The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence by Colin Wilson, Donald Seaman

and arrested him.When a fellow martial arts enthusiast admitted that Duffy had persuaded him to beat him up so he could claim loss of memory, the police were certain that he was the man they were seeking.Five of rape victims picked him out at an identity parade, and string found in the home of his parents proved to be identical with that which had been used to tie Maartje Tamboezer’s wrists.When forensic scientists matched fibres from Alison Day’s sheepskin coat to fibres found on one of Duffy’s sweaters, the final link in the chain of evidence was established; although he continued to refuse to admit or deny his guilt, John Duffy was sentenced to life imprisonment.
    Dr David Canter has described the techniques he used to pinpoint where the railway rapist lived: 2
    ‘Many environmental psychology studies have demonstrated that people form particular mental maps of the places they use.Each person creates a unique representation of the place in which he lives, with its own particular distortions.In the case of John Duffy, journalists recognised his preference for committing crimes near railway lines to the extent that they dubbed him the “Railway Rapist”.What neither they nor the 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 therefore be used to see where the psychological focus of this map was and so specify the area in which he lived.’
    By the time John Duffy was arrested in 1986, the techniques of ‘psychological profiling’ had already been in use in America for a decade, and the use of the computer had also been recognised as a vital part of the method.A retired Los Angeles detective named Pierce Brooks had pointed out that many serial killers remained unapprehended because they moved from state to state, and that before the state police realised they had a multiple killer on their hands, he had moved on.The answer obviously lay in linking up the computers of individual states, and feeding the information into a central computer.Brooks’s programme was labelled VICAP – the Violent Criminal Apprehension Programme – and the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia, was chosen as the centre for the new crimefighting team.VICAP proved to be the first major step towards the solution of the problem of the random sex killer.
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    1 For a more detailed account of the history of crime detection, see Written in Blood: A History of Forensic Detection , Colin Wilson, 1989.
    2 New Society , 4 March 1988

Two
    Profile of a Serial Killer
    UP TO THE time this book went to press, no defendant facing charges of multiple murder in any British court had ever been described in proceedings as a ‘serial killer’, or his alleged crimes as ‘serial murder’.No such classification obtains either in British legal terminology or, indeed, in everyday conversation.
    Even now, despite increasing use of the term in media reports, it is doubtful if one layman in a hundred in Britain knows what distinguishes the serial killer from all other multiple murderers.That is certainly not because none are to be found in the annals of British crime; on the contrary.The reason is that their identification and acceptance as a unique species of murderer is new, so new that outside the United States – the country worst affected by these most dangerous of all killers – the civilised world is only just waking up to the threat they pose to society.
    Paradoxically, the man generally regarded as the archetypal serial killer is also the world’s most notorious murderer: Jack the Ripper.‘The Ripper’ – the only name by which we know him, for he was never caught – stalked and mutilated his victims in the gas-lit alleys of London’s East End more than one hundred years ago.How many women he killed during that brief reign of autumn terror in 1888 is uncertain.Four, perhaps five; by no means an exceptional tally in