With all this in mind, one can construct, as Orwell does, what would be, from the modern News of the World reader’s point of view, today’s ‘good murder’. He might refer us to the videodisc he had been watching that Saturday night. The murderer would be a young and maladjusted man living somewhere in the suburbs, surrounded by his unwitting potential victims. Our chosen killer should have gone astray through some fault of his mother, thus firmly attaching the real blame for the murders to a woman. Having decided on murder the killer should not restrict himself to the one homicide, but should dispatch as many victims as possible. The means chosen should be extremely violent and sadistic, preferably with some sexual, ritualistic, or possibly even anthropophagous aspect. Those killed should most often be young attractive women and their deaths should occur while they are undressing, taking a shower, masturbating, or having intercourse. Only with this kind of background, the Hollywood style of background, can a murder have the dramatic and even tragic qualities which will make it memorable in the present day.
It’s no accident that a significant percentage of the murders committed in modern Europe have an element of this Hollywood atmosphere.
One of the traditional motifs of the Hollywood murder, and what brings me to the point of my speech, is the male-bonding which frequently occurs between male law-enforcement personnel and their homicidal quarry. Since this conference is taking place here in Frankfurt, in the Herbert Marcuse Centre, it’s worth reminding ourselves of what the Frankfurt School of Social Science and Marcuse himself had to say about this kind of behaviour.
For Marcuse, the one-dimensional patriarchal society was characterised by examples of what he called ‘the unification of opposites’: a unification which served to deter social change at an intellectual level by enclosing consciousness in a masculine and, therefore, one-dimensional way. The historical domination of law-enforcement agencies by men is merely one aspect of this monolithic and homogeneous view. Until comparatively recently the average murder inquiry placed little or no reliance on the specifically feminine qualities.
The behaviourists and psychologists tell us that hormones undoubtedly play a major part in organising male and female characteristics in the brain. Whereas, for instance, men tend to think spatially in terms of distances and measurement, women on the other hand tend to think in terms of signs and landmarks. Women are much better than men at focusing on their immediate surroundings, which may actually make them superior to men in the matter of the observation of fine detail. Thus the usefulness of women to any criminal investigation, especially an inquiry where there exists a wealth of forensic detail such as the Hollywood-style murder, should be obvious. Other specifically feminine qualities such as non-violence, emotional capacity and receptivity may also be mentioned as having investigative utility.
During the early 1990s, computer analysis of the twentieth century’s inquiries into multiple-killings enabled British statistical criminologists to determine that those inquiries which included a woman among their senior personnel had a much higher rate of success in apprehending the culprit than those inquiry teams which did not include a female police officer.
As a result of this study, a Home Office Select Committee made a number of recommendations to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir MacDonald McDuff, which sought to increase the representation of female police officers in all serious crime investigations, but with particular regard to the Hollywood style of gynocide. Five years ago these recommendations were adopted, with the result that a female of at least Detective Sergeant rank must now be included in any investigation where a recreational killer may be responsible, thereby ensuring an improved, more two-dimensional approach to the inquiry.
The results speak for themselves. During the 1980s, when there existed no such sex-representation guideline and women accounted for less than 2 per cent of the senior personnel investigating the Hollywood-style gynocide, there was an arrest made in only 46 per cent of cases. During the late 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, where there existed such a gender guideline and women accounted for 44 per cent of senior police personnel in this type of gynocide, an arrest was made in 73 per cent of all cases.
Of course the last ten years have also seen some substantial improvements in law-enforcement and forensic detection technology which has partly helped to explain this dramatic increase in the performance of British murder inquiries. Not the least of these has been the adoption, throughout the EC, of identity cards with bar-codes and genetic fingerprints. However even when developments such as these are statistically discounted, it seems probable that the British experiment with sex guidelines for police investigations has achieved an overall increase in successful arrests of at least 20 per cent.
No doubt you are comparing the gender guideline with that figure of only 44 per cent of senior police personnel being women. Perhaps you are saying ‘why not 100 per cent?’ Well the new two-dimensional approach has been hindered by the small numbers of women who are in positions of relative seniority within the force. However, I am pleased to be able to report that all this is now changing with the advent of recruitment drives among British women, new payscales, crèche facilities, and improved career structures. So it is hoped that before very long, a policewoman of the rank of Detective Sergeant or above will be included in every inquiry relating to a Hollywood-style gynocide.
That represents the view from the bridge. My own experience has been largely on deck. George Orwell mentioned nine cases of murder which he considered to have stood the test of time. Coincidentally I myself have been involved in nine investigations of murder. I doubt that any of them will stand something as mythologising as a test of time. I certainly hope that they do not. But there is one case which I do propose to describe to you as an example of the investigative two-dimensionality I’ve been referring to.
On the face of it we were presented with a fairly typical case of Hollywood gynocide. A maniac was terrorising the women of a university town in southern England, killing eight women within as many months. His modus operandi was to beat his victim unconscious, drag her to some quiet, secluded spot where he would strangle her, and then gratify himself in her lifeless mouth. Perhaps the strangest feature of the case, and what partly distinguished it from the more usual kind of recreational killing, was that when he had finished he would insert two batteries into the dead woman’s vagina.
Male colleagues working on the case adopted a typical phallocentric view of this last item of behaviour, as was clear from the nickname they soon gave to the killer: the Everready Man. Familiar as they were with the kind of pornography in which foreign objects are routinely inserted into a woman ab vaginam as penis substitutes, these male police officers saw little that was particularly significant about two dry-cell alkaline batteries. And beyond making a few enquiries among the town’s electrical retailers, these police officers made no real attempt to try and comprehend this, the most unusual feature of the murderer’s working method. There was even a tacit assumption among them all that the batteries were dead — the sub-text of this being the thought that nobody would waste a good battery on something like a dead woman’s vagina.
It was female police personnel working on the case who first thought of establishing whether or not these were new batteries. In fact, we later discovered that they were purchased specially for the murders. It was also our theory, also verified after the killer was in custody, that there was nothing at all phallic about the insertion of batteries into the woman’s vagina; and that having rendered the woman lifeless for his sexual purposes, the killer then sought to bring her back to life, to re-energise her with a fresh source of power, like a portable disc player.