On the death of an unconvicted killer

We all became jurists when we heard the news: Frederick West dead in his cell, secrets to the grave and all that hokum, and suddenly eveything gelled beyond reasonable doubt. He was guilty and his hanging proved it; he corrupted a weak wife; he li ked young women with dark hair and accents; he liked digging and home improvements.

Once we were just tourists, voyeurs. Now we like to assume things. With terrible crimes, crimes beyond even our cruellest revenges, we yearn for explanations, and if none presents itself, we provide our own. If we can spell it, we like to use the word schizophrenia; sometimes just schizoid will suffice.

Some of us will even admit to feeling a little cheated. Although Rosemary West may still stand trial, her fate remains inextricably linked to the deeds of her husband, and now we will learn only part of the story. We will get only half the gore, or we may get none. In this, we're victims, too, and we lick our wounds with league tables of great serial killers of the past. We want to see him, this man described by a brother as a gentle, quiet guy "who wouldn't harm a fly", the man who carried a normal matey demeanour into jail and to his death. And, of course, we'd quite like more stuff about the sex, please, and especially the alleged incest, and actually anything prurient will do.

So pity the newspaper editor and crime writer: the crime of the decade, splashed pages for a month, the bloodiest and cheapest show in town, and now perhaps all snatched away by ... an alleged criminal. OK, hold your sympathy! Save it for the authors, those already staking out the Old Bailey, those making commercial sense of it all with the cultured spin and the extended deadline.

We claim a wider injustice, of course. There is a moral dimension to all of this, though you may need a concrete drill to divine it. What do the relatives of the Wests deserve? What do we deserve as decent citizens, as steely upholders of justice and theright to a fair trial? Many people even talk about this with a straight face.

With this comes the money problem: a neat hanging saves us a penny each; and we save twice - the trial and the incarceration. Nothing screams injustice quite like the waste of "taxpayers' money". Now we just waste all that money spent by the police sinceFebruary - all those resources and no "end user".

Hanging was too good for him, some say, but some say it was the only thing. If West was found guilty at trial, we'd have the capital punishers frightening us all again, and winning new support. But these people won't be at all happy with the way it has now ended. The problem with his jail hanging was that it was all so private.

Without a trial we may still glean some inside information, from those who have studied these dilemmas for longer than it takes to fashion a noose.

Oliver James, a clinical psychologist who has just com-pleted a study of the increase in violent crime, remembers thinking when he learnt of West's death: "Oh shit. We're never going to find out what really happened." But his was not a professional loss.

"I don't think there's any need whatsoever for us to hear the details of why he did this. We'd like to know, of course, but that's just because we're murder fiends. One of the things we learn from past cases is how inadequate have been the attempts to explore the motives of serial killers. Serial killers have been studied ad nauseam, and the studies have all been very crude. Why it is that some mentally ill people become serial killers and others don't? We still don't know the answer, and a trial wouldn't make any difference at all to that understanding."

James recalls the serial-killer episodes of the television series Cracker. "Robbie Coltrane said that if you go to this expert professor at that university, he will almost certainly tell you that the killer would be white, male, middle class, all this i

n formation which is absolutely predictable and boring. These facts are of minimum use to the police - they might help them to boil it down to half a million people. The hilarious thing in the show was when they got the serial killer to murder the professo r."

But perhaps we need a ritual to cleanse ourselves of these unfathomable acts? Isn't that what we claimed during the Bulger trial? "Maybe we do need a ritual," James says. "But I don't think the trial is it. I think we saw from the Nilsen and Sutcliffe cases that their purpose was the same as that of Hitchcock - purely entertainment."

As a nation we are obsessed with murder. It is not the realities that enthral, not the botched cases, not the husband with the bread knife, but the extended narrative of intricate plotting. We read PD James and Patricia Highsmith, but almost all British murders are nothing like those. Frederick West, of course, might have been.

Or we like the blase approach: Nilsen deciding one evening to talk to someone in a pub, to take them home, to kill them, to have sex with them, and talk to them some more. Oliver James offers at least a partial explanation: "We all have impulses that we barely dare think about, desires to do utterly prohibited things. I honestly think that serial killers are doing things that most of us, in part of ourselves, would like to do. Beneath the surface we're really horribly uncivilised. Melanie Klein is basically right: our inner lives are full of killing and destroying and being destroyed."

The Rev John Penny, communications officer for the Gloucester diocese, also worries that "all of us, given the wrong circumstances, are capable of the most appalling things". It's what Lord of the Flies is all about, he says: polite choirboys suddenly becoming homicidal maniacs. He believes we like public executions for all the wrong reasons: we should be saying "there but for the grace of God ...", but instead we yearn for scapegoats. "We like to fool ourselves that we live outside of the evil that humanity does."

All kinds of people have lost all moral values, John Penny believes. If we regard West as guilty before trial, then that way lies lynch law and the fiasco of the Birmingham Six. "We are going in for law by revenge. Also, the idea of forgiveness has become devalued, because people are not allowed to express rage and anger at violent death. We should forgive not because of the person who has done the crime, but because if we do not we destroy ourselves."

For Brian Masters, who has written extensively about Nilsen and Jeffrey Dahmer, a trial was important, and not just because he planned to write a book about it. "The man has to be tried in order for you and I to walk free. The judicial process has to be seen to work. So I insist on saying that from what we know he was not a murderer, however likely that looks. Because what do we really know? We know that the remains of 12 people were found under or near a house in which he lived. What can we assume fromthat? Only that 12 people used to be alive.

"It's true that relatives feel far more at rest if they know all the details of how their daughter or whomever died, no matter how gruesome. Even at the Dahmer trial someone told me that they were relieved to know that their brother's head had exploded in an oven. Because of what happened to West, the relatives will feel doubly bereaved that their daughters have been stolen from them. But we can't afford to run justice on those lines. We must not mix up justice and retribution. It seems unfair, but we have to be completely dispassionate."

The trial, and perhaps a life sentence, may also have uncovered more bodies. For Gordon Burn, author of an acclaimed study of Peter Sutcliffe, the post-trial confessions of Myra Hindley (and subsequent dramatic search over the Yorkshire Moors) was a sta

r ting point for his novel Alma Cogan. Burn also planned to write about the Wests, and may still do so. "You feel instinctively that he should have come to trial. You have to come to terms with the fact that there was someone around doing those things, and there must be some attempt to find out more about him." Partly this also applies to the relatives; the circle must be fully drawn. "I believe the trendy word is `closure'."

Almost 50 years ago, George Orwell wrote of how you just don't get many good old-fashioned murders anymore. By this he meant the dark premeditated sort, a bitter revenge, perhaps with poison. His league table included not Dahmer or Nilsen or Sutcliffe, but Crippen, Joseph Smith and Dr Palmer of Rugely. These dramas were the "product of a stable society where the all-prevailing hypocrisy did at least ensure that crimes as serious as murder should have strong emotions behind them". In one sen

s e, Orwell probably would have admired the case and emotions of Frederick West, but only if there had been a trial.