Authors: Paul Britton
When I turned forty in 1986, a routine eye check had revealed I was suffering from glaucoma, or more technically - intra-ocular hypertension. This is a blinding illness caused by pressure building up inside the eyes. Each eyeball is basically a ball of clear fluid with the amount of liquid carefully maintained. Too much and pressure builds up until it can cut off the blood supply in the tiny veins at the back of the eye and ultimately cause the nerve to die. Blindness is the result.
When my consultant first gave me this diagnosis, he told me that we’d become good friends. He was right. Over the years I’ve taken a merry-go-round of different medications to control my eye pressure, with none of the combinations really working for any longer than a few months.
Right from the beginning the consultant stressed to me that lifestyle made a difference. Long hours, irregular sleep, work pressure and financial worries could all have an impact on the condition. This is what Marilyn feared whenever she saw me looking tired and run-down. She wanted to know how much longer I would keep trying to do so many things at once.
At one stage I had twenty-seven active investigations where police had asked for my help. I simply couldn’t get to them all, and so responded to the most urgent. As a result, I never reached some of the others, or by the time I did get to them my advice wasn’t necessary or relevant. It didn’t make any sense to have SIOs and investigations waiting on the convenience of my diary. There had to be a better way of doing things.
Although the Home Office had accepted all of my recommendations for the development of offender profiling in Britain, the wheels turned very slowly in Whitehall. In the meantime, I was receiving a growing number of requests to lecture and teach offender profiling. Some of these were very worthwhile, particularly those that fitted in well with the review recommendations. Surely this is the way forward, I thought.
‘Are you going to spend the rest of your life going to crime scenes?’ Marilyn asked me on Christmas night. She’d asked the question many times before. She wanted to know when our lives would settle down and we’d have weekends like other people and be able to take holidays.
These were perfectly reasonable expectations. Our children had married and left home and she reminded me of the conversations we’d had all those years ago, talking about the things we’d do when they’d gone.
‘Things are going to change,’ I said.
‘When?’
‘Maybe next year. We’ll see what happens after the Rachel Nickell trial.’
We talked about what I might do and although I wasn’t exactly clear I knew it might involve leaving the NHS. A clear direction was to offer consultancy and training services in risk management, hostage and kidnap negotiation and crime analysis. I also wanted to use my organizational and forensic expertise to advise individuals, corporations and the law enforcement agencies on specialist aspects of crime prevention. Rather than picking over the pieces of a crime scene, I knew that many crimes could be stopped from happening in the first place. From these vague plans, I felt sure I could fashion a more normal life.
On Boxing Day, Keith Pedder and I flew to Washington, with Marilyn coming along as my secretary. The aim of the journey was twofold. On the one hand we were looking for examples of where offender profiling had been used as evidence in American criminal trials. At the same time, we also wanted to subject the covert operation to independent scrutiny by our opposite numbers in the FBI.
The committal hearing for Colin Stagg was due to begin in February and the prosecution had decided to rely heavily not only on Lizzie James’s evidence, but also on the probative value of my evidence concerning the extremely rare sexual deviation that I expected to find in the killer of Rachel Nickell.
Neither offender profiling nor psychological crime analysis had been used in evidence in a British courtroom before. There were, however, examples in America where FBI profilers had given evidence and the CPS wanted firsthand views on what obstacles they had faced and whether any of the cases were comparable.
Aside from answering these questions, Bruce Butler had also asked us to look at the differences between offender profiling techniques in each country. He wanted me to be sure that we were up to the moment with the American methodology and to be able to compare it with work done in Britain should the need arise.
Arriving in Washington, we were met by Judd Ray, an FBI agent who looked like a young Sammy Davis Jnr. I’d met Judd previously when he spent a six-month fellowship in the UK, at the Bramshill police training college. A fascinating man, he’d spent eleven years working for a New York Homicide division and had once been the victim of a contracted ‘hit’. Three bullets were pumped into him and although he survived his marriage didn’t; his wife couldn’t live with the worry that it might happen again. During the Vietnam War he was a member of a deep penetration group working behind enemy lines and was the only one of the platoon to survive the conflict. These experiences showed in the man who had a stillness about him that was almost touchable.
The FBI training facility at Quantico, Virginia, has gained an almost mythical status since films like The Silence of the Lambs threw a spotlight onto offender profilers. The Behavioural Science Unit is based in ‘The Bunker’, a nuclear bomb shelter built for the White House staff. It has no windows or natural light and all life is accompanied by the low level hum of the air conditioners.
Over Christmas most of the staff were on vacation but some of the pioneers of offender profiling had agreed to give up their time to meet with us, including Roy Hazelwood who was on his last day with the Bureau before retiring. Initially he was only going to sit in for a few minutes but stayed for most of the day.
Sitting next to him Judd Ray introduced Greg Cooper, another senior agent, and Janna Monroe, a striking blonde who had the distinction of being the only female profiler at Quantico. Over the years a number of female agents had joined, but none of them had stayed except Janna. I think the nature of the work had proved to be too disturbing. Although I’d never seen The Silence of the Lambs I couldn’t help but imagine her from a film-maker’s point of view.
I felt this conference was of crucial importance. It would be the first time that my analysis of the murder and conception of the principles behind the covert operation were critically examined by an independent group of experts.
As Pedder began to describe the crime, Roy Hazelwood interrupted, ‘Oh this is a disorganized killer.’
This is one of the categories the FBI uses to differentiate offenders - ‘disorganized’ referring to crime scenes that show evidence of impulsive, violent acts with little evidence of forward planning or attempts to avoid discovery or detection.
I picked up on Roy’s comment and went over how Rachel had been acquired and controlled, the manner in which her body had been displayed and how quickly and effectively her killer had disappeared from the scene, leaving few clues behind. ‘These aren’t the classic signs of what you refer to as a “disorganized” offender.’
‘No, you’re right,’ said Roy, altering his view.
All of them were fascinated by the covert operation - never having seen anything like it before - and we spent the best part of a day going over the case. Subtly, a transition took place and instead of checking legal precedent, the meeting became a forum for swapping knowledge. I could tap into the enormous experience of these investigators and detectives, while they were fascinated by the psychological principles that underpinned my work.
The Americans have developed two separate strands of profiling. The first is computer based and is to a large extent a number-crunching exercise. The details of hundreds of previous crimes are carefully catalogued and categorized within the computer database and can then be compared with the features of any new crime. This can indicate whether the fresh offence is linked to any other cases in the database and help keep track of serial offenders.
The second strand deals with the development of individual profiles that are rooted more in the psychology of the criminal and his crime. FBI agents study particular cases and draw up profiles using their own personal experience as investigators, as well as the knowledge gained from attending lectures and courses run by psychologists and law enforcement professionals acknowledged to have a special expertise in this area.
In Britain some schools of offender and psychological profiling use the number-crunching approach developed by the FBI for linking crimes. Essentially, they rely upon an arithmetical series of results. For example, let’s say, 80 per cent of serial sexual murders are committed by men aged between twenty and twenty-five; and of these 50 per cent have previous convictions for minor sexual offences. These arithmetical abstractions - based on convictions in earlier cases - are then used to support conclusions about a wanted sex killer’s most likely age, education, criminal history and locale,
etc.
However, if this is all that an offender profile is based upon, then what about the twenty per cent of serial sexual murderers who don’t fit into the criteria?
As a psychologist, I view each case as being unique. There is no theoretical reason why a crime must fit into neat clear boundaries, much less the criminal who committed it. Unless there is something else at the crime scene to support such findings, I think it can be very dangerous to make judgements based solely on conviction rates and past crimes that have no specific connection with what you are investigating.
The FBI approach to generating individual profiles is well tailored for a huge country with a high level of diverse and violent crime. However, it’s proved difficult to transfer it to Europe without adaptation, as the Dutch discovered when they chose the FBI system of categorizing sexual crimes and then found that 90 per cent of their rapes, when profiled, fitted into just one FBI category. This clearly made offender differentiation - the point of the entire exercise - extremely difficult.
On the strength of that single meeting at Quantico, the visit to America had been a success. Clearly there was a great deal we could learn from each other and we ended up discussing how we might work together in the future, perhaps on an exchange basis.
For the next few days we stayed in visitors’ quarters at the Academy, which were on a first-floor landing in the main reception building, overlooking an atrium featuring a huge wall of softly tinted glass. The complex felt vast and empty at that time of year and I think most of us were missing our families. One evening Marilyn and I left our room and heard the sound of a piano playing in the atrium below us. We walked across and looked over the railing. In one corner, under soft subdued lights, Pedder sat at a grand piano playing to the emptiness. We listened for a few moments to the wonderful sound of Christmas and I recognized a man who was homesick for his wife and missing his two young boys. It seemed too private a moment to intrude upon, so we returned to our rooms until the tempo changed and the theme tune from The Sting filled the whole atrium.
Over the months, Keith and I had become good friends. A big man, who looked and sounded like a detective, he had a dry, sardonic wit which sometimes made him sound world-weary. After a long and successful career, he’d committed a great deal of himself to the Nickell inquiry.
As we flew back to the UK, I felt contented that the FBI profilers had independently agreed with my conclusions about the case and Pedder believed we had ample evidence of the American legal experience with using offender profiling in a courtroom setting. However, it had never been used alone as proof of identity, but rather as a piece of evidence in the chain.
The prosecution team for the committal hearing consisted of Bill Boyce and Nigel Sweeney, two brilliant lawyers who quickly grasped the psychological principles that underpinned the covert operation.
Boyce was particularly interested in how the evidence about the disposition of Rachel’s body should be considered. Stagg had portrayed her lying curled up with her hands together as if in prayer. Photographs showed that Rachel’s hands were together but not palm to palm, instead they were crossed at the wrists.
‘There’s a sound explanation,’ I said. ‘When Alex was found by a passer-by, he was shaking Rachel and asking her to “wake up”. If the killer had left her hands palm to palm, Rachel’s hands would have naturally slipped apart as Alex shook her. That’s why they were crossed at the wrist.’
Already the prosecution realized that Colin Stagg’s defence would concentrate on attacking Lizzie James’s evidence in a bid to have it discounted. Boyce asked me about the evidence relating to guilty knowledge.
‘If that were excluded, Mr Britton, is your evidence sufficient basis to convict Mr Stagg? Now be careful before you answer because you have to see a man walking down the steps for the rest of his life. That’s what hangs on the answer.’
‘Of course it’s not sufficient,’ I said. ‘I can’t say that Colin Stagg killed Rachel Nickell. I can only say that the probability of there being two people on Wimbledon Common that morning who suffered from the same extreme and violence-orientated sexual deviation is incredibly small.’
‘I’m pleased to hear you say that,’ said Boyce, looking reassured.
The old-style committal hearing began on 17 February 1994, before the very experienced and highly respected stipendiary magistrate Terry English. He would have to decide if the Crown had established a prima facie case for murder against Colin Stagg and, if so, to commit the defendant for trial by jury.
Stagg had been on remand in Wandsworth prison and his appearance had changed markedly. He’d lost weight and let his short spiky hair grow out. He’d also lost the muscle bulk built up in his homemade gym.
Despite a media blackout on revealing details of the evidence, journalists gathered early at the courthouse to catch a glimpse of Stagg arriving. The case had become too important not to monitor every twist and turn. As Bill Boyce began his opening address the press seats were overflowing and the newly built courthouse at Wimbledon hosted its most important case to date.