Читать книгу Born Killers - Christopher Berry-Dee - Страница 8

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 social and physical environment provides stimulation.

During the first three or four years of life – the formative years – children experience the world in a more complete way than children of any other age. Their brains take in the external world through its system of sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste. This means that infant social, emotional, cognitive, physical and language development are stimulated during multisensory experiences. Infants and toddlers need the opportunity to participate in a world filled with stimulating sights, sounds and people.

Unfortunately, early development does not always proceed in a way that encourages child curiosity, creativity and self-confidence. For some children, early experiences are neither supportive nor predictable. The synapses that develop in the brain may be created in response to chronic stress, or other types of abuse and neglect. When children are vulnerable to these risks, problematic early experiences can lead to poor outcomes. For example, some children are born with the tendency to be irritable, impulsive and insensitive to emotions in others. When these child characteristics combine with adult care-giving that is withdrawn and neglectful, childrens’ brains can wire up in ways that may result in unsympathetic child behaviour. When these child characteristics combine with adult care-giving that is angry and abusive, childrens’ brains can wire in ways that result in violent and overly aggressive child behaviour. If the home environment teaches children to expect danger instead of security, then poor outcomes may occur, as this book will show. In these cases, how do nature and nurture contribute to early brain development?

More recent research tells us that early exposure to violence and other forms of unpredictable stress, as experienced by many of the killers featured in this book, can cause the brain to operate on a fast track. Such over activity of the connections between the brain’s axons and dendrites, combined with child vulnerability, can increase the risk of later problems with self-control. Some adults who are violent and overly aggressive experienced erratic and unresponsive care in early life.

Adult depression can also interfere with infant brain activity. When parents suffer from untreated depression they may fail to respond sensitively to infant cries or smiles. Adult emotional unavailability is linked with poor infant emotional expression. Infants with depressed caregivers do not receive the type of cognitive and emotional stimulation that encourages positive early brain development, because they learn to ‘mirror’ the mood swings and negative anxieties expressed by the parents.