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What makes a serial killer? How can the cruel and perverse behaviour of men and women who commit crimes of murder and sexual sadism ever be understood? And how can contact with perpetrators of these acts of horror be borne?
In her installation, “No-One Escapes” Carole Hayman presents us, the viewer, with multiple voices , showing simultaneously on four screens. We see close-ups of the faces of those who struggle to explain the meaning of the crimes they encounter and describe its impact on them.
This is an installation as compelling as it is moving and disturbing. One is left wondering what it is that cannot be escaped from. It seems that it is not only the intergenerational transmission of violence, with its toxic imprint, that is inescapable, but also too the fascination with horror, sexual perversion and cruelty that is revealed in all of the professionals who speak, and seen in the viewers who watch, spellbound.
These films are apparently free flowing interviews with the direct victims of the Wests, like Anne Marie West , the police officers, lawyers, journalists involved in the case and a series of psychiatric experts addressing the questions of how such killing and sexual torture can be understood, and how it has touched on them.
As the supposedly dispassionate experts begin to explain the science of forensic psychology and analysis their own fascination with horror, and their own dark side becomes clearer. The line between forensic psychiatrist and perpetrator becomes increasingly blurred; as one forensic psychiatrist, Ray Travers, jokes, women who are attracted to men who murder are “frustrated forensic psychiatrists”. Several others describe how working with patients who kill allows them to enact violence vicariously and nearly all allude to the lure of evil in fantasy. What people like the Wests have done is to convert these murderous, deviant sexual feelings into reality, in horrific acts of cruelty against their own children and vulnerable young girls.
At another chilling moment, forensic psychologist, Brian Thomas Peters, suggests to the unseen interviewer, that he “spread you out like butter” to reveal her hopes, desires, achievements and fantasies over a lifetime and then see how different she would all be from the psychopathic men and women he sees. He implies that if we were to know everything about someone, that made them what they were, the shock of their actions would be dispelled. No-one, not even Hayman, he argues, would be impressive. With this flirtatious suggestion we suddenly become aware of Hayman’s presence in making the film, coaxing out these nakedly confessional pieces. We see how her influence and her framing of these talking heads, while invisible, is also inescapable.
The morality of the installation is a curious mix. It is a passionate entreaty to examine ourselves, and the society we live in that allows runaway girls to be lost to us, as Nicci Gerrard describes, all the lost children we see everyday, on street corners and under bridges, to whom we turn a blind eye. But it also an invitation to get inside the horror scenes the Wests created, in a way that feels rather more sordid, and itself perverse. The macabre humour one policeman displays, as he recalls how Fred West detailed the number of people he killed, “9 (approx)” laughs as he says, “like you could forget”; this invites the viewer to laugh too, at the impossibility of forgetting how many one has killed. Of course for Fred West, killing was something he could forget, or mis-remember.
The details of the perverse crimes are, at times, graphically presented by Anne Marie West, various policeman and lawyers, in the case, but other facts are skirted over, as Hayman reminds us, this is not a documentary, but an exposure of ourselves to horror, and attempts at understanding. The simultaneous screenings cannot be attended to together, conveying something of the difficulty in creating meaningful narratives from incoherent violence.
The screens are also perspectives from the various participants and observers of the crime scene, who converge at the point of their own response to crimes like these. The cold fascination of the Counsel for Rosemary West, gives way to an admission of her own attachment to all her clients, and sense of the mob braying for her blood, made worse by her being a woman.
The difficulty for society in accepting the possibility of violence in women is a central theme throughout the films, and the stark reality of Rosemary West, her active participation in the crimes and murder of her own daughter and abuse of other children directly challenges this widespread taboo. This relates directly to my work on female violence, and on the profound social resistance to acknowledging its reality without then demonising violent women. The particular horror surrounding Rosemary West is evident throughout these interviews. Like Myra Hindley she is seen as inhuman, evil, beyond redemption.
Cruelty is often a re-enactment of the experience of abuse and torture. This is poignantly expressed by Marian Partington in her search for healing from the pain of knowing her sister was one of the victims. She says, of the tools found in the Wests’ horror chamber, “when I see gags I wonder who gagged them? When I see bodies cut into bits, I wonder, who cut them up?”
Although the dead cannot speak to us of their own torture, their deaths are not forgotten in this installation, and the impact of their sacrifice is evident. Anne Marie’s painful description of rapes and penetration with sexual toys is overwhelmed by the horror of a further memory as she sadly and calmly tells us of her discovery of her sister, tied up naked on the bed and gagged, with pleading eyes. “I closed the door and locked it…it still haunts me,” she says, “that was the last time I saw her.” Can we close the door on this graphic image of a tortured child?
The voices of the other relatives of the victims, are equally poignant and invite us to consider the humanity of both perpetrator and victim. The son of x, killed by the Yorkshire Ripper, describes his own desire to kill random men, as the Ripper killed random women and his outrage at newspaper coverage that distinguishes between the deaths of “Prostitutes or Innocent Women.”
The violence of sentimentality is depicted here, in these up close interviews, and the attempt to go beneath the surface to understand the impact of these crimes on all who encounter it. We see how idealised, sentimental images of women cover over the facts of female cruelty and perversion, how the idea of fallen women and good girls leads us not to look for those young women who run away from home, vulnerable and often abused, only to enter prostitution and become the kind of lost girl the Wests invited in.
Within the façade of ordinary domestic scenes gross acts of perversion occur daily, and incorporate more and more people into their net. Welldon describes these scenes as “domestic holocausts” the evidence of which needs to be destroyed. But the evidence remains, not just in the buried bones underneath the house, but in the minds of those who were part of this household. Chief Inspector X describes how Fred listens to the sound of Rosemary having sex with strangers in the living room, while the children watch television, Anne Marie, brave enough finally to testify against her father and stepmother, whom she tells us she still loves, talks of her rapes as part of the fabric of her daily life, she carries on an ordinary life now, wanting not to hurt anyone.
The borders between victim and perpetrator are shady places, and the point is repeatedly made, that the Wests were themselves victims before perpetrators. Here again we see how the imprint of early cruelty and abuse is shaped. Anne Marie herself, so clearly a victim of her father and stepmother’s sexual cruelty and perversion, describes her own involvement in the abuse of other children. Here, in situations of extreme abuse incest, rape and sadism are the norm. Her honest disclosure that she still loves her parents, and her description of her family as like “the Waltons” is evidence of how a child’s loyalty to the parent, and acceptance of the treatment she or he receives leaves indelible imprints.
These are poignant, alarming moments in the films, and are hard to process as the emotional intensity and the extreme nature of the crimes attack our capacity to think, But the humanity of the voices that speak helps in what could be an impossible task, although the intimate nature of their self disclosure can make uncomfortable viewing.
Hayman’s work powerfully captures the force of serious sexual abuse and killing, the compulsive nature of deep perversion and the capacity of adults to destroy their children’s lives and minds. She does not escape from pointing the finger at us all, those of us who work on the“right side” of this horror, but exposes our own deviance, weakness, fascination and voyeurism when reflecting on the nature of our contact with those who kill. Several experts describe the impact of forensic work, its visceral and penetrating quality: Professor Coid remarks on people getting inside him, and dreaming about his patients, Cleo Van Velson too, worries when she dreams about her violent, psychopathic patients, whom she says want to “get inside the body”, with their intrusive curiosity. Is this not what we too are doing when we watch these films and stare at the impassive, made-up, pained or contorted faces of the talking heads?
The sense of being haunted by those who kill and torture and by their victims is a recurrent theme. Feeling haunted by someone Other, who has enacted evil may in fact, disguise recognition of the possibility for violence in ourselves that Hayman has so artfully revealed.
Anna Motz
Consultant Clinical and Forensic Psychologist
Author of The Psychology of Female Violence: Crimes Against the Body
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