Sadistic Killers: Profiles of Pathological Predators (4 page)

And as he matured, his fantasies became increasingly cruel.

At 14 he left school and found a factory job. Soon he was drinking heavily. He remained desperately shy, and, even when dragged out to social events by relatives, sat in a corner and refused to dance.

But at 17 he lost his virginity to a much older woman who had recently been widowed. His religious upbringing may have caused him to see this sexual relationship as abusive and wrong – in any case, he would later state erroneously that it was the start of all his problems. He hinted to a friend that he’d told his mother but that she’d refused to intervene. He had sex with the widow many times but believed that she’d put a spell on him and that she’d ruined him for girls his own age. He increasingly hated younger women who he saw as the source of his nervous tension, and he had masturbatory fantasies of putting helpless females through a circular saw.

Early crimes

Like many murderers-to-be, he started with lesser crimes which involved trespass, being convicted of three separate counts of 31

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housebreaking in Dublin. In retrospect, he may have been looting these houses for women’s clothing – some of society’s cruellest killers have been cross-dressers who have identified on one level with women due to their strong bonding with their mothers, but who, on another level, despise this supposed weakness in themselves and want to obliterate it. He may also have been hoping that the female occupant would return home, giving him access to a victim in a safe house.

Byrne later spent two years in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps but they saw nothing untoward about his behaviour as he remained quiet and shy.

When he was 26 his mother relocated him, his brothers and three sisters to England. The Byrnes now settled in Warrington and Patrick found a job as a labourer, though he was unreliable and often reported for work in a drunken state.

The voyeur

Patrick Byrne was still living with his mother and had never had a steady girlfriend, but in his fantasies he raped and mastered every girl he came into contact with. This is a trait that’s especially common in embryonic-stage sadistic killers: unable to begin or maintain loving relationships, they spend endless hours developing a rich cruelty-based fantasy life.

It’s unknown when his peeping Tom activities began, but he was definitely an active voyeur when he found work in Birmingham and moved on his own to a lodging house there in the mid 1950s. His nickname by then was Acky and someone had written ‘Acky Byrne The Window Peeper’ on a wall close to his home.

Byrne found erotic satisfaction in watching unaware women undress. His favourite venues included the Birmingham YWCA hostel a mere half mile from his lodging house, the hostel where he would eventually kill. On one occasion he was caught on the stairs there and on another occasion he entered a 32

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Patrick Byrne

young teacher’s room, the sound of her door opening waking her. He stared at her breasts through her nightgown and walked towards her but she remained calm, explaining to him that she was engaged to another man. He seemed to respect this (it made her a ‘good woman’ in his eyes), apologised and agreed to leave. She then led him out of the front door, locked it and phoned the police.

Patrick was introduced to an 18-year-old girl at a social club and met her there weekly, though he never made a pass at her.

He insisted on walking her home because he warned that ‘bad men might rape or hurt her’. He talked of such potential attacks again and again. But many women were naïve about criminal psychology in the 1950s and they simply believed that Patrick was a gentleman who was looking out for them. In truth, he was projecting his own sexually sadistic fantasies onto other men and imagining they were as deviant as he.

Prison

Byrne now began to show his true colours, assaulting a policeman in January 1958. He was sentenced to two months in prison. A few months later he was drinking in a Warrington pub when the landlord refused to serve him again as he was clearly drunk and disorderly. ‘Give us the drinks or I’ll knife you,’ Byrne screamed, so his friends tried to eject him from the building, but he was holding onto the bar top so tightly that it took three of them to prise him loose.

The murder

On 23 December 1959, he drank heavily in a Birmingham pub at lunchtime and into the early afternoon. When he belatedly returned to the building site where he was working, his foreman ordered him to remain on the ground rather than risk him climbing the scaffolding. Shortly afterwards, Byrne 33

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decided to go home. He was walking along the road when he saw a girl going into the YWCA hostel in Edgbaston, one of his favourite peeping Tom locations. He went to the back of the hostel, peeped through a window, and saw another girl in a red jumper and underskirt combing her hair.

Deciding to get a better look, Byrne entered the hostel through an adjacent open window and stood on a chair so that he could peep through the glass partition above the door. After a few minutes it became obvious that the occupant – Sidney Stephanie Baird, who was always known by her middle name

– wasn’t going to undress further, so Byrne got off his chair.

Seconds later Stephanie, who must have heard a noise in the corridor, opened the door and asked him what he wanted.

When he said that he was looking for someone she offered to get the warden, whereupon Byrne attempted to silence her with a kiss.

He put his hands around the 29-year-old’s waist and pushed her back into the room, making her scream in terror. During the desperate struggle which followed, the contents of the room were strewn all over the place. The 27-year-old then put his hands around her throat and she fell to the floor with him on top, whereupon she sustained a fractured skull. Byrne continued to squeeze her throat whilst kissing her, then he bolted the door and undressed himself.

He removed Stephanie’s jumper and committed various sex acts upon her body. By now she was dead or dying. He’d later say, ‘I seemed to be in a hurry to do everything to her and hadn’t the patience.’ He undressed down to his shoes and socks then rolled all over her and entered her corpse. The fantasy had been to make girls scream by putting them through a circular saw – but now that he’d inadvertently killed his victim, he wanted to defile her body as much as possible, an extension of his sadism.

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Patrick Byrne

When he tired of necrophiliac sex, he went into her cupboard and fetched a table knife, carving around her right breast until it was fully excised. He then scored her chest with the blade and cut her back. He also attempted to cannibalise one of her breasts after putting sugar on it, and sawed her head off – an act which took between 15 minutes and half an hour.

Halfway through these mutilations, which doubtless brought him to orgasm, Byrne scribbled a note on an envelope which said: ‘This was the thing I thocht (sic) would never come.’ He would later say that he thought he might rape a girl but didn’t believe the day would come when he would murder for sex.

He left her body on the floor but placed her head and the knife blade on the bed. He seemed confused at his own motivation for removing the head, later telling the police

‘It’s been puzzling me since why I took the head off. It’s not connected with sex in all the books I’ve read.’ It’s likely that his hatred was aimed at another woman, and he was only able to depersonalise Stephanie’s body by removing her face.

Attempted murder

Byrne now dressed but he had the desire to kill another female victim, specifically an attractive one. With this in mind, he went into the hostel’s garden and took a bra from the line, wrapping a heavy rock in it. Thus armed, he made his way to the YWCA’s ironing room where he found 20-year-old Margaret McDonald Brown. He switched off the light then struck her on the head, but when she screamed loudly (her thick hair had cushioned the worst of the blow) he ran away. Margaret Brown collapsed and another resident phoned the police.

They began to search the hostel for the attacker, finding, to their horror, the decapitated body of Stephanie Baird. Her headless corpse was so horribly mutilated that one of the two policemen who found her vomited and the other went into deep shock and remained off work for many weeks.

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Meanwhile, Byrne hurried back to his lodging house a mere 400 yards away, changed out of his bloodstained work clothes and wrote a suicide note to his mother which said ‘I am very sorry youse will have to receive this horrible letter.’ He went on to suggest that he had a split personality but that the real him was good. Then he remembered that it was Christmas, a time of year which was incredibly important to his religious mother, so he decided to live and tore up the note.

He went out drinking with his cousin but was so shaken by the murder and attempted murder that he was afraid to sleep alone and so slept in his cousin’s room. The next morning, he took the train to his mother’s home in Warrington.

Manhunt

Meanwhile the police began one of the biggest manhunts in British history, employing bloodhounds and setting up roadblocks. Every sexual offender in the area was rounded up and interviewed. They also checked 4,000 handwriting samples against the note, painstakingly pieced together by the police, that Byrne had left behind.

By January, the Birmingham police were cooperating with half a dozen other British forces, ranging from York to West London. When this still didn’t bring in their killer, they got in touch with their European counterparts asking if they had any unsolved sex crimes with a similar signature.

Meanwhile they were also interviewing every man who lived or worked within a three-mile radius of the YWCA. During these interviews, Patrick Byrne’s landlady told them that he hadn’t returned from his mother’s after the Christmas break, which seemed suspicious, but his cousin gave him an alibi for the night of Stephanie’s murder. Luckily, the police went to his mother’s house in Warrington anyway and she explained that he’d now found a labouring job near her home so had moved in with her and wouldn’t be returning to Birmingham.

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Asked to attend Warrington police station on Tuesday 9 February 1960, he arrived and nervously denied any knowledge of the crime. But he looked stunned when they asked if they could take his fingerprints. The detective had a feeling that the somewhat immature labourer was holding something back and added, ‘Is there anything else you would like to say?’ Byrne hesitated then blurted out,

‘Yes, I want to tell you about the YWCA. I had something to do with that.’

He went on to give full details of the mutilations carried out on Stephanie Baird, details which hadn’t been made public. He said: ‘I cannot get it off my mind.’ He added that he’d had an equally strong urge to kill Margaret Brown – to kill all beautiful women – but that he’d panicked when she screamed and the stone swung out of his hand.

Trial

Byrne pleaded guilty to the murder of Stephanie Baird at Birmingham Assizes in March 1960, so only his degree of culpability had to be decided at the trial. Three psychiatrists testified for the defence, saying that Byrne was a sexual psychopath who was aroused by sexual perversion, their term for sadism. He was also sexually immature and partly insane – but at the time of the offence he’d known that his actions were wrong. The prosecution said that he was fully aware that he was killing his victim and mutilating her body so deserved to be found guilty of murder rather than manslaughter.

The all-male jury took only 45 minutes to find Patrick Joseph Byrne guilty of murder, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He appealed and the sentence was changed to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, but the court confirmed that the sentence should still be life.

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Freed

Patrick Joseph Byrne spent the next 33 years in prison, then was released in 1993 on licence, aged 61. But his subsequent behaviour concerned the Home Office and he was recalled as a precaution in 1999.

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CHAPTER THREE

VICTOR GLENFORD

MILLER

Victor Miller was responsible for one of the cruellest
child murders of the mid 1980s. His desire to hurt
young boys sent him out into the Herefordshire
countryside again and again.

Early beatings

Victor was born in 1956 to a Jamaican father and a white mother in England. The couple had three sons, but when one died, his mother deserted the household. Victor was distraught, but his father’s solution was to beat him with increasing severity and he became a deeply disturbed little boy.

The authorities removed him from his home and sent him to a residential school in the village of Bodenham. (He would later take one of his victims to a field a mile away from this locale.) His family rarely visited him during the next eight years.

Failed by the adults in his early life, Victor took to cycling for hours through the countryside, lost in his fantasies. Back in the school, he was desperate to control his environment and would tidy his few possessions and fold his clothes again and again. If anyone invaded his space he became alarmingly aggressive but 39

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on other occasions he retreated under his bed and would lie there, curled in the foetal position, for hours.

At 15 he had a nervous breakdown, after which he became a ferocious bully. He was moved to a state school but they were unable to cope with him. By his later teens he was before the courts for possessing a weapon, for burglary and for attacking other teenagers. In hindsight, it is clear that he was a fledgling psychopath. In the early 1970s he was sent to borstal where he continued to lie, steal and bully other inmates, becoming increasingly sadistic and frightening.