Authors: Paul Britton
After a light supper, I turned on the desk lamp in my study and spread the statements, photographs, postmortem report and maps across my desk and on the floor. My study is quite small. Along one wall, wooden bookshelves reach almost to the ceiling, the contents leaning this way and that, seemingly in disarray but I can always find what I want so long as no-one tries to tidy them up. Opposite are several filing cabinets, all of them crammed with case notes and research papers. The tops of each are hidden beneath bundles of the British Journal of Clinical Psychology.
Closing my eyes, I tried to step back into the pretty woodland glade on Wimbledon Common. An image was forming in my mind. I knew how this killer functioned; I knew what drove him, because I had seen the same impulse in other people whom I’d interviewed and treated over the years. I knew that this killing was a decisive stage in a fantasy process that had been rehearsed for years before it ever became a reality.
Very few people are born to become sexual predators. The vast majority of us have a strong desire to be approved of and well regarded by others. As we grow up and become more effective in forming relationships and more confident in ourselves, we come to feel that people value us and want to hear what we have to say, just as we come to know and value them.
At the same time, we have growing and developing sexual needs. Mercifully, these two elements usually evolve together, so that the expression of our sexual desire is related to positive social values. The fantasies and mental images that naturally arise because of sexual desire and arousal, will involve consensual sex where the seduction, courting and intercourse are enjoyed by both parties.
There are, however, a small number of people who have straightforward and strong sexual needs but who haven’t been able to develop social confidence and self-esteem. Maybe their early attempts to form relationships, either sexual or simply courting, have been disappointing, causing them to feel hurt, rejected, or ridiculed.
It doesn’t actually have to be true that they’ve been discarded, they simply have to believe it’s true. If so, it can lead people to spiral downwards into a life of sexual inadequacy and usually unaccompanied loneliness.
An even smaller proportion of these people will find that anger develops; a sense of bitterness and a need to blame others for what has happened. People have hurt them, they believe, and they want to punish them for that.
Because in their ordinary lives they sense that they have little, if any, control or influence over others they begin to develop a private fantasy world - an alternative place where they are powerful and they determine what happens.
When this is combined with a strong sexual need, the fantasies may come to be based upon the sexual control or sexual coercion of other people in imaginary relationships with them. Their fantasies begin to mirror their predicament; they don’t value others because they themselves aren’t valued. The anger, bitterness and resentment consume them and you have all the seeds of a fantasy life that can ultimately lead to sexual aggression.
Such a person often has an enormously powerful visual fantasy system - a kind of virtual reality that is so incredibly vivid that today’s scientists and computer programmers have a long way to go if they hope to match it.
In the alternative world that this person creates, people behave in ways that he directs and determines. And as the fantasy system develops, it requires more and more energy and specificity of detail for it to be as rewarding as it was in the beginning.
It’s an escalating process. Where a fantasy might once have involved the mild or minor degradation of a participant to fulfil sexual desire, it will need to become more and more extreme in order to maintain the same level of pleasure. This usually means increasing the degree of sexual violence and the intensity of detail. Ultimately, he will have in his mind a set of images and scenarios that are brilliantly and intensely clear.
Within sado-sexual or sadomasochistic fantasies there are a number of different domains, but the band of activities is quite narrow. Some focus on verbal interaction and degradation; others require types of constraints and bindings; others use lashes or whips; or weapons such as guns, clubs and knives. These instruments are used in combination with a particular sort of victim and setting that have been developed so that the creator of the fantasy can maximize his sexual release and reward. .
Eventually, the fantasy alone is not enough and he may begin to rehearse some aspects of it in the real world. You may, for example, have a person who fantasizes about raping a woman, someone of a certain age, with blond hair or brown hair, blue eyes or green eyes. He visualizes following her home; she doesn’t know he’s there. He waits outside the house, looking at the bedroom window, and as she undresses her silhouette falls on the curtains. He enters the house, usually in a particular way, and goes up the stairs. Depending on his fantasy, he will either violently rape her, or she may acquiesce, or perhaps after initially resisting she becomes sexually aroused and they have passionate consensual sex.
When the pleasure provided by this fantasy begins to wane, he takes parts of it into the real world, cruising the streets and rehearsing. It sexually arouses him and gets the adrenalin pumping. Soon he needs more than this and begins to actually follow particular women. They might not look exactly the same as they do in his fantasy - either taller, shorter, thinner or fatter - but they present opportunities and he will follow them at a distance. If they are with someone such as a boyfriend or a child, he will simply blot out that person in his thinking.
Much more likely, he will find victims of opportunity, women who are alone but have some of the characteristics from his fantasy. This may go on for months as he cruises bus stops, creeps into yards or walks up and down the back of railway embankments looking into bedroom windows.
Eventually, the level of sophistication and risk-taking increases. He begins to take something to break into the house, or to tie her up, or a mask to disguise himself. He may even go through the early stages of entering a house and then run off.
What he can’t predict is how she’s actually going to react. While he can control how she acts in his fantasy, he can’t control how she reacts in real life. Sometimes a victim is entirely passive and, depending on his temperament, this may save her life. It may also lead him to kill her because he has no reason to stop. It may be that she resists, very vigorously and with verbal abuse. This may make him kill her, or he may have been going to kill her anyway - it all depends on the blend of what happens in his fantasy and what happens in real life.
But what about Rachel Nickell?
Her murderer was a stranger - of that I was almost certain. For one thing, Alex hadn’t been harmed. If it was someone well-known to Rachel, there was a fair chance that the baby would know him too. The sexual fantasy element of the attack and the location also suggested that he was a stranger. If he set out to kill a woman he knew, he would probably have known where she lived, or where she worked, or where she was going to be at a given hour so he could have selected a site that gave him more time with her.
The woodland glade was a risky place to take someone. Although it was shielded from a long view it was perfectly possible that at any moment someone could interrupt him. He was willing to take the risk.
Equally, he couldn’t have known exactly how Rachel would respond; what she would say or do, but to some extent that was irrelevant. What was important was that she fulfilled the role that he assigned to her in his fantasy.
At 10.00 a.m. on Wednesday 15 July, he would have known that the only people likely to be on the Common were joggers, horse-riders and people out walking their dogs. Young women would be among them, some with children. From his point of view, a few of them would be provocative and titillating. He wants them but doesn’t possess the skills to begin an ordinary conversation, or to chat them up.
But this doesn’t really matter any more. He’s grown angry and embittered over the years and this has fuelled his sexual fantasies. He’s been rehearsing, using his fantasy as a template, stalking women and taking home the images he collects.
But today is an exception, because today his overwhelming urge and the opportunity to enact his fantasy will collide and combine in the person of Rachel Nickell.
To her Wimbledon Common is a place of rest and relaxation; of sunshine and soft green grass - somewhere she can take her dog and child in safety. For the killer it is a theatre - a place where victims are to be found, where he has hiding places, observation posts and escape routes. He may have seen Rachel previously, even loosely followed her; or more likely he is simply cruising across the Common to one of his favourite waiting places.
Then he sees her - a young woman, blond, attractive, self-assured, wearing clothes he finds arousing. She’s just what he wants. Not only is she compelling but she has a confidence and naturalness about her. Ironically, the very things that make her so popular with others, enhance her as a victim in this man’s mind. She brings all of his past into sharp, immediate relief, focusing his bitterness and rejection. As he leaves the trees and moves towards her, he has a sense of complete omnipotence; she is going to pay the price for all of those other women.
Rachel gives him a friendly smile but he’s not interested in that; he’s passed way beyond looking to start a friendship or a relationship. By the time Rachel realizes the nature of her risk, it’s far too late. She may look round to see if there is someone there to help but there’s no-one. All she knows is that she and her child are at risk from this man and she doesn’t understand why. Her terror is absolute.
She drops Alex’s t-shirt - it marks the initial point of contact. He controls her with his voice. The knife, prodding at her chest, draws blood and pushes her where he wants her to go. She’s in shock; this is something completely outside her experience; she will never have envisaged it, or known what it feels like.
Like many women, Rachel may have talked about what she would do if accosted by a stranger. Perhaps she said, ‘I’d punch him and kick him,’ or ‘I’d scream at him to sod off. But what she discovers at the moment of the attack is that she has absolutely no energy and no resistance. It’s not a case of being paralysed by fear, it’s a passivity that overwhelms her.
For the killer, Rachel’s compliance is not enough. She has to be humiliated. He forces her away from the path, separating her from her child. He cuts her throat and she can no longer scream. He forces her down onto her knees so that she presents herself to him in the fulfilment of his fantasy as a woman wholly dominated, degraded and humiliated. Then he stabs her over and over again long after she ceases to struggle.
But he wants more than just her quick death. He pulls her jeans and pants down and either just before - or just as - she dies, he forces a smooth object into her anus. This is not a sexual act in the ordinary sense, it’s an act of violation. For him, sexuality is inextricably linked with exploitation, degradation and the defiling of the woman in his fantasy. Rachel, by now, has fulfilled this role.
All of this has taken just a few minutes, probably no more than five or six. Rachel has been stabbed forty-nine times and her throat so severely cut that it appears that her head has almost been severed. Her body is left in such a way, with her buttocks prominently displayed, that anyone coming across her will see her in the most degrading position the killer could manage in the circumstances.
His exhilaration is enormous. He never knew that he could achieve anything like this outside of his fantasy. This is real; he doesn’t have to put energy into holding it in his imagination, he can see the blood on his hands, he’s holding the knife. Whatever else happens, no-one can ever take from him the memory of his sense of fulfilment and completion at that moment.
As the arousal and exhilaration begin to decrease, so the anxiety starts to establish itself-the guilty knowledge. He knows that he has changed himself in a way that he couldn’t predict. Until now, everything has been in his imagination but he has suddenly stepped across a threshold that separates him from most of mankind. Whatever else happens, he will always be a sexual murderer.
It isn’t remorse that he feels; it’s the knowledge of the outcry that’s coming; he will become a reviled and hunted person, using all his wits and resources to protect himself.
Leaning back, I rubbed my eyes until white stars bounced across the ceiling. I’d been concentrating so hard, it was difficult to refocus. I’d forgotten to draw the curtains and the window was dark. My study looks out over the front garden - or at least it would if I trimmed the shrubs that line the path. I couldn’t remember the last time I pruned them - perhaps the previous summer.
I have no affinity for gardening. Ian and Emma call me a ‘demolition gardener’, saying that if everything was dug up and levelled so that it was simply brown earth, then I would be content. They’re wrong but I let them tease.
Years ago, Marilyn and I decided to take a horticultural class at a local college. It was one evening a week and designed to teach beginners about various flowers and shrubs. On the first night, the elderly lady teacher was talking about lupins.
‘Excuse me,’ I asked, raising my hand a little self-consciously.
‘Yes, what is it?’ She smiled.
‘Exactly what is a lupin?’
It took her some considerable time to accept that my question was serious. Afterwards, she took Marilyn to one side and said, ‘Mrs Britton, do you really think your husband is going to enjoy this course?’
I can’t remember going back, although I don’t regard it as a complete waste of time. If there’s one flower I can recognize it’s a lupin.
Leaving the desk, I wandered into the kitchen and plugged in the kettle. As I spooned coffee into a cup, Marilyn appeared at the doorway in her dressing-gown. She looked at the clock, got a glass of water and padded out again without saying a word. I should have been in bed.