If symptoms

persist.. .

I HAPPENED to be visiting friends in Gloucestershire last weekend when the remains of the fourth and fifth bodies were found at No 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester. Apart from a certain local pride in the national (and perhaps even international) notoriety which the activi- ties of a multiple murderer had brought this otherwise quiet and prosperous county, I detected a slight undercurrent of unease during the dinner party I attended on Saturday night.

The conservatory of one of the guests had been built by the man already charged with three of the Cromwell Street murders, who had most obligingly offered to carry out the work while his employers were away on holiday. Apparently, there are many other con- servatories in Gloucestershire built in similar circumstances upon similar foun- dations.

No one who has regularly to do with murderers can be completely surprised by human conduct, however; and the most perfunctory of surveys of English murder over the last 100 years ought to be more than sufficient to convince any- one that the peculiarity and wickedness of man are not of recent origin.

To take but a single example at ran- dom, that of Ernest Albert Walker, a footman, who in 1922 lured a messenger boy to his employer's home and there beat him to death with an iron bar. The police found a note at the scene of the murder, written in the form of a list on black-edged paper, in the murderer's hand:

1. Ring up Sloane Street messenger office for boy.

2. Wait at front door.

3. Invite him in.

4. Bring him downstairs.

5. Ask him to sit down.

6. Hit him on the head.

7. Put him in the safe.

8. Keep him tied up.

9. At 10.30 torture.

10. Prepare for end.

11. Sit down, turn gas on.

12. Put gas light out.

13. Sit down, shut window.

Nevertheless, murder with an indefi- nitely large number of victims — who knows how many bodies the Glouces- testershire police will find or fail to fmd? — does seem a modern phenomenon, if not in its origins, then at least in its prevalence. One has even wondered whether the writing of articles such as this provides a stimulus to imitation and emulation.

It is in America, naturally, that serial killing has reached its apogee, both quantitatively and qualitatively. There, one such killer intermittently used his murdered mother's skull as a dartboard; another was thought to have killed between 100 and 500 victims (he was a murderer, remember, not a war crimi- nal). The FBI has estimated that there are perhaps 500 serial killers on the loose in the United States, and that nearly 20 per cent of its unsolved murder cases are committed by such people.

One of the reasons for the rise of the successful serial killer, perhaps, is the comparative ease of finding victims in modern mass society. Last year, for example, there were 30,475 reports of missing persons in London alone (the numbers of individuals involved was smaller, because many of them, such as children in municipal homes, would have been reported more than once in the year, having run away several times). Of these, 'only' 558 remained missing, some of whom will reappear in due course, or even many years later. Still, it is apparent that a substantial number of people go missing every year in Britain (about 4,000) and are not found: grist to the mill of the would-be killer.

Moreover, it seems that many more people 'disappear' without ever featuring among the statistics of reported missing persons. The police were unaware of the disappearance of at least two of the peo- ple whose bodies were found underneath No 25 Cromwell Street. Any large city hospital receives a small but steady stream of drifters who seem to have sev- ered all connection with those who once knew them, and are now without family, friends or acquaintances. Their complete disappearance from the face of the earth would be noticed by no one. Only the other day, I had a patient, the son of middle-class parents, who had left home some nine months before and had had no contact with them since. When I tele- phoned the mother concerning her son, she sounded relieved enough to know of his whereabouts, but she had informed no one of his initial disappearance. He would have been a perfect victim for a serial killer.

According to the police, the number of murder victims whose bodies are found but who remain unidentified is less than 10 per year. But this fact does not allow one to answer the disquieting question: How many people are murdered each year without the knowledge of anyone except the killer?

Certainly, the population from whom so many of my patients are drawn seems to be one in which a cunning serial killer might operate with ease. It is a popula- tion of many young drifters, who move from one address to another without apparent rhyme or reason, in the hope perhaps that the meaninglessness of their lives will be more supportable else- where, and whose relations with others are fleeting or transient, while those with their parents (or more likely, parent) are hostile and antagonistic. It is a world in which anonymity is easily attained and maintained, in which incuriosity about one's neighbours, a defence against the violence in which any contact with them whatsoever often results, reaches patho- logical degrees. If plenty of evil is spo- ken (and even shouted), none is seen or heard.

It is worth recalling that the serial killer, Dennis Nilsen, was caught not because anybody had missed his 16 vic- tims (the disappearance of only one of whom had been reported), but because their remains blocked the drains of the house in which he lived. Indeed, Nilsen himself, in an unconscious parody of Guardian-style thought, asked why soci- ety was so concerned for his victims after they were dead when it had done noth- ing for them while they were still alive. He even managed to persuade himself that, in killing them, he was acting humanely and in their best interest. How lucky they were, he said, to be out of it, to have travelled beyond this modern vale of tears.

Opportunity does not make the crime, of course: a motive and the means are necessary. But with an ever-increasing percentage of single-person households, with ever larger numbers of young peo- ple alienated from their parents and almost everyone else, with the blasé anonymity of much of modern life, opportunity for those with a predilection for serial murder will not be lacking. I do from time to time on my rounds meet strange, isolated people, up till now respectable and law-abiding citizens, who confess to me their wish to kill not one person but many, and whose admiration for those who have done so is great. I note down their addresses and steer a wide berth, lest their fantasy become reality.

Theodore Dalrymple