Today's guest blog by author Marnie Riches. She has a Masters degree in Modern & Medieval
Dutch and German. She has been a punk, a trainee rock star, a pretend artist, a
property developer and professional fundraiser.
The concept of serial killing enthralled
me even as a child. In the houses of my relatives, the abduction and murder of
local children by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley – The Moors Murderers - were
regular talking points over strong tea and cigarettes. Somebody always knew
somebody who knew one of the mothers, poor cow. This was Manchester, after all.
In the early seventies, the emotional wounds inflicted on the northwestern hive
mind were still raw.
Later that decade, Peter Sutcliffe
– The Yorkshire Ripper - was on the prowl in the north of England. My mother, a
single parent, had planned a rare night out in Manchester, but decided to
cancel when one of his victims, Vera Millward, had been found dead in the
grounds of Manchester Royal Infirmary. Those stories sparked in me a life-long
fascination with society’s worst feared predators.
After completing my Masters, I had
planned to do a PhD in criminology (there’s time yet...). Small wonder,
therefore, that my main protagonist, George McKenzie is an aspiring
criminologist. Writing about serial murder in The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die and my subsequent George McKenzie
thrillers, I am intrigued by the circumstances surrounding an individual who
makes that deadly transition from non-violent child to brutal killer. Is the
compulsion to serially murder down to nurture or nature?
Reading academic articles on
criminal psychology and psychiatry, as I do for research purposes, it appears
that many if not most serial murders are, in fact, sexually motivated. Killers
are divided into neat categories - the disorganised, like Sutcliffe, who are
relatively spontaneous in their attacks and who depersonalise the bodies of
their victims through mutilation, and the organised, like Fred West, assisted
by his wife, Rose, who stalk their victims, plan their abductions using a
vehicle and who commit sexual acts with live victims.
One of the reports I read stated
that 75% of serial murderers are the children of single parents with a history
of physical, emotional or sexual abuse in childhood. The father figure is often
punitive. The mother may either be over-protective or may reject the child and
be promiscuous. Alcohol and drug misuse in the home is common. Nurture, then.
But amongst the organised killers, 80% were judged to have superior
intelligence. Amongst the disorganised, below average intelligence is the norm.
In which case, nature.
But hang on! One has to be wary of
taking all academic observations as gospel. How many of us are from single
parent backgrounds? I am. How many of us have sexual fetishes? Most people, if
you believe 50 Shades of Grey and the
ensuing worship at the altar of BDSM, complete with cable ties from B&Q.
Your average psychopath is described as focussed, intelligent, obsessional, and
hypochondriacal and well mannered on the surface. I am all of those things.
Perhaps you are too. Does this then make us serial killing material? No! Of
course not (Honestly, I’m not, although I do own goldfish instead of a cat).
Sometimes, the prejudices of the researcher shine through, and you know their
findings are therefore flawed. Sometimes, the reports, from a writer’s
perspective, smack of well-trodden tropes.
My theory, for what it’s worth and
the basis on which I draw the personalities and back-stories of my
perpetrators, is that there is a large grey area between “normal” non-offender and serial violent offender. And I’m not the
only one...
Much has been said about the
psychopathic spectrum recently, thanks to a piece of research being conducted
by Prof. Kevin Dutton at the University of Oxford. Happening upon this excited
me hugely, because it points to the lines between “normal” people and serial violent offenders being quite blurred. A
serial killer would score highly on the psychopathic spectrum, as might a
surgeon or a senior detective or somebody in the armed forces, who takes risks
on a daily basis and whose job requires complete focus.
What then differentiates the rest
of us in society - who may have had disruptive, disadvantaged childhoods, who
may suffer from mental illness, who may have sexual fetishes but who are
law-abiding citizens - from those who kill and kill again? Do serial murderers
have bad genes? Have they suffered brain damage? Are they innately evil? Or have
they endured a traumatic experience that changes them irrevocably?
In the follow-up to my debut, The Girl Who Broke the Rules, I refer to
this notion of a triggering incident as a Frida Kahlo moment: Just as the
artist, Frida Kahlo was forevermore influenced by an almost fatal bus crash,
where she was badly injured and covered in gold dust, there must be a traumatic
event in a killer’s life, tipping them from entertaining violent fantasies into
committing actual bodily harm; turning their murderous potential into serial
killing reality. Interestingly, Fred West suffered a terrible head injury after
a motorcycle and was never the same again. Ted Bundy, having grown up
witnessing the antics of an abusive grandfather, was apparently devastated by
the break-up of a romance. Peter Sutcliffe was allegedly conned out of money by
a prostitute. Would they have murdered if there had been no Frida Kahlo moment
for them? We’ll never know.
In striving to create really three
dimensional, believable perpetrators in my writing, I shape my bad guys based
on the theories of criminal psychologists and psychiatrists. But then, some of
the good guys in my novels have psychological foibles and shockingly tough stories
too! And I make sure I avoid those tropes where I can. That makes the puzzle
for the reader harder to solve, of course, and that’s my aim.
Do I believe that monsters are a
product of nurture, not nature? Well, I think it’s probably a bit of both. Do I
believe that we are so different from the serial killers we read about in the
news or depict in our writing? Probably not as different as we would like!
More information about Marnie Riches can be found on her website. You can also follow her on Twitter @Marnie_Riches and also find her on Facebook.
1 comment:
I appreciate this intelligent, intriguing article. Based on this post, I like your writing style. I'll be on the lookout for your book. :-)
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