Criminal Shadows: Inside the Mind of the Serial Killer by David Canter

Author:David Canter [Canter, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2015-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven – Objects of Murder

In most, if not all, rapes and rape/murder cases the criminal sees the woman only as some sort of object. The particular type of object he thinks the victim is may hold vital clues to his identity.

Murder in the family, where two people know each other well and have fed on each other’s emotions for many years, usually happens as a passionate outburst that explodes into a violent killing. Here one person feels so strongly about another that, as awful as the crime might be, most of us can imagine similar break points in our own relationships.

The murder of a total stranger involves a different kind of aggression. In this sort of crime, the victim plays a role in the life of her assailant, though she may never have seen him before.

Our studies of a number of violent killings helped us establish some important connections between the detection of rape and of murder, rules that might be applied to rape/murder cases in general. We wanted to know how people treat each other as instruments of their own gratification. One particularly helpful case for our research team involved the murder of a young woman in Cardiff

The Cardiff Murder Case

The murdered woman had been well known to the police as a prostitute, working in what used to be called the Tiger Bay area before the docklands development got under way. The scene of her death was described to me over the telephone as “a brothel near the docks”.

Like many people, my idea of a brothel had been drawn from fiction and the movies. Then I saw the police photographs of the viciously knifed body of Lynette White, lying on the floor of the room where she used to take her clients, her “brothel”. The small, buff-colored room had a dirty, tom carpet and smudged curtains. The bed, a bare mattress with no covers, essentially filled the room.

By the time I reached the room it had been neutralized in the detailed way that only police scientists and scene of crime officers can do. Every drop of blood, every foreign fiber and hand-dab had been examined. All that remained were the faint brown stains on the worn carpet where once the pool of blood had seeped through.

The police photographs of the victim provided a brutal contrast to the artful arrangement of even the most gruesome cinematographic horror pictures. Police photographers never compose their shots for anything other than to clearly record the scene and the body. This usually means emphasizing the wounds and blood splashes, the bindings and the general disarray surrounding most murders. The photographs of the murdered prostitute in Cardiff were the grisliest pictures I had ever seen; more than fifty stab wounds punctured the body, the neck had been hacked, the wrists gouged.

Before the police asked Rupert and me for an opinion, they had talked to every woman who worked on the street in Cardiff and knew a great deal about the victim and her family. She was a young girl born in Cardiff, with little talent and few job prospects.

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