EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) (11 page)

Eleven months passed before the next incident, but during that time his beloved mother had died. Sutcliffe had been very close to her, but had been devastated to discover that she had had an affair with a neighbour, a policeman. One night his father had arranged to be with Peter and Sonia at a hotel to meet his wife, but she arrived believing she was meeting her lover. John Sutcliffe humiliated her by forcing her to show them the nightdress she had brought with her for her tryst. It was a humiliating incident that made a big impact on Sutcliffe.

Just when the police began to believe it was all over, Sutcliffe killed Josephine Whitaker, a building society clerk as she walked home late at night from her grandparents’ house in April 1979. He stopped her in a stretch of open grassland, asked her the time and then swung his hammer into her head. He stabbed her twenty-five times in her breasts, stomach, thighs and even her vagina.

Amongst the thousands of letters that were being sent to investigating officers and newspapers were several that the officers thought might be genuine. They had been posted in Sunderland and the suggestion that the killer might be a Geordie was reinforced by a cassette tape that they received. For some time, the Geordie connection became something of a red herring, drawing officers away from the real killer who was, of course, closer to home.

He killed again on 1 September 1979. It was a student this time – Barbara Leach whom he had first spotted in a pub, the Mannville Arms, in Bradford. He followed her as she walked home, killing her with one blow as he leapt out of the shadows. He stabbed her, as usual, and covered her with an old piece of carpet.

The police campaign took on new life. £1 million was spent on newspaper and billboard ads. They still focused on a man with a Geordie accent, however.

By now, along with the other employees of his company, Sutcliffe had actually been interviewed a number of times. His workmates had even started calling him the Ripper because the police had spoken to him so often. But he had alibis provided by Sonia for all the nights on which the murders had taken place. He was never a real suspect.

His next victim was a forty-seven-year-old civil servant, leaving work late one night. This time, however, she did not fall to the ground after he had struck her with his hammer and he was forced to strangle her to stop her screaming. Police carelessly ruled her out of the Ripper investigation because of the method of her death.

His next two victims, on 24 September and 5 November survived but on 17 November, he killed Jacqueline Hill, a student at Leeds University, who died from a single blow to the head. Ironically, she had moved into a university residence because of her family’s fears for her safety in view of the Ripper attacks.

Sutcliffe was sentenced to life imprisonment with no opportunity for parole for thirty years. Although found sane at his trial, he has since been diagnosed as schizophrenic and was sent in March 1984 to Broadmoor Hospital under Section 47 of the Mental Health Act. There was speculation in February 2009 that his doctors no longer believed him to be a danger to the public, but Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, said in a press conference that it was unlikely that he would ever be released.

Patrick Mackay

It is astonishing how many people who grow up to become killers have been brought up in an abusive and violent environment. It is almost as if they learn from their abuser and later begin to do to others exactly what has been done to them. Patrick Mackay is just such a man, born in 1952 to a father who was an aggressive and violent drunk. Harry Mackay, a veteran of World War II, was an unsuccessful accountant who came home every night to his wife, the worse for wear, and accused her of things she had not done. A severe beating would follow. In time, he would vent his anger on his son, Patrick.

Alcoholism and a faulty heart killed Harry Mackay when Patrick was ten but the boy found it difficult to come to terms with the loss of his father. He had not been allowed to see his body or go to the funeral and began to believe that his father was still alive, although it was probably more of a hope born of the desolation he felt, having wished his father dead many times over the years.

His mother suffered a nervous breakdown around this time and was hospitalised for four months. With his father gone and his mother in hospital, he felt abandoned. His personality changed and he had his first brush with the law, accused of stealing from a neighbour’s house. He became a bully at school and was subject to tantrums and fits of extreme anger. He was a loner, a liar and a troublemaker, an outsider with no friends and was often dirty and neglected. He was also cruel, reportedly setting the family tortoise on fire on one occasion. He was also said to have pinned birds to the road in order to watch cars drive over them. Like his father, alcohol made him violent and he began drinking at an early age. He mugged people on the street and burgled old people’s flats and houses. Once, he set fire to a Catholic church.

His father had told him many gruesome stories about the war, describing colleagues being blown up and shot and Patrick developed an unhealthy interest in death, spending a lot of time dissecting the bodies of dead birds and animals.

It became obvious that there was something seriously wrong with him and his mother had him sent to various homes for boys with problems, but she eventually brought him home again, against the advice of the psychiatrists who had been observing him. Bizarrely, she re-located the family to Guyana in South America but before too long they were back living in London. There then followed a spell in Gravesend, Patrick failing to hold down a job, possibly as a result of his persistent bullying.

He was unravelling dangerously, however, and a probation officer warned of dire consequences if he was not removed from the family home. His prediction was proved to be correct when Patrick tried to strangle his mother and commit suicide. His response to questions from investigating officers was that he lived with his father and saw snakes. However, following an examination to judge whether he was mentally ill, he was released. Shortly after, he tried to kill a young boy, but was restrained.

Incarcerated in the first of a series of psychiatric facilities, he was diagnosed by one doctor as ‘a cold psychopathic killer’. It was 1968 and he was sent to Moss Side Hospital in Liverpool, one of the few institutions in Britain that had the required security to keep a man like Patrick Mackay out of harm’s way. He underwent numerous tests and examinations which were fairly inconclusive apart from the opinion of one psychiatrist who thought he had inherited a genetic defect from his father that made him likely to be psychopathic. His troubled relationship with his mother did not help and it was no coincidence, they felt, that many of his violent fits occurred around her. He suffered from Intermittent Explosive Disorder, they suggested, a condition characterised by explosions of uncontrollable anger. He was, they concluded, very disturbed.

He was also very immature and would take a doll to bed with him every night that had to be kissed. His behaviour was extreme and one doctor was convinced he could be a murderer of women. He was a psychopath but without the mania that sometimes accompanies the condition. An independent tribunal examining him found nothing wrong with him. He was released several times in spite of the fears about his violent tendencies. He was also becoming obsessed with the Nazis.

Mackay idolised Adolf Hitler, even fashioning a Nazi uniform for himself and purchasing a pair of stormtrooper boots. He began to have delusions that he was powerful and that one day he would change the world. Like other serial killers, such as Moors Murderer, Ian Brady, he believed that he was superior to others people.

In 1972, they released Mackay from Moss Side. He was twenty years old and about to unleash his own form of hell.

He tried to make a living, but found it impossible to hold down a job. Eventually, he moved in with some people he knew in London, starting to drink heavily and consume large quantities of drugs, not the best thing for someone with his particular history. As usual, however, he proved difficult to live with because of his mood swings and aggression. He did not want to live with his mother because she was constantly nagging him about paying his way and other family members soon showed him the door after one more temper tantrum.

Meanwhile, his interest in the Nazis persisted and a photograph of Hitler’s right-hand man, Heinrich Himmler, sat proudly by his bedside.

One day, as he walked in some woods near to his mother’s home in Kent, he found a Carmelite convent that housed eight nuns who looked after elderly patients. Next door to the convent lived sixty-four-year-old priest, Father Anthony Crean. Father Crean bumped into Mackay that day and offered to buy him a drink in the local pub. He thought that Mackay looked like he needed a friend. The two men became friends – as much as Patrick Mackay could have a friend, that is – and began meeting for a drink in the pub regularly. Mackay could not resist his impulses, however, and broke into the priest’s house, stealing a cheque for £30. Mackay was arrested but Father Crean was reluctant to press charges. The police proceeded with the case anyway and Mackay was ordered to repay the money. He never did, however, and had even altered the amount on the cheque to ‘eighty’ instead of ‘thirty’. Mackay went back to London and left the priest seriously out of pocket.

He continued to drift from job to job and was convicted of petty crime, spending some time in jail. His behaviour was still violent and some commentators speculate that by this time, late 1973, he had possibly killed five people. Later, he admitted to drowning a homeless person in the Thames but he is suspected of other killings.

In February 1974 he tried to kill himself and was picked up by the police. After being examined by a psychiatrist and deemed not to be mentally ill, he was observed on a ward for a while before being released on 14 February. He headed for the home of eighty-four-year-old Isabella Griffiths whom he had helped to carry her groceries back to her home in Chelsea not long before. She told him she did not require any help that day, and he became angry, bursting into the house anyway and strangling her in a rage. He then proceeded to take his anger out on her with a twelve-inch kitchen knife, mutilating her body before having something to eat and listening to the radio in her living room.

He later claimed that he now thought about killing himself with the knife but decided against it. He arranged Isabella’s body, closing her eyes and covering her. He put dishes in the sink along with her shoes and turned on the taps. He left the house having stolen only a cigarette lighter, tossing the knife he had used to kill her into some bushes.

It was two weeks before she was found but the police found no clues and the case remained unsolved.

Mackay became the lodger of a social worker who was ordered to take him in. He would discuss endlessly the violent fantasies he had and suggested that he might be possessed. Eventually, to the man’s great relief, he moved on. He was now living rough, abandoned by his family who wanted nothing to do with him. He robbed the social worker’s house and went to prison for four months. By the time he was released, he was angrier than ever and determined to take revenge on the society that had let him down so badly.

He began by mugging women and then formed a plan to rob well-off elderly women. He had enjoyed killing Isabella Griffith. It gave him a sense of power and he wanted to experience that feeling again.

On 10 March 1975, he knocked on the door of eighty-nine-year-old Adele Price, strangling her after she opened it. The euphoric feeling it gave him stayed with him for several days, he later admitted. After killing her, he took a nap on her sofa but was wakened by the sound of someone trying to get into the house. It was Mrs Price’s granddaughter. She went off to phone her grandmother from a phone in the hall and Mackay ran out past her. However, there were other flats in the building and she thought he had come from one of them.

Once again, it was a motiveless crime that left police stumped.

Again Mackay tried to end it all and was locked up in a psychiatric hospital. On his release, some friends taunted him about his friendship with Father Crean, jokingly suggesting that it had been a homosexual relationship. It put the priest back into Mackay’s mind and he set off for Kent to find him. He had decided that the only way to stop this kind of scurrilous talk about him was to kill Father Crean.

He travelled from London with two knives, first visiting his mother and telling her to cook a chicken he had brought with him. Then he strolled over to the convent. He said later that he found Father Crean’s front door ajar and he walked in and called out his name. Seeing him, and being afraid, Crean attempted to get out but was stopped by Mackay. There was a struggle and Mackay became angry. He punched the priest in the face but Father Crean broke free, running towards the bathroom, presumably to lock himself in. But Mackay caught him before he got there, pushing him backwards into the bath while beating him with his fists. He took out one of the knives and stabbed him in the neck and the side of the head. He then found an axe which he swung at his head. ‘It was something in me that just exploded,’ he later said.

The blows of the axe rained down on the priest, now stretched out in the bathtub. Mackay watched as his skull was split open and then he put the plug in and turned on the taps. It took an hour for the priest to die, at one point touching his exposed brain with his fingers, an action that Mackay later claimed to find very erotic.

He left Father Crean’s house and went back to his mother’s house to eat the chicken she had cooked for him but the body was discovered later that night, and it did not take the police long to work out who had killed him. Mackay was arrested and confessed to the murder within thirty minutes.

Initially, he confessed to three murders but in prison he began to boast of others and was questioned again. This time, he admitted to eleven murders committed during a two-year period. He had stabbed a woman on a train, bludgeoned three elderly people in their homes and stabbed a woman and her grandson. A man had been thrown in the river and another man had been beaten to death as he closed his shop for the night.

Medical assessment confirmed what others had found. Mackay was a psychopath who felt no remorse for his crimes. He was judged sane, as he knew exactly what he was doing, and stood trial for three murders on 21 November 1975, pleading guilty with diminished responsibility.

Patrick Mackay was sentenced to life imprisonment.