposure for the story,' Haw recalls, 'but it wasn't perceived that way. I wanted to write Don a letter trying to explain that, but I decided against it. He is so full of intense sorrow that it takes nothing to upset him and I didn't want to make it worse. It was a volatile time for police, media and, most particularly, victims' families.'
15
Shortly after the discovery of Jane Rimmer's body, criminal profiler Claude Minisini is invited to Perth by the Macro team to decipher any clues found at the scene of her disposal site. Minisini, a colleague of Commissioner Bob Falconer and founding member of the Victoria Police Rape Squad, had undergone a 12-month fellowship at the FBI's Behaviour Science Unit in Quantico, Virginia, made famous by the movie The Silence of the Lambs. During his sojourn in the United States, Minisini interviewed notorious serial killers Ed Kemper – who, amongst his other victims, murdered his mother and put her voice box in the blender to finally 'shut her up' – and Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed at least 15 men and on whose character Hannibal Lecter was partly based. Returning to Australia after 13 years in the police force, Minisini left and co-founded the Forensic Behavioural Investigative Services (FBIS).
Criminal profiling is based on behaviour clues that are left behind at the crime scene and offers pointers to the offender's personality and the relationship, if any, that they had with the victim. It analyses the victim, why and how they may have caught the attention of the offender, and the similarity between each serial crime. Carefully studying the crime scene, the criminal profiler then layers the clues to put together a composite picture to help police. But profiling never replaces the hard investigative slog of good police work.
The profile that started the technique was that of New York's so-called 'Mad Bomber' in the 1950s. In open letters to a newspaper, he taunted police with clues to his identity. Psychiatrist Dr James Brussels examined both the bomber's handwriting and the bombs, shaped like a penis, to draw conclusions about his personality. This man, he advised police, was obsessively neat. He went further. When the bomber was caught, he said, he would be dressed in a buttoned-up, double-breasted suit. Brussels's profile proved uncannily accurate: as he walked out of his home on the day of his arrest, George Metesky wore a buttoned-up, double-breasted suit.
Minisini – a meticulous dresser who favours white shirts and cufflinks and sports an Inspector Clouseau moustache – flies into Perth with the city's expectations resting on his shoulders. The stakes are high, as are the public's hopes for a speedy arrest. Examining the site where Jane Rimmer's body is found, he maps out a profile of the killer. This person, he tells police, is organised and the murder was controlled, careful, planned. This is not the work of a disorganised killer with a dishevelled mind.
Paul Ferguson calls a press conference to spell out to the public the profile of the type of person the police are seeking. He asks Perth residents to help, by watching closely anyone who had a strange response to the media reports that Jane's body had been found. These signs could include 'absence from work, an inability to remain at work for the entire day, a sudden deterioration in work performance, an inability to concentrate, experiencing headaches, sudden changes in plans...' Ferguson also outlines other profiling clues picked up by Minisini. The killer would drive a late-model car that he keeps spotlessly clean, hold down a job and be of unremarkable appearance. Police release no further details, the lack of information inviting sharp criticism and no little incredulity. Minisini stands his ground. They did find enough evidence to deduce strong and incisive conclusions, he says. But he can't say any more than that.
Advertisements based on the profiling are shown on prime-time television, using the familiar faces of actor John Wood, from Blue Heelers, and singer Kate Ceberano. 'Like Sarah's family and friends you're agonising over the even
ts of that weekend, because you think someone close to you may be involved in her disappearance, 'Ceberano says. 'You're worried because you've noticed a change in their routine or behaviour. Whatever it was, ease your mind.' The ads work, seducing people into coming forward with information.
Criminologist Paul Wilson, from Bond University, watches the unfolding profiles on television with more than a passing interest. 'This is all very general and quite superficial,' he says. 'Just because, for example, someone is showing signs of anxiety at work or decides to go off and wash their car, doesn't make that person a serial killer. The accuracy rate for the FBI profiling is less than 90 per cent and the whole technique is not scientifically based.' Minisini is used to the flak. If police don't perceive that profilers are doing a good job, he says, they are the first ones to say so.