A KILLING WAY WITH WORDS

I FIRST met John Scripps when I went to see a man about a serial killer. It was early September 1993. I was working two days and one evening a week as writer in residence at the Mount Prison in Hertfordshire. I had been there eight months, encouraging the prisoners to write in any way I could. I held a weekly workshop, but mostly I saw the prisoners individually. I had my own set of keys and we met wherever we could find some quiet, in the library, in the chapel, in the men's own cells.

The man I had gone to see was a tube-train driver serving four years for drug-dealing. He was writing a thriller about a serial killer. With him in his cell that day was another man, whose name I wrote down in my appointment book as "Cripps!" (The exclamation mark because I wrongly, though eerily, remembered this as the name of the man who buried his wife in his London cellar, was caught by radio crossing the Atlantic and hanged in 1910 - Crippen, in fact.)

I don't remember much else about that initial meeting, other than that Scripps was perplexed by me, as many prisoners were. Who was I? I wasn't a screw, but I had keys. I wasn't a con, but there I was sitting on a bed, chatting away in a friendly manner. He told me later that in his 10 years in prison I was the first non-prisoner he had ever seen doing this. After a while he said he would like to talk to me about writing too.

"Do you write?" I asked.

"I'd like to," he said.

Later I realised this was typical of Scripps. He was searching for something, some outlet for his energy, his frustrations, his need to be someone, and he clutched at me."Cripps!" I wrote in my diary, and said I would make some time for him the following week."Why don't you write something between now and then?" I said. "Anything, even just a few words."

We met in the education block and I took him into the chapel. Unlike other inmates, who liked to get me on home territory, he never invited me to his cell. He preferred neutral ground. I stood at the doorway to his cell a few times (cell 24, C spur, Ellis wing), and there was nothing notable about it, other than its bareness. He had few books, few personal items. There were none of the glossy pictures of naked women I saw in many cells. Scripps would never have put them up; he considered himself a strong moralist.

I don't think he kept me at bay because he was hiding anything in there. He hadn't started chopping people up then. But that cell was all he had that was his. In prison the enforced company of strangers can be as much a punishment as the separation from family and friends. Scripps had been inside for almost all the previous 10 years, serving two long sentences for drug trafficking, and this was the one place where he could shut the door and escape into his own privacy.

In the chapel he handed me a scrappy piece of paper half-covered with writing. I looked down at it and saw a mess of crossings out and peculiarly spelt words, some inspired, weird phonetic guesses, others simply incomprehensible. It was pretty clear he was dyslexic. But reading slowly, with his help translating some of the words, I saw he was writing a story about a man walking through the slums in an unnamed South American city. Tidied up, it wasn't bad. It was a bit melodramatic, but quite powerful.

"My nose and lungs were filled with the aromas of the ghetto: the aromas of coffee bubbling in clay pots and garbage rotting in the open sewers, all mixed up in the humid air to make that everlasting smell that eats into your nostrils like the flies and mosquitoes that were eating into my flesh, quenching their thirst with my blood."

I praised him and reassured him that the spelling didn't matter, it was the content that counted. We talked about the direction the story was taking and I encouraged him to complete it. I said if he did I would type it up for him.

Over the next couple of weeks he worked on the story. We talked about it and I made a couple of suggestions, he finished it to his and my satisfaction, and then I typed it up. It was titled "Buried Treasure". The man narrating the story was walking through the slums on the way back to his hotel. He was shocked by the poverty and smell and wanted to be in his air-conditioned hotel room with a glass of chilled white wine. But then in the shadows he saw someone digging, surreptitiously burying something by a wall, and his mind "began to race with thoughts of treasure". He waited and eventually the digger left. She was a thin woman, and he could see from her face that "she had left something very valuable there". He waited for her to go and then frantically dug up the treasure she had buried, tearing his nails and flesh in the process. It was a package, wrapped in newspaper and tied with blue plastic string. As he lifted it up, a police car pulled round the corner, and the man threw himself into the shadows. When the police car had gone, the man started running and didn't stop until he reached the main road and found a taxi to take him to his hotel. Back in his room he laid the package on the bed. But he couldn't unwrap his treasure while he was dirty and sweaty. So he ran a hot bath and ordered up a bottle of chilled white wine. Then he opened the parcel. Inside was the body of a baby.

"Its face was fine and delicate and its arms were so skinny," Scripps concluded his story. "Only its stomach was bloated. Tears began to run down my cheeks and I reached out to pick up the cold body. I held it in my arms and cried out against this inhumanity and unfairness. I cursed the gods for my treasure."

Two and a half years later, waiting to hang in Changi jail in Singapore for the murder of Gerald Lowe, a South African tourist whom he had killed in his air-conditioned hotel room, chopped up and wrapped in plastic bags, and then thrown into Singapore harbour, Scripps again cursed the gods, though not this time for the body wrapped up and discarded. God, Scripps said, had betrayed him, the killer. He also mused over inhumanity. In a newspaper article, I read that he had said that what upset him most was being told that he was not a "member of the human race".

Scripps was hanged for the murder of Gerald Lowe. But police in Thailand and Britain are convinced he killed and dismembered at least three other people, and possibly more. He killed for traveller's cheques and credit cards and access to bank accounts. He had been let out of the Mount Prison on a four-day home leave in the autumn of 1994, and skipped the country. He was travelling round the world in style, and needed money to pay his way.

Shortly after he disposed of the body of Gerald Lowe, Scripps went down to the hotel restaurant, and ordered a fillet steak and a glass of chilled white wine.

The photograph that the newspapers used again and again of John Scripps showed him staring menacingly into the camera, one eye half-closed. He is unshaven, his thick black hair a mess. It is the face of a man who could kill another man in cold blood and then carefully dismember his body. The Scripps I first met was more boyish, more hopeful. One eye twitched as if he was winking. He wanted me to like him and smiled when I smiled. He shaved irregularly, and sometimes cut himself doing so. He was a tall man, quite chunky, round-shouldered and somewhat childlike in his movements, a bit lumbering. He had a mild stutter. He never looked comfortable sitting in a chair; he preferred to sit on the edge of a table, dangling his legs. He had a habit of putting his knuckles against his forehead and frowning when he was thinking that appeared so contrived as to be comic, though it was quite serious.

He was delighted with his story, the first he had ever written. He liked it being typed up, felt it made it real. They were his words, but clean, crisp, correctly spelt. He asked me for copies to send to his mother and sister. He never spoke much about his mother. He was quite secretive about his family and background, though he could also be suddenly open about private matters. Later he told me about his sister's children, and when he was finally granted a home leave (he went out on at least one home leave and came back voluntarily, before the leave from which he did not return) he asked if I knew of any good children's plays or events to which he could take them. He was particularly keen on something Jewish. He insinuated, without ever directly saying so, that he was partly Jewish, though I did not know if this was true, or if he was doing it because I am Jewish. I brought him a copy of Time Out.

His great love, about whom he was more than happy to talk, was his Mexican ex-wife, with whom he was still obsessed. She was in Mexico, married to a policeman. He wanted me to understand how much he loved her, how unusual his love was, and in October I wrote in my diary "Poem, Armitage, cut off arm for Scripps". This reference, which made me shudder when I recently found it, was actually to a delicate love poem by Simon Armitage, which describes a man who would prefer to cleave his arm "from the joint or seam" rather than disturb the woman he loves who is sleeping against him. I took it to Scripps because he had said to me of his wife, "I'd cut off my arm to get her back." He was prone to comments like that, which I didn't take very ser- iously. I heard them from prisoners every day.

The Mount is a category C prison, but it contains every type of prisoner except lifers. I knew manslaughterers, rapists, armed robbers, kidnappers, drug-traffickers. Hard talk and threats were a part of prison life. So was actual violence. One man was murdered in the prison while I worked there, beaten to death in a corridor, though I should say that most days were peaceful. The Mount is a new prison, red-brick buildings set among pretty gardens, and on a summer evening, with men sunbathing on the grass, listening to Walkmans, playing with frisbees, I felt sometimes that if I blinked I could imagine I was back at university.

The Mount is also predominantly a young man's prison, and Scripps, in his mid-thirties, with long experience of jail, considered himself as an older and wiser head, and made a point of walking away from arguments or trouble. But on occasions, when an officer spoke to him without respect, or when he was turned down again for parole, he would talk about hitting a screw or doing something that would get him shipped out of the Mount to a higher security, B-category, where prisoners and officers kept their distance. What was the point of bowing and scraping, as he saw it, if it wasn't going to get him parole? Sometimes when he said these things a wildness would come into his eyes, across his face. But there were many men in that prison who appeared more aggressive and violent and wild, and those men have not killed anyone yet.

That October, I started a magazine in the prison. Though the prison wouldn't then give me a room or a computer, the Governor agreed to pay for an initial print run, so I decided to go ahead anyway, and typeset the magazine on my computer at home. I put up posters and told all the men who I knew were interested in writing, and changed my Thursday evening workshop into an editorial meeting. Any inmate could come, but the meeting was held at evening association, the only free time during the day, when inmates made their phone calls, cooked their own food, played chess or pool or ping-pong, did their drug deals, or simply sat around and chatted; so only the genuinely committed kept coming after the first couple of meetings. These regulars were, for that first issue, an Irish armed robber, a couple of junkies, an elderly gent with a fondness for alcohol, the tube-train driver, and John Scripps. We called the magazine XMT, which was stamped on all the prison-issue clothes. XMT - from the Mount.

Our Thursday evening meetings were lively and interesting. We used one of the classrooms in the education block. I would get there early and put several desks together into one big table, and we would sit around this. Everyone had strong views, especially on subjects like the police, the judicial system, drugs and prison, but this was the first time that many of them had been presented with an outlet for these views, and it was hard work to transform whinges and resentment into something more reasonable. There was no point in starting a magazine that got closed after one issue, so criticism had to be constructive, and spleen expressed satirically. In this Scripps was one of my main allies. He would tell the younger men to be realistic, to accept what could and couldn't be written, though he was also capable of coming up with odd ideas himself. At the end of each meeting, most of the prisoners would get up and leave. But Scripps often stayed to help me put the desks back. He didn't take me for granted in the way other prisoners did. He wanted me to know he was aware of me as a person, and wanted me to be aware of him as one too, not just as a prisoner, a number. His helping with the tables was a way of establishing a sort of equality between us. On more than one occasion he insisted I take an apple from him, or a Mars Bar that had cost him a third of a day's wages.

The first issue of XMT was produced in time for Christmas. More than 30 inmates contributed. The Irish robber wrote the funny pieces; we had articles about race, judges and the UK table-football champion, who was in the Mount. An officer wrote an article arguing against privatisation of prisons, while an inmate argued in favour. There were poems, cartoons and short stories. The tube-train driver contributed an extract from his serial killer thriller in progress: "In his all-black outfit, his long black hair tied neatly back in a ponytail, designer stubble on his jaw, the effect was devastating. Truly, he thought to himself, he was the epitome of a modern-day angel of death..."

Scripps contributed three pieces. The first was his story, "Buried Treasure", the second was called "Hell Holidays". It was a page of satirical holiday advertisements: one was for cheap holiday homes recently emptied in Bosnia; another, "Mule Tours", offered free holidays to Thailand, Malaysia, Nigeria and Jamaica with pounds 500 spending money as long as the holidaymaker brought back a small package. "When you come back you will have a choice of pounds 10,000 or 10 years' free accommodation paid for by Her Majesty's Government." Scripps's third piece was a description of a Thai jail, where he said he had spent a few weeks for overstaying his visa.

Scripps had now reached the stage of his sentence where he could start talking about home leaves; about getting his category D status, which allows prisoners to work in the community; even about parole. His birthday was on 9 December; he requested a home leave then, and thought he was going to get it. He had spent his previous 10 birthdays inside. When he didn't get this he asked for a Christmas home leave. He had also spent his previous 10 Christmases inside. He didn't get that either.

We were no longer making appointments every week to talk about his writing, but he often hung around after the editorial meetings ended, sometimes with his tube-train driver friend, at other times on his own, to talk with me. We would sit on the desks, legs dangling, and chat about Thailand, where I had also been. He told me about a house he said he had owned in Chiang Mai. His first long sentence had been for smuggling heroin from Thailand into Britain, which he admitted he had done. He related how he had been released after five years and had gone back to Thailand for a few months of freedom and sun and relaxation. On the flight back into England he was picked up again. Someone else on the plane was carrying heroin, and customs said the drugs belonged to Scripps, that the carrier was merely his mule. Scripps claimed he was innocent, that it was merely chance and that he was arrested because of his previous conviction. But he was found guilty and given another long sentence.

He talked too about Mexico, and his ex-wife, Maria. In December 1993 there was unrest in Mexico, and he asked me to get him the address of newspapers in Mexico City. He wanted to write a letter to them about the unrest, hinting that he hoped Maria would see it. I got him the addresses, and a Colombian friend helped him write the letter in Spanish. I don't know if he ever sent it off, and he didn't mention it again.

For the second issue of XMT he contributed a survey of the influence of drugs on imprisonment, which found that over half the prisoners in the Mount were in for drug-related offences - if stealing to buy drugs and violence because of drugs was added to dealing, trafficking and possession. His other contribution was a recipe that could be cooked with ingredients on sale at the canteen: John Scripps's Chilli Con Carne.

He had also finished a second short story, though for some reason this was never included in the magazine. It was another eerily presentient piece of writing, called "The Unwilling Survivor". It was set in South America again, and was about a boy who woke up to find his mother and little sister dead beside him, and then tried to kill himself. "He untied some rope from the old bed and threw it over the beam of the house. He put the rope around his neck. He reached down and picked up a handful of earth, and put this in his mouth. Then he climbed on to an old creaky chair and pulled the rope tight, and tighter still. He stood on tiptoe, pulled the rope again, and then kicked the chair out from under him." But his weight on the beam pulled the house down around him and he survived. Further efforts to drown himself and get bitten by a rattlesnake were also unsuccessful. Finally he met a priest, who told it was a sin to commit suicide and promised to look after him. But crossing the road to a cathedral, the boy was hit by a lorry and killed. It was only later, after Scripps was arrested in Singapore, that I learnt from the newspaper reports that his own father gassed himself when Scripps was nine.

In February 1994, frustrated by his lack of progress towards parole and home leave, Scripps asked me to write a letter in support of his parole. I was asked this kind of favour every couple of weeks, and if I felt I knew the prisoner well enough, I complied. It could be quite a difficult task. I was always being tested by prisoners, to see if I really was "on their side", if I could really be trusted, and I couldn't brush aside these tests completely, for without trust no prisoner would have shown me his writing. In these letters I tried to be honest, but not harsh. "Mr Scripps has spent most of the past 10 years in prison and has not always been a model prisoner," I wrote. "But more recently, in my opinion, he has developed considerably. Despite the handicap of severe dyslexia, Mr Scripps has produced some highly able writing. He has contributed several varied and interesting pieces to the first two issues of the Mount magazine. He has also been one of the editors, attending weekly meetings and showing a strong responsibility to the balance of the magazine ... I have watched with interest as he has helped to bring on some of the younger, more fiery, contributors."

I wrote that letter on 14 March 1994, and soon after Scripps started drifting away from the magazine, and from me. For XMT3 he came up with the idea of a joke horoscope, but the bits he wrote missed the point and, perhaps a bit callously, I encouraged another inmate to write it. We had been given pounds 2,000 for a computer by the Prison Service, as well as a small room off the library, and we needed to make XMT3 the best issue yet to justify the expense. Perhaps I could have given him more time and helped him to write the piece himself. But then I'm not sure he was really interested any more.

With hindsight, I can see a pattern in Scripps's behaviour, in his attitude and state of mind. For the first six months I knew him he appeared stable and hopeful. He wrote two good short stories and half a dozen magazine pieces, and helped to edit two issues of the magazine. The prospects for home leave, getting his "D cat" and parole seemed real to him. But towards the end of February 1994, I began to see a wilder, more shiftless Scripps. I also began to see his tendency to get gripped by shortlived enthusiasms. Every time I saw him he had a new idea that was going to change his life, make him rich, win back Maria.

One day he came to see me about kosher butchers. He said he had a little experience with butchery (I didn't know he had been trained in the kitchen at Albany jail on the Isle of Wight) and asked if I could find out if there were any kosher butchers not too far from the prison to whom he could write and offer his services for free when he qualified to work in the community. For reasons I couldn't quite express the whole idea made me uneasy. I felt this task was beyond the call of my duty. I also didn't understand why it had to be a kosher butcher, or what Scripps's Jewish connection was. Perhaps, too, the idea of Scripps and butcher's knives was beginning to disturb me. I made a couple of enquiries but was relieved to find there were no kosher butchers in Hertfordshire. And anyway Scripps soon dropped the idea himself.

He had stopped coming to the education block. I didn't see him for a while, and when I did he seemed distracted and odd. One day he stopped me and told me about his plans to set up a hamburger restaurant on the Isle of Wight. He had a notebook in which he had jotted down lists of figures. He wanted to know if I could find out wholesale beef prices for him. A few days later he told me he had worked out how he could undercut McDonald's. If he sold 1,000 hamburgers he would make so much profit. If he sold 100,000... If he sold a million... His main worry was the cost of transporting goods over to the Isle of Wight by ferry. He asked me if I thought the ferry gave businesses special discounts. I didn't know. His plan was to start with one hamburger bar. Then he would have a chain. When he had made enough money he was going to go to Mexico City, where he knew of a big building going cheap. He would turn it into flats, or perhaps a department store. Only then would he go to see Maria, who would surely take him back, so successful would he be. I listened as patiently as I could and then excused myself. He was twitching a lot more. He would stop mid-sentence and jump off in another direction. The truth was, I didn't know how to deal with him, so I avoided him. I was only the writer in residence.

This was in May 1994. Some time in the summer he went on home leave, and came back. But the home leave did not seem to have settled him, and when he was turned down again for a parole, he virtually disappeared, becoming a recluse. I didn't see him for several weeks, and when I did, he had grown a thick, bushy, black beard. His eyes were very wild. He looked like the Ancient Mariner. He said he had been in his cell without talking to anyone for days. There was in him quite a strong ascetic streak, a desire to prove his own strength to himself, to show that he could take anything, that he could make life worse than the prison was already making it and still survive. (Perhaps this strong asceticism was responsible for his not appealing against the death sentence, along with his desire not to spend the rest of his life in prison. The reports from Singapore do not suggest his wish to die stemmed much from remorse.) But it was clear he was struggling. He had been inside for 10 years, from his mid- twenties to his mid-thirties.

For a while I think he even stopped going to the canteen to spend his wages on chocolate or coffee or phone cards. (He didn't buy tobacco like most men. He didn't smoke, or use drugs.) He felt he had played it the prison way, had been a good boy, and the prison hadn't given him the one thing he wanted, his parole. He didn't want anything else it had to give - though another time I remember him arguing over pounds 1 docked from his wages for being late for work.

Once or twice I tried to talk about him to the tube-train driver, who was still friendly with him, but these conversations did not get very far. It did not occur to me to talk to any of the prison officers or any other member of staff. What would I have said? What would they have done? He wasn't getting into trouble. He wasn't violent. He wasn't annoying anyone else.

HE didn't say goodbye. He went on home leave and didn't come back. The prisoners on Ellis wing and I knew where he was because he sent postcards to friends in the prison. They were unsigned, but there was no mistaking his spelling and his handwriting. They were happy, chatty postcards, apparently full of the pleasure of being out of prison, of being free, though I remember saying to a prisoner, "How is he funding this? Where has he got the money?'"

The prisoner shrugged. Little did we know.

One postcard was from Mexico, where Scotland Yard believe Scripps killed Timothy McDowall, a 28-year-old Cambridge graduate. Scripps certainly transferred pounds 21,000 from McDowall's bank to his own account. Another postcard was from Thailand, where the Thai police are convinced Scripps killed and butchered Sheila Damude, a Canadian tourist, and her son Darin. Scripps was arrested with Darin Damude's credit cards in his possession.

What turned John Scripps from a relatively ordinary criminal (our prisons are crammed with drug traffickers) into a multiple murderer? Would he have done the same if he had been released from prison when he was at his most sane and hopeful and clear-thinking around Christmas 1993? Was he planning these murders even as he was writing his short story about buried treasure, even as he was asking about kosher butchers? Was he imagining his own death when he wrote about the rope around a little boy's neck?

These questions I cannot begin to answer, and so will not try. But there are others I can address. Did I like John Scripps? It would be easy to say in retrospect that I didn't, that I saw something horrible in him. But the truth is that at first, at least, I liked him. He had a kind of boyish charm. (Other people liked him later on too. He befriended his victims before he killed them. They shared hotel rooms with him, or let him into their rooms.) There was also a kind of dignity to him that was missing in many prisoners, or at least a struggle to find that dignity. He liked to give, as well as take. He had a sense of morality, even if it was wildly skewed. (He disapproved of drug-taking, but peddled heroin.) He offered me Mars Bars. He stayed behind to help me with the tables. These were small things, but even they were beyond a good few of the men I knew in the prison, men who haven't killed.

Later on, when he became more desperate, wilder, he scared me a little. And when I read about what he had done, I was shocked, horrified and saddened - for him and for his victims - but not, I realised, utterly surprised. I knew at once, instinctively, that he was guilty. There was something in the Scripps I knew that connected with those crimes: the sudden enthusiasms for "good ideas", the skewed morality (he justified killing Gerald Lowe by saying he made sexual advances towards him), the ascetic "inner strength" that would have helped him dismember the bodies. But then again, with hindsight, I could probably write something similar about a dozen other prisoners I knew, and none of those men has been killing and butchering.

Finally, could anyone have predicted Scripps's killings, prevented them? I cannot see how on either count. He skipped a home leave, but he was only months away from his automatic release date, and would have walked free then anyway. Certainly in those last months he was a little crazy, but then a lot of men in prison are a little crazy. The line between psychiatric hospitals and prisons is a blurred one.

By the time Scripps was arrested in Singapore, I had left the prison. But I was still in touch with a few prisoners and I mentioned Scripps to them. They didn't want to talk about him, didn't want to think about the fact that they had known him, had shared jokes with him, had patted him on the back, had liked him. The John Scripps we knew wasn't a monster, but the John Scripps we knew ended up doing monstrous things. Many an explanation could be offered, but none would explain.

! Jeremy Gavron's first novel, 'Moon', is published by Viking at pounds 13.50