Two stories about serial killers

I have two stories about serial killers, which have given me a somewhat jaded view of the way TV, film and books like to portray them. You may wonder why this matters, or why on earth I’m talking about this on such a lovely, sunny June morning, but I’m also conducting an experiment, so indulge me and i’ll explain at the end.

(I will be talking in very vague terms about some truly nasty stuff, so feel free to bow out now, and here’s a picture of a cute kitten so you can think about that instead all day.)

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Anyway - story number one:

If you were born in the last century like me, you might have had your nightmares stalked by Fred and Rose West, who’s meat-headed mug shots consumed the news in the early 1990’s, when what was inevitably called their ‘House of Horrors’ in Gloucester was uncovered. They still bob up from time to time in real-life documentaries and podcasts, and no doubt many learned books have been written about them, trying to unpick how they came to do what they did.

As I was about 20 when this all happened, I followed the case with extreme interest and the sort of sick fascination of which I am now a little ashamed, but forgive me, I was young and everyone else did too - how could you not? The weird thing is, that I barely remembered my story two at the time, which you think I would have really, but you’ll see why later.

Story one though, happened about three years later, when life had made me friends with a couple who lived in Watford, and who were bikers. They were very nice and we were quite close for many years, until life did that thing where the physical distance between meant the pull apart became stronger than the pull together, no hard feelings, just the end of the road. However, at this time we were hanging out a lot, and I was meeting their friends and chatting over tea and wine, in their small terraced house with blue window sills and a garden full of insane custom motorbikes and trikes.

One of the friends I met the once, was a woman with curly hair and, as I remember, big red framed glasses, who introduced me to herself as ‘I’m their ugly friend.’ When I said that was a bit harsh, she grinned and added, ‘no, seriously, I am the ugliest woman you’ll ever meet and that’s official, because I was too ugly for Fred and Rose West.’

She of course had to tell the story behind this, a story I guess which had served her well, though maybe not physiologically coming from the best place, in the years since everything had come out. As a school girl in the 1980’s, she had got a place in a school a bit too far from her house to make the bus ride easy, so her Dad had arranged for her to get a lift with his mate Fred - yes, that Fred - as he was going that way most mornings. Sometimes Fred’s girlfriend Rose would come with them, but most of the time this women has sat in the back of the car and been ignored by the both of them, which she said proved that she was such an ugly teenager that even these two never gave her a second look.

People often ask me at this point if she was indeed ugly, but I now feel that’s to much of a judgment for me to make.

Story Two -

Jump back from that point about ten years earlier, and a woman from the village where I grew up just outside the M25 to the North of London, now renowned as where both Old Footballers and Greek Business families move in order to build eight bedroom McMansions on plots far to small to accommodate them, with triple garages and columns by the double front doors, was found murdered. Her name was Anne Locke.

After she went missing, her body was eventually found in a field over the road and opposite from my house, and, when they finally looked for it, her handbag and other items were found my family’s back garden. My home was something of a local oddity, being set down from the main road and almost invisible from it due to planning restrictions, so its unmade driveway was on occasion mistaken for a farm track into the fields which could be seen beyond. I have to assume that the killer walked down our drive by error rather then design and, when confronted by our house, dropped things round the back of our house in over very overgrown garden in panic.

This meant that, for a brief while, my Father was a suspect in her murder, though thankfully as this was the age before podcasts, no one made that connection locally. It did not, however, stop the poor woman’s husband being the subject to local gossip and accusations, as he by terrible coincidence, was a butcher, so you can imagine what utter nonsense people spouted until the real killer was found, and before the poors woman’s case was moved from ‘missing person’ to ‘murder victim.’

The other night, I wandered into our sitting room to find my husband watching CSI whatever, where almost Godlike investigators use close up slow-mo filming and staring into the middle distance looking pained, to unravel the deadly plans of a whole army of serial killers. They show serial killers almost exclusively as hyper intelligent sadists, who go to increasingly elaborate lengths to dispatch their fellow human beings, while of course endlessly taunting these investigators by leaving thumpingly cryptic ‘clues’, in order to lure them to a high stakes denumant at the season finale.

There’s a long tradition of this, from Hannibal Lecture’s various incarnations from Brian Cox (not the Science-y one), through Anthony Hopkins to the utterly beautiful Mads Mikkelsen (according to a, hem hem, friend) and beyond, to a collection of Film and TV, where serial Killers collect female models who are also virtuosos musicians, so they can have their own private orchestra, and where Brad Pitt comes up against Kevin Spacey and his obsession with the Seven Deadly Sins, with possible the world’s most overly complex set of killings, which makes one glad he wasn’t obsessed by the Seven Dwarfs from Snow White instead. (though it might have been a funnier film!)

Ok - so this is why this annoys me - serial killers are not like this. They are not smart, they are not trying to create some gory master plan to make a detective reflect on their own failings against a backdrop of arcane knowledge and the times of the moon. Serial killers are sad, perverted individuals who generally get away with what they do not because of who they are, but of who we are.

They get away with it not because they kill, because because of whom they kill.

Before killing Anne Locke, her murderer had killed student Maartje Tamboezer, and secretary Alison Day, as well as attacking several more women including his wife - as a time when such an attack was still considered legal in many cases, at a time when she would not have been listened to had she reported it. As he’d attempted to burn Anne’s body as he has Maartje’s, it was not discovered for some weeks, and then mistakes meant she was not identified for several more days. There were miscommunications between the Met Police Force and Hertfordshire Police, traditionally always trying to outdo each other and often deliberately obstructing investigations where they crossed into each other’s patches. As well as footballers and Greek textile magnets, the village where I grew up used to be known as where ex-gangsters settled in equally austentatious houses, simply because when they were being chased out of London it was the first place you cane to over the border in the Herts district and the Met would simply give up at that point, knowing it was more trouble than it was worth to continue into enemy territory.

As his victims were young women, Maartje a student on a backpacking holiday, Alison on a night out after work, their initial disappearances were down played until their bodies were found; they were out alone, they were out late at night which all the assumption that bred. It was only because they had families that refused to accept this that the cases were linked, people who cared about them, people who pushed for answers, that the answers eventually came.

With the West’s killings, they girls they killed were mostly runaways, mostly foster children no one wanted, difficult girls no one wanted to bother with, girls with no one to ask the questions. The woman I met was not protected by being too ugly, but because she had a family, she has someone who cared.

So it’s this which annoys me about the cult of serial killers, which annoys me when CSI comes on the TV, and even if I watch ‘Hannibal’ and might occasionally have wanted to be invited to dinner by it’s particular iteration of Doctor Lecture - it’s because it lets us of the hook as a society. When we can believe that the killer has a dark and devious plan, that they too are somehow ‘other’ than us, we let ourselves off from believing victims, caring about victims, we can blame victims a little, because how could they have escaped such en evil genius? It is only when they trespass into killing ‘good girls’ as was infamously stated during a police press conference during the Yorkshire Ripper investigations, that we start to get worried and finally join the dots, and that’s on us.

I hope this is changing, but perhaps if we all stopped consuming Serial killer movies and books and TV series and podcasts without questioning their motives, as entertainment, it might change a bit faster?

If you’ve read this far you might indeed be waiting for the answer as to why I am spending a good chunk of my morning thinking about this all?

I’m trying to make myself talk on a new painting challenge, something I’ve not tried quite this way before, and bring an ink painting, it’s something I can comprehensively eff up at any second, and so I’m literally doing pretty much anything else right now, rather than make a start.

But now there is nothing else but to make a start.

Though I might look at some more kittens first….

If you want to see if I manage to pull this painting off and others like it, you can come and see my work at The Untitled Arts Fair, The Old Chelsea Town Hall, London, July 12/13/14th - details on my website and social media.