This edition features Chicago-based serial and mass killing expert Helen Morrison. A year onfrom the gun-sprees of British men Derrick Bird and Raoul Moat we discuss those cases - and infamousserial killers Peter Sutcliffe - The Yorkshire Ripper and Fred and Rose West.
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| Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained. | |
| The return thereof. | |
| Thank you very much for all your contacts and emails since our last show. | |
| The guest on that show was, I have to say, controversial, Wendy Brown, expert on survival. | |
| A lot of you asking, why did we do that topic in The Unexplained? | |
| Because it's not about UFOs or ghosts or anything like that. | |
| And the only explanation I can give is if you believe anything that people are saying to do with 2012 and how we may have multiple challenges to face. | |
| Now, I don't know whether we will or we won't. | |
| Certainly, I think all of us could do with learning some survival skills, and that is Wendy Brown's speciality. | |
| That's why she was on the show, and I think she was a good guest. | |
| Some of you do, some of you don't. | |
| Mark, for example, emailed just this morning to say he liked the show very much. | |
| But, you know, we have to be able to go out on a limb occasionally and do something a little different, I think. | |
| But please keep your feedback coming. | |
| It's vital. | |
| And I understand those of you who didn't like the Wendy Brown show, I quite understand why. | |
| But also a lot of you did. | |
| So that's the game we're in. | |
| Always controversial. | |
| Robert in Raleigh, North Carolina, got your email this morning. | |
| Robert, thank you very much for that. | |
| Likes the show. | |
| Tell your friends, Robert. | |
| Crusader asks a question that an awful lot of you are asking now. | |
| Richard C. Hoagland, the American space expert, has been on the show a lot, both on the radio show and on the online version. | |
| Hasn't been on for a while. | |
| Simple reason, Richard, very, very busy with his work. | |
| We were due to do a show with him about six weeks ago, but he was going to a conference in Holland and had to cancel at the last minute because of pressure of work. | |
| Very busy guy, Richard Hoagland. | |
| We will be getting him back on, though. | |
| Old friend of mine, old friend of the show. | |
| Linda, thank you for your email. | |
| Colin in Essex, suggesting the Bermuda Triangle. | |
| Colin, good call. | |
| We did do that subject on the radio show a few years ago, but it's high time we did it again. | |
| And there's been some new research about that, so we need to get that topic back on. | |
| Bill, thank you for your email, suggesting that on UFOs we talk to David Adair. | |
| I'm doing some research on that and trying to get hold of him. | |
| Thanks, Bill. | |
| Andy on the Isle of Man. | |
| They used to call it when I was a kid, listening in Liverpool to the radio station from there the wonderful Isle of Man. | |
| It is a marvelous place too. | |
| Andy, thank you for your email. | |
| Dean, very good points, Dean. | |
| Thank you very much for those. | |
| Phil in York, good email, thank you very much. | |
| And Mitch, making another suggestion that a lot of you have put forward to me about Graham Hancock, British author, lives in the wonderful city of Bath here, the Roman city. | |
| If you've never seen Bath, you've got to go there. | |
| It is an amazing, lovely, marvellous, wonderful place, but packed with tourists in the summer, unfortunately, many from North America, many from Japan, enjoying, quite rightly, the history there. | |
| So a good time to go there is wintertime when it's crispy, cold, and really beautiful. | |
| But anyway, Graham Hancock lives there. | |
| He would be a wonderful guest on the show, and I've tried for a long time to get him on. | |
| His publicist told me a few months ago that he was doing no media interviews until May. | |
| Well, it is May now, so I need to get in touch with them once again about getting Graham Hancock on, and they're very confident that I will. | |
| One guest I'm not so confident about getting, but I still hope that we can, is a man that a lot of you are suggesting to me, a man called Tom Sleman. | |
| He's a bit of a local celebrity in Liverpool where he's written quite a number of books. | |
| He's a total expert, a brilliant guest about ghosts. | |
| Tom Sleman, I'd love to have him on. | |
| If you know Tom Sleman, please tell him that this show doesn't bite. | |
| And we'd love to have him on the show. | |
| But I've tried once again through his publishers in Liverpool to get him on. | |
| So let's see if we possibly can. | |
| Tom, if you're listening to this, if you do listen to these shows, please come on. | |
| Would love to talk to you for about an hour if we can do that about Liverpool ghost stories. | |
| I'll even come up to Liverpool and talk to you if you would like that in any place that you want at any time you'd like. | |
| What else have I got to say? | |
| Just thank you very much for all the emails. | |
| If I didn't mention you just then, and there are many, many, many, many people I didn't mention, didn't have time to thank you again. | |
| And I will get back to you as soon as I can. | |
| Thank you for the donations. | |
| Please keep those coming. | |
| If you want to send me feedback about the show, go to theunexplained.tv. | |
| That's the website. | |
| That's theunexplained.tv. | |
| All the W's before that address and send me an email. | |
| And if you'd like to, please make a donation to the show. | |
| Thank you to Adam Cornwell, who's doing really well at the moment with his internet design work, various other projects, but always has time for us. | |
| Adam is at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool. | |
| He gets the show out to you and has designed our website that a lot of you keep telling me how much you like and enjoy. | |
| Thank you to Martin for the theme tune. | |
| Martin, do get in touch. | |
| We'd love to hear from you, my friend. | |
| And above all, as I always say, but definitely mean, thank you to you for helping this show expand. | |
| We're very big in North America now, which is what I always wanted for the show and growing everywhere, including the UK. | |
| Fantastic. | |
| The website, don't forget, www.theunexplained.tv. | |
| And however you're hearing this show, please register a hit on the website. | |
| I will do a newsletter soon as well. | |
| I haven't done one of those for a while. | |
| The guest this time is an expert on a spine-chilling subject that she over the years has been casting some fresh light on. | |
| Most of us have given thought to this. | |
| Why do people kill? | |
| What is it that motivates and drives them? | |
| And why do people kill serially in numbers? | |
| Which they have. | |
| If you go to a list of famous serial killers on the internet, you will see that there are people who've claimed 30 lives or more in a career of killing. | |
| We've had many famous ones in this country. | |
| Fred and Rose West, the Yorkshire Ripper, and way back in history in London, Jack the Ripper. | |
| But what is it that motivates them? | |
| Is it nature or nurture? | |
| Are you born to be that way? | |
| Do circumstances and society make you that way? | |
| Helen Morrison in Chicago, USA knows all about this, has written many successful books, helps the police, has been involved in a case recently on the west coast of the USA that I'm not sure if she can talk about. | |
| But let's get her on now. | |
| Our guest, I've waited some time to get this and looking forward to it massively, Helen Morrison from Chicago, Illinois, USA. | |
| Thank you very much for coming on the Unexplained, Helen. | |
| Well, thank you for having me on a Saturday in which you are spending half of your holiday. | |
| Ah, no, this is a labor of love for me, Helen. | |
| You know, I know like you, you are so absorbed in your work. | |
| I am so absorbed in mine that literally I don't notice the time go by. | |
| You know, this is what comes first for me. | |
| I've always loved it. | |
| Now, you are hard to describe, so I'm not even going to try. | |
| You describe yourself to me. | |
| What are you? | |
| What is it that you do? | |
| What I do as my research focus is to look at two classifications of murderers in very intensive study. | |
| One is the mass murderer, the person who kills a number of people in a short period of time. | |
| The other is the serial murderer, who kills one person across a number of years. | |
| There are extreme differences between those two classes of murderers. | |
| And what I have done over the past, I shan't say it, but 35 years, is to tease out the differences among those two and to also try to get rid of some of the myths about both of those classes of murderers. | |
| All right. | |
| So there is a distinct differential between the two because people tend to think, well, people who kill a lot of people, they're serial killers. | |
| And that ain't so because somebody who kills a lot of people isn't necessarily doing it in a series. | |
| They're just taking out a lot of lives, maybe at one time, perhaps on a couple of occasions. | |
| Somebody who's a serial killer is rather like those people you will have seen on the Clint Eastwood movies, somebody who has a real taste for it and for whatever reasons continues in a pattern. | |
| Yeah? | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Perfectly put. | |
| Better than I could, actually. | |
| I don't think so, Helen Morrison. | |
| All right, well, for reasons that I'll explain, let's deal with the category of the mass killer first. | |
| I know that we've been in communication before this. | |
| I was on duty last year, almost exactly a year ago, and I was just about to finish my shift on air. | |
| And we started to get reports from Sky News, which is like Fox News for you in the US, owned by the same guy, Murdoch. | |
| And they start to break this news of a number of people being shot dead in a very nice part of the UK called Cumbria. | |
| That's where the Lake District is. | |
| And it's the last place in the world where you would expect this to happen. | |
| Well, by the end of that day, we discovered that a taxi driver there named Derek Bird had settled by what, well, as the day went by, settled by all accounts some old scores with people and then went on to randomly shoot a bunch of other people being pursued by the police who were clearly deeply stretched in that area because they're not used to dealing with that kind of thing. | |
| So they had to call in help from other police forces and there was this chase across Cumbria, chasing this man who was shooting people as he went and in the end shot himself. | |
| It was a deeply disturbing case and a lot of people who certainly didn't deserve to die, none of them deserved to die, ended up perishing on that day for reasons that I think we're still trying to work out. | |
| But it seems this guy had a lot of concerns and had a bit of a grudge going one way or another about the way people had treated him. | |
| And one day simply snapped. | |
| It's a case that baffles and bemuses people. | |
| It is nearly a year since it happened and I welcome your thoughts on it. | |
| Well, first of all, he was the classic mass murderer. | |
| What I mean by that is he had a basic center of himself that was very suspicious, very paranoid, as people would say, did not trust individuals, and then developed, as time went on, | |
| this thought, that people were cheating him, that they were taking things from him, that they had led him astray, that he needed to feel that he was going to get revenge on these people. | |
| This was his motive, was revenge. | |
| The biggest revenge that he took out was that of his brother, his twin brother, whom he felt had been ignoring him. | |
| I think it was the day of or the day prior to the murder of his twin brother, that he had reportedly called him about 44 times, and the brother had only responded twice, which fueled this anger, this rage, this sense that he was being cheated and that he was going to get back at this brother. | |
| That is a classic motive for a mass murderer. | |
| But of course, many of us have situations where people have, they might have slighted us in some way. | |
| They may have caused us grief and anguish. | |
| And most of us don't snap, don't go beyond that point where we think we're going to take those people out. | |
| We absolutely do not. | |
| And that's why this became such a serious case, because the man was not mentally stable. | |
| That was the first thing. | |
| And he went basically over the edge. | |
| The trigger seemed to be his sense that his brother was ignoring him. | |
| And so what we see is his targeting specific individuals whom he felt had wronged him, a committee member that he felt had not treated him correctly, the solicitor who he thought was in a conspiracy with his brother to try and take money away or something away from him. | |
| And then following those targeted murders, he went on a killing spree and he just let his rage out on the most innocent victims, the people who had never had contact with him, the people whom he just happened to see. | |
| The tragedy of this is that he continued to do this until he finally did kill himself, which is what most mass murderers do. | |
| But I'm intrigued by what it is that makes somebody, number one, want to settle a score. | |
| Well, we've given a pretty full explanation of why that might be, because he felt in his mind that he'd been wronged by, first of all, the brother, then a string of other people connected to him, some former work colleagues or some current work colleagues. | |
| He got that out of the way. | |
| But what is it that happens in the mind that takes the person from having made that step across a threshold to then making another step across another threshold where they think, okay, I've done that now, that's serious, I'm going to take anybody out? | |
| What happens is the rage becomes all-consuming. | |
| Once it's like a dam breaking, that once you have a trickle of water and then a little bit more and a little bit more, and then all of a sudden the dam completely breaks and it becomes an indiscriminate flooding of the world around the mass murderer. | |
| And so what he does is just to unleash this rage on anything that is in his sight. | |
| A hugely, hugely tragic story when you read the life stories of all of these people involved, the ones who had been connected with Derek Bird in his lifetime, and those who simply got in his way as he was driving around Cumbria, loosing off shots at people. | |
| Some people had lucky escapes that day, and sadly, others did not have a lucky escape, and they died. | |
| The thing that the media has been preoccupied with, and I guess when the first anniversary of this comes up in not many weeks from now, they will be preoccupied with again, is there must have been signs of this, and yet the dots were never joined up. | |
| Anybody who might have been informed about it or told about it on the quiet, the connections were never made, so this man was not intercepted and stopped. | |
| And I would imagine in the case of mass killers, you hear that all the time. | |
| I do hear that all the time. | |
| And one thing that people do not recall is that if you're paranoid and suspicious, you are not going to be going out there showing people how disturbed you are. | |
| You're going to become more and more self-involved. | |
| You're going to become more and more guarded. | |
| People may have seen an occasional burst of anger from him, and they may have seen him withdraw, or they may have seen him become less social. | |
| But how many people who are considered to be normal do that? | |
| And so there are really no outward signs, with the exception at times, of a statement he might make to a friend or a colleague, that looking back in retrospect, you say, aha, that's what happened. | |
| He was like that. | |
| But most people wouldn't just pass over it as saying, well, he's just having a bad day. | |
| And as we always say, hindsight, lovely phrase you have in America, is 2020. | |
| It's easy to look back and see the signs. | |
| After the event, not so easy to explain why you may not have acted on those signs. | |
| But look, we've all been in those situations where you might have worked with somebody who you think is a little strange. | |
| But it's very hard to go to somebody official and tell them what might be a suspicion. | |
| In this country, you've got to have firm proof. | |
| And mostly, if you go to the police here with suspicions of that sort, general feelings, there is nothing they can do because the person who ultimately becomes the killer also has rights. | |
| It's always the case that when a mass murderer has committed his crimes, that people start to try to find some way to, if not assess blame, to ask the question of why didn't you know this was going to happen. | |
| The difficulty with the classical mass murderer, which is what Byrd was, is that they are paranoid individuals. | |
| They're very suspicious. | |
| They're very withdrawn. | |
| They're very closed in. | |
| They're not social. | |
| And so they don't walk around with their gun threatening other people. | |
| It's only when the dam finally breaks that then they commit the crimes. | |
| Now, we also know that many of us have had instances in which we think somebody is a bit strange or a bit off. | |
| But if we went to an authority and said to them, well, this guy seems really dangerous. | |
| This guy seems like he's going to cause some problems. | |
| The authorities would say, well, what proof do you have? | |
| Or what kind of evidence do you have? | |
| If you don't have threatening letters or if you don't have threatening tapes or recordings or Facebook or whatever, it's very difficult to convince anyone to restrict the rights of another person. | |
| So what is to be done then? | |
| What as a society, bearing in mind these things as much as we would like them not to happen, they do periodically with frightening regularity. | |
| What can we do as a society? | |
| Generally, we can't do anything but perhaps loosen some of the restrictions that we have in intervening with a person that might be considered dangerous, in which the person themselves could be examined by an individual who is capable of doing a risk evaluation. | |
| That exists in one state in the United States, and that's Arizona, where if you have a thought or a concern that's real, not just manufactured because you don't like someone, you can request an evaluation and a risk assessment of that person. | |
| But one out of 50 states in the United States is not exactly a majority. | |
| And so the concern of balancing the individual rights with the rights of society is a constant battle. | |
| Well, it must be. | |
| And are you part of that process? | |
| Do lawmakers in different states consult you about that? | |
| Because you do have expert status and you have written about these things. | |
| Do you get asked? | |
| At times, I do get asked, what can we do? | |
| How can we do it? | |
| But again, the one thing that people never want to do is to infringe on the rights of the individual. | |
| And balancing the right of the individual with the rights of society is a very difficult task. | |
| So are we saying that in this day and age that we just have to accept, just as we accept the risks of air travel and every other risk in life, the risk that somebody in our community may snap and start to shoot or murder people in some way is just something that is going to happen periodically. | |
| And really, at the end of the day, Without going in for really draconian measures, there ain't a great deal we can do. | |
| You're absolutely right about that. | |
| It's a very sad thing to say, but people will say, well, what rights do we violate when we just pull people in for an examination? | |
| And protecting those rights, especially in our day and age of the terrorists and everything else that goes on, what do you do? | |
| Do you just lock up people that seem to be possibly dangerous? | |
| Or do you give them a chance to show that they may or may not be, but they're not going to do that voluntarily? | |
| Now, the other thing about the case of Derek Bird and other people like him makes all of us think, is this nature or is it nurture? | |
| Was this man born to be like this? | |
| Did he always have those propensities? | |
| Are they in his DNA somehow? | |
| Or did his experience of life over the years and his experience of being short-changed along the way as he saw it, is that the factor? | |
| Or is it a combination of the two? | |
| It may be it's more nurture than it is nature. | |
| This is a mental illness. | |
| This is a severe mental illness. | |
| A paranoid disorder is extremely difficult to spot. | |
| And it's also one of those situations in which the person who develops this illness has it generally begin in their teen years, but it really becomes full flower in their 30s and 40s when they finally act in this terrible rage that leads to homicide. | |
| And it does seem to come to a peak in the 40s, doesn't it, and even early 50s, because by that time, presumably somebody who feels that life has not been kind to them has had time to harbor and nurture all kinds of angers and emotions. | |
| It's like a mental cancer. | |
| It takes over more and more of the functioning of the individual. | |
| And so it does build up. | |
| It does become a tiny little speck that builds into what we call a full-blown false belief that they have been harmed and that this harm has to be rectified. | |
| Is it the kind of thing that the early signs of it could be detected by perhaps school teachers, maybe secondary school teachers as we call them here from the age of 11 onwards? | |
| Is that the kind of thing that you might see signs of at that stage? | |
| And perhaps if teachers were trained better and empowered better, I know we seem to offload an awful lot of our responsibilities on teachers, but perhaps that could help. | |
| Actually, probably not, because the person who begins to develop this paranoid core is often seen as a not very likable individual. | |
| They can be antisocial. | |
| They can be not involved with a peer group. | |
| They may show signs of being a loner, but you're not going to find any teacher who is going to be adequately trained. | |
| And it really is not their responsibility to spot someone who's a bit off. | |
| Okay, so that's another difficulty. | |
| It's not going to be stoppable at that stage. | |
| What about parents? | |
| Do you think that parents could spot such things? | |
| Most parents, I would suspect and assume, know most of the proclivities of their children by age seven, or am I wrong? | |
| I think you're absolutely right, but I almost take umbrage with most parents. | |
| I think what's happened in the generation is that many parents wanted to be friends of their children, and so they don't, or they want their children to be happy. | |
| They want their children to enjoy their lives. | |
| So they very frequently will brush off some of the nastiness that occurs with their children, saying that they need their freedom, they need to be alone, they need to develop their own self. | |
| And so many parents will frequently not even pay attention to what might be going on inside their child because they're not paying attention to what's going on outside their child. | |
| So parents have a problem because in this day and age, we are all, certainly in the West, in the United States particularly and in the UK, parents want to give their children as much freedom to experience life and the world as they can. | |
| But that's a double-edged sword because you might be harboring somebody with these sorts of tendencies. | |
| Yes, and I know that's a generalization and I know people will argue about that. | |
| But what we see along with this sense of freedom is a child doesn't have the basis of self-control and judgment. | |
| Most adolescents don't anyway. | |
| The brain generally, and I'm not picking on a gender, in men and boys is not even beginning to be fully developed until they're 25 years of age. | |
| This is something I have to, I must ask you now at this stage, because I should have asked you before, but let's do it now. | |
| Is it mainly a male thing? | |
| It's mostly when you read about mass killers, it's men. | |
| But are there women who do this? | |
| Generally, we have not seen women be mass murderers. | |
| No. | |
| When we talk about women, I think that the new generation of women are going to be much more openly violent than and are more openly violent than in previous generations. | |
| So it may only be a matter of time before a woman is involved in being a mass murderer. | |
| That's a deep concern, but certainly from my own experience in the UK, you've only got to pick up the papers and you see that more and more young women are perhaps drinking too much in the evenings, going out on the streets and having fights, getting involved in violence. | |
| Not a thing, this is not a sexist point, I certainly hope it is, and it's not meant to be, not the kind of thing that we associated in the past young women with. | |
| And now suddenly, certainly this side of the Atlantic, I don't know what happens in America, this is becoming a phenomenon. | |
| In America, we have girl gangs. | |
| We have girls who band together for the express purpose of violence. | |
| We see it very frequently in our secondary schools that are not public in your country. | |
| And we also see that there just seems to be a lack of self-control. | |
| And that very frequently goes back to this kind of parenting that wants a child to be able to express themselves, they want to be friends with their children, they want to have fun with their children, and they don't see parenting as a two-sided issue. | |
| You can't give total freedom to something without having a boundary. | |
| And many of these children don't have boundaries. | |
| So it is a parenting issue. | |
| We've talked about it in this country a great deal on a political level, that maybe there should be parenting classes. | |
| Now, nobody taught my mom and dad to be parents. | |
| Nobody ever did. | |
| But life is way, way more complicated now. | |
| We're all more connected, and there are many more temptations in this world. | |
| So maybe what it comes down to is wherever on the planet you are, unless you live in a completely unconnected society on the mountain somewhere, perhaps we need to start teaching people how to do this. | |
| Well, one of the things that happens at some points in schools is that they try to teach children what it's like to have the demands of being a parent in these classes. | |
| However, the most powerful way to teach is to role model. | |
| It's do what I say, not what I do. | |
| And so people forget that what children see, what they experience, what they know comes from seeing how their parents and their friends' parents act. | |
| So it's something that you can't really teach. | |
| You have to show. | |
| And then demonstrate, and one generation picks up cues from the next generation. | |
| I want to get on to another case of mass killings in the UK, which made all the news. | |
| Of course it did. | |
| Very, very close on the heels of the Derek Bird case. | |
| This was the case of Raul Mote, a man who famously shot a policeman in the face and blinded him. | |
| And that poor man is still coming to terms with that. | |
| Another killer who ended up being pursued by the police, ended up hiding out in a village in the northeast until eventually he was cornered by police and once again pulled the trigger on himself, but not before causing all kinds of devastation. | |
| Now, this guy had been a nightclub bouncer, had been in prison, I think, for a while, and showed signs of being a misfit. | |
| But a lot of people liked him. | |
| He was a misfit who a lot of people seemed to like. | |
| Even right at the end, there were people coming out on his side and speaking well of him. | |
| An interesting case. | |
| It was an interesting case, but it's so different than the case of Byrd. | |
| One of the things about Raoul Malt is it seems that he was basically an antisocial guy. | |
| He had very little conscience, very little stability in his functioning, very little family involvement. | |
| He also seemed to be associated, and this is very different than Byrd, with two accomplices who helped hide him and helped him obtain what he needed to obtain. | |
| He had a definite rage against police, and was that because he had been arrested so many times? | |
| And he also had been precipitated in a way by the breakup of his six-year relationship, the mother of his four-year-old daughter. | |
| But before that, we saw him being very disconnected from responsibility in one way. | |
| He had other children from other relationships. | |
| He moved around from job to job. | |
| I think the longest he had was, what, 10 years. | |
| But that didn't mean that he was able to perform well. | |
| We also know that his mother, when she married another gentleman, that this individual, Raul, definitely hated his stepfather. | |
| And he basically had a lot of anger for a long period of time. | |
| Now, people say that the reason he killed was because he had been using steroids. | |
| There is this almost myth that steroids, if used, will cause Roid rage. | |
| And a lot of people tried to blame the crimes on the steroid use. | |
| But this was a man who was very, very unstable from definition of his own sexuality to his relationships. | |
| And he basically killed because he was mad. | |
| I mean, he felt that and told the people in prison that he would be back shortly when he was going to be released because he had a plan to murder his girlfriend's lover, whom she stated was a policeman, and to murder her. | |
| Well, unfortunately, he was able to murder the boyfriend, who was really not a policeman at all, and to wound the girlfriend. | |
| And then even after he committed those crimes and blinded that policeman, who was sitting very quietly in his car, he basically went on and hid out. | |
| He was able to elude a wide manhunt until he was finally cornered and then he killed himself. | |
| But the guy, obviously with his steroid use and the various things that he'd done in his life, he was a very wily character because he was able to hide out in quite extraordinary ways and led, as we say, this side of the Atlantic Police a merry dance until in the end he was caught and cornered and the whole sad drama came to what the entire media saw was its inevitable conclusion. | |
| They gave live coverage on some of the TV channels here and it was just a matter of time before this guy shot himself and there seemed to be nothing anybody could do to Prevent the end of this in the way that just seemed inevitable to all of us in the media and to everybody else in this country, if we're honest? | |
| Well, one of the things is that they tried to taser him to see if they could interrupt him and to try to keep him from harming himself, but it was completely unsuccessful. | |
| Wiley character is not just it. | |
| This man appeared to have little to no conscience. | |
| And that's what makes him an antisocial personality. | |
| He spent most of his years being involved in multiple criminal acts. | |
| As I said, I believe he was arrested 12 times, but only in prison once. | |
| And that was only when he abused a child, a nine-year-old child. | |
| So he felt that, as most people who have no conscience, that he had been somehow wrongly selected. | |
| But he wasn't paranoid. | |
| He was just an angry, he was a nasty bloke. | |
| The sad thought about all of this and the chilling and frightening thought in all of this is that there are such people, they must be, around, statistically, around now, who are harboring similar thoughts. | |
| And one of these days the dam's going to bust. | |
| And we're going to have another case like that. | |
| It is just an inevitability. | |
| Well, I think one of the things is that he became somewhat of a hero to people. | |
| Well, that's a point I wanted to put to you, and I wasn't sure how to phrase it, because it did seem that this guy was almost seen as some kind of rebel by some people. | |
| And although they wouldn't behave that way themselves, they tacitly supported him. | |
| Oh, not only that, they tried to bring him food and drink. | |
| And there were a lot of comments made by onlookers that he was a living legend. | |
| And so did he tap into a deep-seated nastiness about authority? | |
| It's not just the police, it's authority in general. | |
| That somehow there are so many individuals who feel that they may be entitled to something, they're not given something, so they take it out on the people that they feel are to blame. | |
| There was a definite sense, I think, certainly given the reports that I've read of this thing, that this guy felt that he was striking a blow for a lot of other people. | |
| And as you said, he was supported by some people. | |
| I wonder how they feel now. | |
| You know, I think that some still feel that he did the right thing. | |
| It's a very sad commentary on how there's such a lack of respect for any authority. | |
| But that again, this one gets traced right back to the family. | |
| That if you don't show respect, you don't gain respect. | |
| And I think that's something that happens very frequently. | |
| But to someone who has this kind of a personality, it doesn't matter. | |
| Respect is never part of their functioning in the world. | |
| Sounds to me as we talk that what is required in society in the US, in the UK, wherever, is some kind of return to what talk show hosts in America like to gleefully refer to as old-fashioned values and newspaper columnists in the UK do exactly the same thing. | |
| We need to kind of come back to some fundamentals that maybe we've lost along the way. | |
| In one way, what appears to again have happened is that people will blame the lack of family structure. | |
| They'll blame the lack of social structure. | |
| They'll blame the lack of money. | |
| They'll blame anything. | |
| But if we could ever go back and take a look at how successful our countries were when we did have a common goal, and this goal basically is that we want to live and raise our children to be good moral citizens. | |
| And that's a tough job. | |
| I mean, look at the complete difference in communication between our grandparents' lives and the lives of our children. | |
| It's as if we went at warp speed from containment within a family to complete and total freedom without limits. | |
| Well, I can remember my grandmother in Liverpool saying at times when I was a naughty child, and I undoubtedly was when I was very, very young at times, as all kids are, you know, but I was a little cantankerous in my time and trying to find a nice word for it. | |
| And she would say to me, because her background would have been stretching back her mother, Victorian times we're talking about here, you know, children should be seen and not heard. | |
| That's what they say. | |
| I don't know if they say that in America, but that's what my Liverpool grandmother would say to me, you know, not seriously and sometimes in jest to me, but she'd say, children should be seen and not heard. | |
| Well, it's a little bit like what we call the inside voice. | |
| When you have a child with you and they're starting to raise the ruckus, so to speak, you tell them to use an inside voice. | |
| But the other thing is that how desperate this has gotten is that there are restaurants here in Chicago that ban children. | |
| Really? | |
| Because the children are disruptive. | |
| They're loud. | |
| They run around. | |
| They have no sense of being on the lookout for possibly bumping into someone. | |
| The restaurant here, Seventh on Heaven, put up a sign and they ask people to leave if their children are being unruly. | |
| But does this because parents are so self-centered or self-absorbed or self-interested that they really don't notice what their children are doing? | |
| How frequently have we all been in a place where we wanted to have somewhat of a, not a quiet time, but a relaxing time to hear some child screeching at the top of their lungs and the parent sitting there oblivious to what this child is doing? | |
| Now listen, I never thought that the conversation that we would have today would go in this direction, But it is a fascinating direction, and I know it'll be controversial. | |
| I will get emails about it, but I'll make one reflection on this. | |
| My listeners know that I love America, and if I could live in America and work in America, I think arguably I'd be a very happy guy. | |
| You know, that's always been my broadcasting style. | |
| I've always taken my cue from American broadcasters. | |
| That's what I like, and that's what I understand. | |
| However, when I go to America and compare it with other countries, I do see, and this is a huge generalization, and it doesn't apply broad brush to everybody, but I see that kids are worse behaved in America in public places like those restaurants than they are, for example, in countries like South Africa, which I also know very well. | |
| And obviously, there are reasons for that, but that is a fact. | |
| I never thought that this conversation that we would have about people who kill would come back to that. | |
| But if you think about it, it's fundamental. | |
| It's about behavior. | |
| Where does behavior start? | |
| Obviously, in childhood. | |
| And where does behavior end if you have a child that you've helped teach appropriate behaviors, appropriate respect, and appropriate concern for other people? | |
| I'm not talking about, you know, a puffy little liberal person, but I'm talking about just general human interaction. | |
| The problem in the United States quite frequently is people somehow take the word freedom to mean do what you want, when you want, where you want, and damn the other person. | |
| Well, I don't know what is to be done about that because our freedoms are terribly important. | |
| We fought for them. | |
| It's a bad day for all of us when they are infringed upon. | |
| But equally, again, this is a double-edged sword. | |
| I've used that phrase again. | |
| How do we balance our freedom with potential behaviors that could go very, very seriously off the track? | |
| Well, as you said, it's going to take an entire societal revolution to go back to some semblance of self-control and teaching other people self-control. | |
| And this isn't necessarily discipline, because look, I wouldn't want anyone to go back to the days of the school that I went to in Liverpool that was not a great school. | |
| It was a really hard school. | |
| And a lot of the older teachers there delivered on the spot instant justice as they saw it with the back of a hand or any other implement that they could find. | |
| And they gave it broad brush not only to the bad kids, but also to the kids who weren't so bad like me. | |
| We don't want to go back to that, do we? | |
| No, we don't. | |
| But you know, why is it that discipline is such a bad word? | |
| Why have we somehow demonized the word discipline? | |
| People have to start looking at the fact that discipline is something that can be taught, can be learned, and really makes an individual like going to work on time. | |
| Discipline is like taking the responsibilities that you are given or that you have taken on and fulfilling them. | |
| It doesn't mean the rod. | |
| It doesn't mean the lashes. | |
| It doesn't mean any of the physical things that happened. | |
| Although once in a while, a swat on the bottom is not a bad thing for a kid. | |
| True. | |
| It stops them to behavior. | |
| I had a few, I have to say. | |
| Mine were mostly for talking too much. | |
| And look what I became. | |
| All right. | |
| Fascinating discussion. | |
| Let's talk about serial killers now, which is a subject you and I have discussed on radio before. | |
| And we've had some here. | |
| Perhaps the most notorious in my lifetime, we'll talk about the Yorkshire Ripper in a moment, a very special case he was, but the case of Fred and Rose West, who lived in Gloucester. | |
| This guy was a builder and was aided and abetted by his wife, he ultimately killed himself, Rose West, to commit some heinous crimes involving young women who simply disappeared and were later found in this thing they called the House of Horror in Gloucester. | |
| Terrible, terrible story, but were they as unique as I feel they were? | |
| I can't think of any other cases like that. | |
| They really were. | |
| And if they were unique, what were the conditions that created them? | |
| Well, one of the things that we know is that the serial murder couples, and we've had several of them in the United States, the man is the dominant and the woman becomes his handmaiden, so to speak, willingly. | |
| This is not something that she's coerced into. | |
| She will do anything to make his life whatever she feels he needs. | |
| And this for the Wests included murdering one of their own children. | |
| It's just, it is unthinkable. | |
| It's a case that, like all of these things, shocked the nation, but in a very special and particular way for that reason, but also because the pair of them operated so calculatingly for such a long period and got away with it. | |
| How many people expect that this normal-looking couple in a somewhat suburban area would be committing the kind of crimes that the Wests committed together? | |
| The wife using herself as a lure to make people feel somehow that they weren't dangerous or they were just a normal little couple out for a spin. | |
| It boggled the mind of people because you expected that the typical serial murderer is going to be this wild-eyed, manic, crazy person with disheveled looks and hair and somebody that you would get an immediate response, oh, I don't want to have anything to do with you. | |
| But the West looked so normal and they acted so normal in general. | |
| I mean, there were people who had suspicions about odd things going on in that house, but not to that degree. | |
| I mean, sometimes life is so much more intensely chaotic than we can even possibly imagine. | |
| But I think the thing that baffled a lot of us, those who reported it and those who just watched it through the newspapers, was that they clearly became stranger and stranger as the years went on and they became more outrageous in their crimes. | |
| They obviously, behind those closed doors, had their own morality going on between themselves. | |
| And yet outside, there were not that many outward signs of it. | |
| Amazing. | |
| There generally are not many outward signs because what happens is that, you know, we as human beings do accept what we call quirks of other people. | |
| So if somebody becomes a little bit odd, as long as they're not stepping on your toes, you're not going to go cause trouble, so to speak. | |
| So what we see so frequently is that, okay, they're a little odd, they're a little strange, but they're not hurting me. | |
| So I'm going to stay out of this. | |
| And also, people don't want to ask for trouble. | |
| Could anything have stopped the West doing what they did, do you think? | |
| Could there have been any break on them? | |
| No, there couldn't have been a break on that because nobody ever would have suspected what was going on. | |
| I mean, what generally happens, the serial murderer, who's the single serial murderer, usually gets caught because he's made some sort of a stupid mistake. | |
| But the couples generally are unscathed. | |
| They don't show anything. | |
| And is that because one partner is often a check on the other? | |
| So if one is about to make a mistake, the other will spot it. | |
| There is such, they're really not two separate people. | |
| They may be two separate bodies, but they become almost one person. | |
| So they do have a check and balance. | |
| And as noted that the West specifically, as we've all learned over the years, had so many types of unusual behaviors, but they didn't show them to the outside world. | |
| Now, they were, in popular parlance, mad. | |
| They were bad. | |
| But were they evil? | |
| And if they were evil, what is evil? | |
| Oh, I wish I knew what evil was. | |
| I see it and I feel it. | |
| And I think all of us have this sort of sense that something is really not right. | |
| A lot of people will say, oh, well, it's the dark side of however your belief system is. | |
| But there has to be some sense of what is it that we cannot explain psychiatrically or psychologically or behaviorally or sociologically that propels people in this kind of way. | |
| You know, we do know that there are certain kinds of brain changes. | |
| We do know that there are certain kinds of things that happen, but that doesn't explain the horrendous parts and the grotesque parts of these crimes. | |
| As you say, you know, how many parents deliberately murder their children, deliberately, over time, and act as if it meant nothing. | |
| What happens to the conscience factor then? | |
| Does the conscience factor in people like the West simply get switched off permanently? | |
| Or do they have pangs of it from time to time, do you think? | |
| No, they don't have pangs at all because their world to them is their world. | |
| They really don't use a conscience or have a conscience. | |
| They basically function without a conscience, much like we call a psychopath or a sociopath. | |
| But theirs is so much more impaired. | |
| They just, it doesn't register with them. | |
| They don't register the pain and the horror that these people that they're murdering experience. | |
| It's just something that they are doing and that's it. | |
| So they've created their own morality, which makes it even more fascinating that Fred West ultimately killed himself while behind bars. | |
| If he created his own morality and had forgiven himself, well never even had to forgive himself because he just thought that was okay, why would he want to kill himself in the end? | |
| What happens is that when someone who is a sociopath or a psychopath is put in jail, they very frequently will develop a depression. | |
| Not because they're sad about what they did or because they wish they hadn't done what they did, but because they're unable to move about freely. | |
| They don't and cannot tolerate being incarcerated. | |
| And that's ultimately what did for Fred West. | |
| So without having the freedom that he'd enjoyed for all of those years where he got away with whatever he wanted behind those closed doors and functioned normally in the community outside the closed doors, once you take that away from him, then it inspires and engenders depression. | |
| And that depression is what leads to the ultimate downfall. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| It's the sense of I am not free. | |
| I cannot do what I want to do. | |
| And I will take complete control of my life and I'll show you kind of a thing. | |
| Now, people who are touched by serial killers, whose lives are touched, perhaps they're potential victims, people who are almost victims, people who survive, people who perhaps lived close to these people. | |
| Well, and the children, of course. | |
| The children, absolutely. | |
| How do they live with it after the event? | |
| So many people are essentially scarred for the remainder of their life. | |
| The children, I know some children of serial murderers just are in a constant state of disbelief that this was their father, this was their husband, this was their brother, their sister, this was the person who almost died but was able to get away. | |
| That is something that is never, ever able to go away. | |
| And so frequently it's very difficult even for those individuals to comprehend or to deal with the aftermath of what horrendous crime the person did or was trying to do. | |
| It just haunts them forever. | |
| And almost like a kind of guilt factor in some cases. | |
| Well, there was one daughter of the Green River killer in Seattle, Washington, who talked about, you know, why didn't she know? | |
| What if she had known? | |
| Could she have stopped him? | |
| Could she have done anything? | |
| But she herself had experienced a moment when she was homesick from school, laying on the sofa, and she heard her father's truck drive in, and she suddenly became completely terrified and had no idea why she was terrified. | |
| She didn't know that he was the Green River killer, but she had this overwhelming sense of just complete horror. | |
| And to this day, she wonders, should she have done something? | |
| What if she had done something? | |
| And yet she had to struggle with her own issues when he was arrested of her becoming almost a pariah socially, where she wasn't allowed to play with anyone, see anyone, be with anyone because she was the daughter of a serial killer. | |
| So to this day, this woman is tortured by the thought of, oh my God, what if I could have stopped something? | |
| What a horrible situation that presumably will require an entire lifetime of care. | |
| Yes. | |
| Okay, I want to move on to the Yorkshire Ripper. | |
| Very much a part of my life because, well, I was a teenager at that time and remember the reporting of it. | |
| And then when I started getting involved in radio, then we were seeing the aftermath of it and the eventual almost by chance, through a bit of good old-fashioned police work, the catching of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. | |
| This man had gone around killing mainly prostitutes. | |
| I think there was one victim who was not and doing terrible, unspeakable things to them. | |
| He is now, of course, detained, and there are periodic attempts to get him out. | |
| But his case shocked the nation. | |
| Do you consider him to be unique? | |
| No, unfortunately, he is a typical serial murderer who just managed to devastate the lives of so many people, not just by the murders, but by the aftermath. | |
| You know, it's funny because we always want to give these people cute names. | |
| And sometimes I think that when we do that, we almost enshrine them for future reference, that he is just unfortunately a typical serial murderer. | |
| Now he's changed his name to Peter Coonin, and he is frequently reported as trying to make various bids to get himself out of incarceration. | |
| Do you think that given what he's done, he should ever be let out, whatever name he calls himself? | |
| If he is ever released from prison, ever, he will kill again. | |
| We have had cases. | |
| How do you know that? | |
| We've had two cases in the United States in which a serial murderer who was not charged with the murders because they felt they didn't have enough evidence were released from prison and subsequently went on to kill again. | |
| One was in Chicago called the mad biter, Richard Masick, because he would bite his victims after he murdered them, was in prison for an unrelated crime to a murder, spent his time in prison, was, quote, rehabilitated, end of quote. | |
| And when he got out, he continued to kill. | |
| There was a case in Texas in which an individual was sent to prison on a lesser crime because they didn't have enough evidence. | |
| And everyone said, don't let him out, don't let him out. | |
| Even the sheriff said, don't let him out, which people said, oh, well, he's a sheriff. | |
| He didn't want anybody to be out. | |
| And he killed when he got out of prison. | |
| Never, ever under any circumstances. | |
| You cannot rehabilitate a person who is not humanly put together psychologically. | |
| You can't do it. | |
| A lot of people have spent an awful lot of time and an awful lot of public money has been expended giving this particular individual psychiatric care and assistance over the years. | |
| Do you think that as a society we just, in these cases, ought not to bother doing that and just put them in jail and throw away the key? | |
| We know that these are the most clever individuals. | |
| They may not be the brightest bulb in the armore, but we do know that they can basically snow people. | |
| They can make an individual think that they're responding to treatment. | |
| But how do you treat an individual who doesn't have a complete psychological structure and who is mandated to be treated? | |
| I mean, if this man was clever enough to not be caught for a number of years, don't you think he's clever enough to make people think that he has responded to, quote, treatment, end of quote? | |
| Now, we gave him this name, the Yorkshire Ripper, after Jack the Ripper, famous case in London in history. | |
| One of my listeners has been emailing me for quite some time, asking me if I would ask somebody like you, so you're on, let's ask you, about Jack the Ripper. | |
| What are your thoughts about that famous case from history? | |
| Once again, he eluded capture and identification. | |
| I mean, there have been so many theories about who he was, but he was a consummate serial murderer. | |
| He murdered prostitutes, a group of people who are what we consider lost. | |
| Nobody keeps track of them. | |
| Nobody thinks very much of them. | |
| Nobody really cares. | |
| And they're out there, they're offering themselves, and so it's almost like going to a buffet where you can pick and choose what you want to have that evening. | |
| So this individual, whomever he was or whatever he did, just was a typical serial murderer functioning in that society, and it's never ending. | |
| But he stopped. | |
| Do many serial killers stop? | |
| Many will stop, and we don't know the reason. | |
| Is it because they are, well, you know, in his day and age, you couldn't get in an auto and just drive hundreds of miles to find victims. | |
| He was limited. | |
| Did he move? | |
| Did he die? | |
| How old was he? | |
| I mean, the lifespan back then was not what it is now. | |
| So if he was an older gentleman in his 40s, he would have been considered quite old. | |
| And some serial murderers, if they stop, it's generally because there's some kind of an external control. | |
| They're in prison or they've been killed. | |
| It's something that we continue to look at. | |
| But we do know that serial murderers generally peak by their 50s, and then after that, we don't know what they do, but most of the time they're caught. | |
| Okay, in your own professional experience and your own experience of wherever in the world you may have studied a serial killer, what is the most fascinating, outstanding serial killer, if you get what I'm saying, the most outstanding, unsolved case? | |
| Well, I think Jack the Ripper is probably the most fascinating, unsolved case that's ever been. | |
| I was thinking of one of the most un-notorious serial murderers who really was caught, so that doesn't fit your category that you were talking about. | |
| But most of the serial murderers, the one case that we always go back to is Jack the Ripper. | |
| A little bit of infamy from London's history, London's past, and now almost a tourist attraction in some ways, in a perverse way, because human nature is what human nature is. | |
| One of the things that you do to, apart from writing the books that you do, is you do give assistance to police forces, don't you? | |
| And I know that I phoned you at the airport a couple of months ago and you're on your way to the West Coast USA to help somebody with something. | |
| Are you able to talk about that case? | |
| I can't talk about it. | |
| Unfortunately, it is an unsolved case that a large number of individuals are working on from multiple angles. | |
| It's a fascinating case. | |
| It was a very well-known case. | |
| But until we have more data or more information, we just continue to gather at the wisps and straws. | |
| And we do feel that at some point we will have an answer, but it's taking a long, long time. | |
| And without telling me what the case is, how far back does it go? | |
| To the 80s, 70s and 80s. | |
| Okay. | |
| Well, I wish you luck and good fortune. | |
| I was like Jack the Ripper. | |
| No, I wish you luck and good fortune with it. | |
| Of all the cases you have worked on, what's the one you're proudest of helping solve? | |
| I think the one that I am most proud of solving was Wayne Williams' case in the United States. | |
| He was an individual who murdered children within his neighborhood. | |
| And he was, well, basically, there was a radio show in which I was being interviewed about what kind of person could possibly have done the crime. | |
| Thank goodness for you radio people. | |
| And I was essentially vilified because I said that my impression was that the murderer was also black because the children were black. | |
| Well, that led to such a hue and cry that I was being racist or I was all of the names that you can possibly imagine. | |
| But it did turn out that he was black. | |
| He did murder the children. | |
| But it seems like such a simple thing. | |
| How could a Caucasian individual be in a black neighborhood and not be spotted? | |
| And so sometimes we get so involved in our own theories or our own thoughts or our own impressions that we don't see what's right in front of our face. | |
| As they say over here, it's the elephant in the room. | |
| It's the most obvious thing that is sometimes missed. | |
| Absolutely, the elephant. | |
| Oh, how correct. | |
| Are you working on a book at the moment, Helen? | |
| I am working on trying to start a book. | |
| I am looking for children who are willing to talk to me, children of serial murderers who are willing to talk about what impact this has had on their lives. | |
| And that's very difficult because so many of the children of these individuals have changed their identities, don't want to talk about it. | |
| Well, they would be afraid of being tarred with that brush by association, wouldn't they? | |
| Well, they were. | |
| As I mentioned, the daughter of the Green River killer was not permitted to play with anyone because her dad was a serial killer. | |
| And she was essentially ostracized. | |
| Understandable in one way, but why do we do this to the children? | |
| Why do we take people who have had no responsibility for a crime and tar them with the same brush? | |
| This is an awful thought, and I hope that I'm completely wrong when I say it, but I'm going to get emailed questions along these lines. | |
| If you are the offspring of somebody who is a serial killer, could there be any way in which you could become the same? | |
| I rarely use this answer, but my answer is no. | |
| This is not genetic. | |
| It is not something that's passed down from generation to generation. | |
| It is not role modeled. | |
| It is not an imitation type of thing. | |
| So even if, you know, we know that it's not genetic, but even if your dad is seriously weird and doing these things and maybe you have suspicions about him, but he's your dad, none of this could rub off on you? | |
| No. | |
| Okay. | |
| You might kill somebody, but that's very, very, very rare. | |
| We have really not seen violence in the individuals who are children of the serial killers. | |
| More often, what we see is depression and tremendous anxiety, but not murder. | |
| You deal in this field. | |
| It clearly fascinates you. | |
| It takes up a good portion of your life. | |
| Do you have nightmares? | |
| Does it affect you in any way? | |
| You must see and hear some absolutely horrendous things. | |
| I know you do. | |
| So how do you, you know, assuming that it must have some impact on a human level, on your life, how do you insulate yourself from that? | |
| What I learned to do quite early on, that when I work with the serial murderers, I have no contact with my family because I am not capable of shaking off whatever it is that happens in that interaction. | |
| It's not a human interaction with a serial killer, but it's almost like raw emotion. | |
| It's completely raw. | |
| You feel the violence, you feel the fear, you feel only the emotion, not the intellectual part, only the emotion. | |
| And so what I need to do is to sort of reconstitute myself by, once I'm finished with the serial murder, is taking a day or so to just kind of come down, so to speak, and reintegrate all those emotions into the summary of working with them. | |
| It does affect me. | |
| I would be completely untruthful if I said it didn't. | |
| But I don't have anything that lasts. | |
| I don't have nightmares. | |
| I don't have the paranoia. | |
| I don't have the fear. | |
| I don't have that stick with me, fortunately. | |
| And I think that's because I learned and was taught how to handle raw, horrible emotions. | |
| And thank God for my teachers. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| And I'm glad that you're doing the work that you do. | |
| I don't know how you do it. | |
| I couldn't do it. | |
| But I'm glad there are people in the world like you, Helen Morrison. | |
| And thank you very much for talking with me again. | |
| Howard, thank you so much. | |
| It's always an absolute delight to work with you. | |
| You are so informed and so good at your work. | |
| Well, you're very, very kind, and you are very good at your work, Helen Morrison, and thank you again. | |
| If anybody wants to read about you or perhaps get details of your books, is there an easy and convenient way, a website or something they can do that? | |
| No website, but there is the book about the first part of our serial murder research that's available on Amazon. | |
| Helen, thank you again. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Well, that's a delve into the world of a fascinating woman, Helen Morrison, in the United States, who made time with us to talk about serial killers and why they do and how they do what they do. | |
| Hope you enjoyed that show. | |
| Let me know what you thought about it. | |
| Let me know what you think about the unexplained. | |
| Future guest ideas. | |
| Any suggestions, any feedback, go to theunexplained.tv. | |
| That's our website designed by Adam Cornwell, a creative hotspot in Liverpool. | |
| Thank you to Martin for the theme tune. | |
| But above all else, thank you very much to you for listening to this show. | |
| It is called The Unexplained. | |
| My name is Howard Hughes, and we will return soon. |