Into the Darklands (5 page)

THE HARDEST THING in my job isn’t what you can do; it’s what you can’t.

The first time I met Sam he was 17. He’d been convicted for masturbating in front of two 10-year-olds from his car, and sentenced to a period of supervision. This meant he had to comply with strict conditions, including participating in counselling, or he’d be sent to jail. On the face of it he was pretty minor league, but you should never judge a flasher by his cover. It’s what’s going on behind his eyes that’s the most important thing.

I was working in a community-based sex-offender treatment programme at the time and Sam joined the adolescent stream. The programme involved group, individual and family therapy over a period of 18 months to two years. I picked Sam’s case up when he first came into treatment, and I have to say that the thing that most struck me about him when I first met him was his piggy eyes. That’s not a particularly clinical description, I know, but these are the details that sometimes leap out at you. Sam was overweight, unpleasant-looking, and most of all he had piggy eyes.

Right from the start he set off warning bells. When he spoke about his victims there was a clear tone of contempt. He didn’t even try to fake remorse.

‘Are you angry at the girls?’ I asked him.

‘Sure.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they shouldn’t have narked on me.’ And he really meant it.

Another thing about Sam that struck me was the fact that there was absolutely no sense of connection between us in the whole time I worked with him. I’m pretty good at finding some connection with even the most unlikeable people. We don’t necessarily need to like each other, but there’s usually some sense that you’re engaging with a warm-blooded mammal on the other end.

With Sam it always felt cold. He was more reptilian.

It was only when I started asking him about his fantasies that it really started to become clear why I had this niggling sense of alarm.

‘What were you thinking when you were looking at the girls?’ I asked him.

‘Nothing.’

I shook my head. ‘You’re sitting there in your car, with an erection, masturbating, looking at a ten-year-old girl walking past.’

‘Well I
wasn’t,’
he replied, his tone that of a petulant child.

All sex offenders, without fail, find it harder to talk about what they were thinking than what they actually did. A man can tell you about holding down a seven-year-old boy and sodomising him, but when you ask what he was thinking as he was doing it 99 percent of the time he’ll either say ‘Nothing’ or ‘I don’t know’.

Over several sessions Sam grudgingly admitted he’d been
thinking about ‘touching’ the girls. His description of what he wanted to do was bland and devoid of feeling, yet his whole manner suggested the exact opposite. He was angry and resentful at the world. He didn’t have any friends to speak of, no job and no prospects. It made absolutely no sense to me that, in the context of the generalised sense of failure and resentment he felt about his life, his fantasies could be so benign.

Sam had an interest in writing, and initially I hoped this would be an inroad I would be able to use to start to explore his inner world. Our shared interest in writing should have been an effective way to bridge the emotional void between Sam and the rest of the world.

Instead it was more of the same. He showed me a few stories, and I encouraged him to write more, thinking that perhaps this might be a mode I could utilise to get him thinking about some of the issues he needed to work out if he was ever going to reduce his risk of reoffending. His stories were interesting from a clinical perspective. Mostly they were science fiction and involved a solitary male ‘hero’ fighting some greater enemy. There was no evidence of emotional life or connection in his characters, and he showed no interest in developing this aspect of his writing, despite lots of encouragement.

I set him one exercise where I wanted him to write a first-person narrative as a victim, to try and get him to develop a greater sense of empathy for his own victims. It took him three weeks to do it and the results were pretty much as I expected, sadly lacking in any ability to see things from a victim’s perspective.

As time went on I became more and more concerned. On the face of it there was still no firm evidence that Sam was any greater risk than any other flasher, but the nagging sense of alarm inside me kept increasing. After a while you start to develop an instinctive
awareness of the myriad subtle cues that delineate different kinds of offenders. He also became more obstructive and aggressive during our sessions. He never became physically threatening; instead his manner suggested that, given the right circumstance, there was nothing he would have liked like more than to cause me some serious harm.

‘Are you angry right now?’ I asked him one day.

‘No,’ he said, but he smiled as he said it.

‘What’s that smile about then?’

He grimaced, baring his teeth. ‘I’m just happy to be here with you.’ The sarcasm practically dripped off the end of his chinny chin chin.

‘Actually, Sam, I think you hate my guts.’

‘Nooo, Nigel. I think you’re a great guy.’

‘That’s about the least convincing lie I’ve heard all week.’

He just shrugged.

His progress in the groups was unsatisfactory, and his progress in the individual sessions wasn’t much better. A dynamic soon began to emerge between us that was more about intellectual sparring than a therapeutic relationship. If I could outfox him, or do some other clever thing, he would give me a little more. This was far from ideal, but after having tried everything I could to form a relationship and failing, I knowingly entered into his game. If nothing else at least I was gaining some more information about what went on inside him.

One day, out of the blue, he told me he’d been sexually abused by a female cousin.

‘Do your parents know?’

He nodded, affecting a pained look.

‘What did they do?’

‘Nothing.’

Maybe it was true, and maybe it wasn’t, but the way he told me smelled like a trap. It felt like he’d thrown a rotting piece of meat at my feet and asked me to eat it.

Finally, as a last resort, I sent him on the residential victim-empathy weekend with the adults. I was a facilitator on these weekends now and made sure Sam attended the group I would be co-leading. My hope was that the phenomenally intense group process would initiate some shift in him. Even before he went I knew it was a slim hope.

His performance over the weekend was dismal and succeeded only in alarming me even more. He didn’t connect with any of the other members of the group and remained aloof and alone. In the group sessions he was similarly disconnected from the work. I only saw him display emotion on two occasions. The first was when he was talking about being bullied at school, and the second was during his victim-empathy role-play when, in the heat of the drama, I told him to express himself to his victims. He kicked the chair over and said, ‘I don’t give a fuck.’ Both times the emotion I saw most clearly was rage.

If nothing else, my observations of Sam over the weekend helped me to become clearer about what I thought was going on in his head. In brief, my theory was that he was a fat, unattractive, nerdy kid of average intelligence who lived in a fairly emotionally distant family. He had no close emotional support, no one to turn to for help with his problems. I believe the majority of his rage and resentment came from his treatment at the hands of his peers. He was the object of universal ridicule at school. Everyone hated him and the other kids picked on him every chance they could get. He was the target of every bully. Sam never hit back, but he did have a burning rage. I think this rage festered in him like a boil, until he hit adolescence, when it collided with sex. As a result I believed his
sexual fantasies were probably sadistic and very violent. I think Sam didn’t give a shit about the world because in his eyes it had never given a shit about him.

In our first session after the weekend I put this theory to him, telling him how I’d observed him over the three days of the weekend and in the weeks preceding it. I told him I didn’t believe him when he said that he had ‘only’ wanted to touch the girls. I told him I thought he had more to tell.

Sam listened quietly through the whole thing. When I finished talking I just sat there. I didn’t ask a question. The next move had to be his.

‘I do,’ he finally said with his ever-present faint sneer.

‘Do what?’

‘I do have more to tell.’

‘Such as?’

‘Next time,’ he said.

It was
all
about control with him.

‘I’d like you to tell me now.’

‘I don’t want to tell you now, I want to think about it first.’

‘What do you have to think about?’

He shrugged. ‘Just stuff.’

I was thinking
very
quickly in that moment. I believed he was a high-risk offender, and chances were he was currently actively planning to do something very bad. It was my belief he was fantasising about abducting, raping and possibly killing a child. The problem was that at that point I had absolutely no evidence to support this. He hadn’t said anything or done anything concrete I could use as evidence to get him recalled into court. All I had was my experience and intuition, and those aren’t sufficient grounds. I didn’t like it at all, but I didn’t see that I had much choice.

‘I want to see you in two days,’ I said. ‘I’m going to be away next
week.’ That was a lie, but I needed to see him as soon as I could.

As soon as he left I called his probation officer and outlined my concerns. Whilst Sam hadn’t said anything to date, I’d been laying a bit of a trap for him over the last several weeks. I’d given him a series of therapy assignments to complete in his own time, and of course he hadn’t done any of them. I’d carefully documented all of this so at the very least I had evidence of his noncompliance with treatment. You always need to be running a Plan B when you work with people like Sam.

The probation officer was very experienced and said he would see Sam the next day for a ‘routine’ check-in. I also indicated I would be forwarding a written report to him after my next meeting with Sam. I said that I believed there was currently a high risk Sam would reoffend—he wasn’t responding to treatment, and therefore he should be recalled to court and, hopefully, locked up.

We both agreed this is what should happen. It was just a matter of having some supporting evidence.

I went home, hoping that two days wouldn’t be too long. There was nothing else I could have done, I was clear about that, but that would have been cold comfort if Sam abducted or killed a child in the next 48 hours.

THE TWO DAYS I
HAD
to wait before my next appointment with Sam seemed like a very long time. I kept an anxious eye on the newspapers and television, hoping nothing would happen, and I went over and over my strategy in my head. Not only that, but I also discussed the case with an experienced colleague. This stuff is too important to trust your own judgement without question.

I knew his being sent to jail wouldn’t do anything to reduce his risk over the longer term, but at least he would be contained. At least for the time he was inside he couldn’t hurt anyone. If he’d been engaging in treatment or making any observable progress, I might have been prepared to keep going. I couldn’t justify continuing with therapy when he was clearly making no progress. If anything he seemed to be getting more hostile and controlling.

Friday eventually rolled around, and I wondered if Sam would arrive for his appointment. He was right on time.

‘So?’ I said as we sat down.

‘So, what?’

‘So you had some more to tell me.’

‘Oh yeah, I did say that, didn’t I.’

I wasn’t really in the mood for his games. Besides, I couldn’t let him think he had me dangling on a hook. ‘Look, Sam, tell me if you want to, don’t if you don’t. Just don’t stuff me around.’ I sat there looking as if I had somewhere else to be.

He finally shrugs. ‘What happens if I do tell you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Who do you tell?’

‘Like I said at the very start, the things we talk about are confidential
unless
either you or someone else is at risk. Then I do what I have to do to make sure everybody is OK.’

‘Would you tell my probation officer?’

‘I would do whatever I needed to do.’

‘But would you tell him?’

I frowned. ‘Of course I would, and you know it. I’d tell the Seventh Cavalry if it came down to it. I’d hire a hot-air balloon and blast it out from loudspeakers if that’s what it took. So can we stop all this screwing around and get on with it?’

With the Sams of this world you must never let them feel you’re beholden to them. If that happens you’re lost, because there’s nothing they like better than watching someone spin.

‘What do you want to know?’ he asked.

‘Well, like I said before, I think you’ve had a pretty shitty time of it. I think people were really mean to you in school, and I think you’re angry about that. I put that together with your sexual offending and it doesn’t make any sense to me.’ I’m phrasing it carefully, because I want him to feel as if I understand what he did. I call it strategic collusion. ‘So when you say you just wanted to touch those girls it doesn’t make sense to me.’

He smiles. ‘I know what you’re trying to say. You think I was thinking about snatching them.’

‘Well, were you?’

He pauses for a moment, smiling his cold little smile. ‘Yeah.’

And there it is. ‘Tell me about that,’ I say.

And so he does. It turned out Sam fantasised about abducting a 10- or 11-year-old girl and taking her to a deserted location on the coast. Once he had her there he said he wanted to tie her up, rape her, torture her and kill her.

‘What would you do to her?’ I ask, neutrally.

‘I’d probably cut her with a knife or something.’

‘How would you kill her?’

‘I’d strangle her.’

‘And then?’

‘Then I’d just drive off and leave her there.’

‘Do you have a knife?’

‘I could get one.’

‘And what would you tie her up with?’

‘Rope. There’s some in the garage at home.’

‘Who would you grab?’

‘Anyone.’

‘Where would you grab her from?’

‘Walking home from school.’

‘Which road?’

‘I don’t know, somewhere round a school.’

‘Which schools do you live near?’

‘I don’t know.’ And all the time he’s talking that little sneer is there.

‘When’s the last time you followed a girl, thinking this?’

‘I haven’t. Not yet.’

I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t want to get bogged down. If you’re moving, keep moving. You can always come back to the sticky bits. ‘What about the two girls you exposed yourself to?’

He pauses. ‘OK, I thought about it but I wasn’t following them.’

I’m processing all this as we go. The fact that he says he doesn’t have a knife and rope already is a good thing, because it means he’s still probably turning the idea over as fantasy and not as a solid plan. He doesn’t have his ‘rape kit’ in his car but he’s starting to source it. He’s looked at the rope in his garage and thought about how he would use it. His description sounds more fantasy than real-world planning at the moment, but the distance between those two points can be as long as years or as short as minutes.

I make a mental note to verify all this by having a look in his car before he goes. If he lied to me about not having the equipment I would have to drastically rethink my assessment of his risk. The ice had suddenly become very thin.

And I still needed more. He had described sadistic rape fantasies but he hasn’t given me any concrete acts that would be grounds for recalling him to court. I’m only going to get one go at this and if I screw it up then he walks and he’s even more dangerous than before. He can’t be recalled for
thinking
bad things.

‘Tell me about the sexual offending that you’ve never talked about,’ I say, staring him down, actively trying to focus his attention purely on this moment. I don’t want him thinking about the possible consequences of disclosing new offending, I just want him to focus on him and me, on the mental sparring he enjoys so much. ‘Tell me about the stuff you’ve been doing since you were caught.’
Forget about all that stuff,
I’m projecting,
none of that really exists, it’s just you and me.

He shakes his head. ‘There’s nothing.’

‘You’re lying,’ I say, and I’m trying to pour my will into the words. I want him to believe I already know.

‘There’s nothing.’

‘You’re lying.’ I say it quick, snappy, without hesitation, without doubt.

He looks at me for a long time. ‘OK,’ he finally says, ‘what the hell.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I’ve been jerking off under the counter when women come into the shop,’ he says. He was working in a 24-hour service station at the time. While the rest of us slept Sam read porn in the shop and jerked off behind the counter while serving women. He gave me the details.

‘What else?’

‘That’s it.’

‘What else?’

‘My friend’s little sister.’

‘What did you do?’

‘When I gave her piggybacks I’d put my hand inside her shorts and touch her.’

‘How old was she?’

He shrugs. ‘Five, something like that.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What’s her brother’s name?’

‘Steve something.’

‘Last name?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I thought he was your friend?’

‘Not really, we hung out a bit.’

‘Where do they live?’

‘They moved.’

‘Where to?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘I’m
not,
they moved.’

His petulant tone tells me I’m going to get no further so I give up on that one.

‘I’m going to ring your probation officer now and get him to come down so you can tell him everything you’ve just told me.’

He looks alarmed. ‘Why?’

‘Because he needs to know.’

‘I won’t tell him.’

‘Either you can or I can, but it looks better for you if it comes from you.’

‘I’m not going to jail,’ he says.

‘That’s not up to me.’

His little piggy eyes narrow, and the malice is almost palpable. ‘I’ll kill anyone that tries to send me there.’

I pause from my writing. ‘Excuse me?’

‘You heard me.’

‘Are you saying if I ring your probation officer and you get sent to jail, then you would kill me?’

‘If you did that I would.’

‘Do you realise threatening to kill is an offence, Sam?’

‘So?’

‘So you just threatened to kill the guy who’s writing a report on your progress in therapy. Not too bright, Sam.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Is that right?’

My judgement said he was all bluster, at least as far as his threats to me were concerned. Still, he wasn’t small, and desperate people can be strong and unpredictable. I was also aware there was no relationship between us that might have been a brake. If push came to shove there was a metal chair off to my side I could probably belt him with.

‘Well, Sam,’ I said, putting down my pen and paper, ‘I
am
going to talk to him, and you might get sent to jail, so if you’re going to have a go, now would be a good time.’

Never show fear to a sadist, that only feeds him. My instincts said it was best to respond to his display with quiet confidence, and in such moments I
always
trust my instincts. We sat there for a few moments in silence, staring at each other.

‘I didn’t really mean it,’ he said finally.

‘Too bad, Sam. You said it and it
will
be in my report.’

(Actually there’s only ever been one man I thought might really try to kill me. He was a drug-addicted, drug-dealing, personality-disordered, violent sex offender with big-time criminal connections. I’d been a key part in him not gaining custody of his child and for months afterwards I scanned the car park as I left the building each day.)

Sam did end up telling his probation officer all the things he’d told me. As a result he was recalled and sent to prison. It was the hollowest of victories. I knew he’d be off the streets for about 18 months maximum. He was never charged with the extra offences he admitted because there wasn’t enough evidence. While in prison he completed a sex-offender treatment programme, but made no therapeutic progress. He eventually walked out the front gates just as dangerous as when he’d been driven in.

Even now I know there was nothing more I could have done with Sam. He wasn’t responding to treatment, wasn’t completing tasks assigned to him and was showing clear signs of dangerousness. Getting him recalled was my only real option, but it was also only a short-term solution.

A few months after Sam was released an 11-year-old girl vanished from a park near the area where he was living. Whilst I was no longer working with him I’d kept tracks on him through various
contacts, and when I heard about this little girl’s disappearance one afternoon I felt my stomach drop all the way to my shoes.

Straightaway I knew Sam was someone the police should be looking at. The circumstances of the little girl’s disappearance matched the scenario he’d described to me 20 months previously.

At that point there were a few ethical dilemmas, namely the client’s right to confidentiality versus the risk to some other person. I had no reason to believe Sam had been involved other than the fact that it fitted with the scenario he’d described to me. It’s only ethical to breach confidentiality if you have evidence that a
specific
person is at risk. You can’t breach confidentiality on a hunch.

Still, there was nothing stopping me making a few discreet enquiries. As it turned out, I never had to wrestle with my conscience. Sam was already a key suspect. He’d been interviewed by the police and, even though he denied any knowledge of the girl, he’d apparently spent some time driving around with them showing them where he would dump a body. I’m certain he would have loved every minute of it.

In all the years I’ve been working with thousands of offenders, this is the
only
time I’d been so concerned as to consider passing on a name to the police. I work with lots of bad guys and there are many crimes I hear about where it’s possible any one of them could have been involved. I have
always
worked from the clear position that unless I had specific evidence that someone was at risk, it was unethical to breach confidence. I still believe that.

But in this case the timing and circumstances of the little girl’s disappearance were simply too much to ignore. It was exactly the kind of scenario he had described to me in our sessions, including the age and sex of the victim, and the general location. In any case, Sam would have already been on the police suspect list because he was a known sex offender living in the area. I would have just
moved him a little higher up the priority list.

If that makes me unethical, so be it. I can more easily live with that than I could live with the knowledge that I might have known something that could have helped find that wee girl.

Tragically, several days later the girl was found dead from what appeared to be natural causes. The coroner eventually ruled her death was indeed accidental.

Sam is, as far as I know, still out there walking around. I’m sure he still has the same sadistic fantasies, and I believe one day he may take that terrible step between the world inside his head, and the one you and I walk around in.

I hope I’m wrong. I really do. Like I said, in my job the hardest thing isn’t what you can do, it’s what you can’t.