Sadistic Killers: Profiles of Pathological Predators (8 page)

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Police rushed to the scene and found Deborah alive but unrecognisable. She died in hospital three days later without regaining consciousness.

Paul Beart pleaded guilty on 5 November 2001 at Bristol Crown Court. The following day he was sentenced to life imprisonment with the recommendation that he never be released. He has now been assessed as an untreatable sexual sadist and psychopath.

DAVID JAMES COPELAND

In April 1999, David Copeland bombed residents in Brixton, Brick Lane and Soho, causing death and horrific disfigurement.

Public interest centred on his racist agenda and, as a result, his underlying sadism was completely ignored.

Small in stature, David (born 15 May 1976) was bullied at school. His dyslexia went unrecognised and he was put into a remedial reading group. His genitals didn’t develop at a normal rate so they had to be examined by clinicians, something which deeply embarrassed him. By 12 he was having sadistic fantasies about torturing his classmates and burning down his school.

His sense of inferiority deepened when it became clear that his younger brother had a high IQ and his older brother was street smart. Believing himself unable to compete, he locked himself away in his room playing heavy metal music for hours at a time. Contrary to popular belief, this music tends to calm down its listeners, who feel that the bands understand them.

Professor Jeffrey Arnett interviewed dozens of such teens for his book
Metalheads: Heavy Metal Music and Adolescent Alienation
and found such music ‘purged their angst’.

But it was going to take more than a few tunes to relieve David’s loneliness and inferiority complex, so by secondary school his sadism had deepened. He was one of only two boys 65

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who watched what they believed was a snuff video in which people were extensively tortured, probably the well-known fake snuff movie
Faces of Death
. He also began to self-medicate by inhaling glue.

At 16 he got drunk with a few friends and vandalised a building in Aldershot. He was so drunk when his mother came to the police station that she was afraid to take him home to his father, and instead sat with him for several hours in the car.

A year later he and his older brother assaulted a neighbour, and Copeland was given community service. In the same time period he began to have sexual fantasies in which he was a powerful SS officer who enjoyed raping numerous female sexual slaves and torturing men.

His parents asked him if he’d met a nice girl yet and, paranoia possibly setting in, he believed that they thought he was homosexual. He began to carry a knife when he went out at night and wondered what it would be like to use it on a gay male. Though heterosexual male sadists prefer to hurt girls and women, they will single out boys and men if these are easier targets. Their strongest motive is to cause pain and fear, so any sentient partner will do. Animals are the third category targeted but they are less desirable as, though they can show signs of suffering, they obviously can’t respond verbally to the sadist’s commands.

In 1995, David’s mother left his father. Apparently this didn’t affect 19-year-old David very much as he’d seen his parents grow apart for many years. He remained living with his father, sometimes signing on and sometimes doing casual labour work. The two men continued to argue interminably.

The following year Copeland was pleased when a bomb exploded at a rock concert in Atlanta after the Olympic Games.

He later admitted that he was excited by the suffering.

At 20 he moved into a bedsit close to his work, a move which increased his loneliness and isolation. He began to neglect his 66

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personal hygiene, one of the many signs of depression and low self-esteem. Once a month he visited a prostitute, always choosing a different woman. He wanted to ask them to tie him up but he didn’t have the courage and settled for vanilla sex. Ashamed at his own shyness, he constantly thought about suicide, though fantasies of drugging girls and doing what he wanted with them would temporarily cheer him up.

At 21 he joined the British National Party with its keep-Britain-white ethos, and suddenly had meetings to go to and a social life. Later he joined a religious movement called Christian Identity which identifies the chosen race as white. Now Copeland was no longer the girlfriendless semi-literate man without a purpose – instead he was the chosen representative of an omnipotent deity.

Unfortunately a belief in this deity didn’t quell his sadism and he began to collect photographs of bomb amputees, war atrocities and mutilated murder victims. He was particularly thrilled to find a photo of a starving African baby and would later tell police that he ‘got off ’ on such images. He also loved the movie
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
, which represents the aimless life and supposedly daily violence of the late serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. He became equally enamoured of the Arkansas religious group Kingdom Identity which believes that homosexuality should be punished by death.

Deciding to kill and maim the various societal groups which he despised, Copeland turned to the Internet and learned how to make explosives. He began to have panic attacks so returned home to his father for a few months but stabilised after being prescribed sleeping pills. He resumed his rambling talk to acquaintances about wanting to hurt black people and remained generally aggressive. The rows at home continued and eventually his father threw him out.

In January 1999, David Copeland moved into a bedsit in Farnborough and found a job doing engineering work on the 67

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Jubilee Line. A sympathetic co-worker befriended the boy, later describing him as ‘immature, unloved and insecure’.

But 22-year-old David found a source of affection when he bought a white rat for company. He doted on his pet and would later pay for it to have the best veterinary care. (Though many sadists torture animals, a few – such as Christopher Wilder

– are genuinely fond of them. After all, an animal can offer unconditional love, something that many sadists have never known.)

Every night the young man returned to his bedsit and communed with his rat then spent hours making bombs, testing them on a quiet stretch of wasteland. He would later say that he wanted to be remembered.

On 17 April 1999, he set off for Brixton carrying a bag with a pipe bomb inside. The bomb nestled within a sandwich container which was packed with thousands of nails which he hoped would lacerate human flesh.

Brixton bomb

Copeland travelled by train and cab to Brixton Market and put the bag with the bomb down by a busy bus stop. He then returned home to watch the news.

At teatime the bomb exploded, sending nails into people’s heads, limbs and groins. Two people lost an eye and a two-year-old boy had a nail penetrate his brain. Ironically, given that the bomber wanted to hurt black and Asian people, 24 of the 42

victims were white.

But the young man with the bag had been captured on CCTV

so Copeland’s freedom was limited. Later, when the photos were printed in national newspapers, one of his colleagues would recognise him and give his name to the police.

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Brick Lane bomb

Excited by the carnage which he’d caused, the dispossessed young man now focused on the Asian market at Brick Lane in the East End of London. He planned to cause as much carnage as possible before he was identified. He arrived on Saturday 24

April, only to find that the market was now held on a Sunday.

He also saw several white people, the so-called chosen race, in the vicinity. But sadism is no respecter of colour, so he set the bag containing the ticking pipe bomb down beside a car and left the area.

The subsequent explosion blew the vehicle apart and damaged nearby shops and restaurants, perforating several shoppers’ eardrums. Others had glass from nearby windows embedded in their heads.

Visions of torture

David Copeland would later tell police that he felt nothing at the carnage he’d caused, but he continued to seek out cruel images, going to Soho and renting a video which he believed featured bondage and torture. He was incensed to find that it actually showed coprophilia (defecation for erotic purposes, one of the least popular fetishes.)

Whilst returning the video, he heard on the shop radio that the police had video footage of the bomber. Determined to cause one final act of mayhem, he fetched the bomb-making equipment from his bedsit and took it to a hotel.

The pub blast

On Friday 30 April, he travelled to Soho and left his bag containing a bomb in a pub favoured by gay men, the Admiral Duncan. The bomb exploded, tearing the skin and flesh from 69

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nearby revellers. Over a hundred men and women were burnt by the intense blast and lacerated by the flying nails.

Andrea Dykes and her unborn child were killed instantly and her husband remained unconscious for three weeks. One of their friends, who had just agreed to be their child’s godfather, died of his injuries the following day. Three men lost a leg and a fourth man had to have both his legs amputated. The scene resembled the horror of a wartime battlefield.

Meanwhile David Copeland travelled back to his bedsit, well pleased with his handiwork. He loaded a crossbow and put it beside his bed so that he could shoot one of the arresting officers he knew would call.

But when the constabulary arrived, he gave himself up without a fight. Asked why he’d planted the bombs, he said

‘to terrorise people’. Questioned about his choice of targets, he said that Brixton was a black area, Brick Lane an Asian area and Soho frequented by gays.

During interviews, the police asked him 16 times why he had planted the bombs and he gave incoherent replies but finally said that he was ‘totally shot away, a loner’. When they asked why, he added, ‘My family fucked me up.’

They asked the 23-year-old if he realised the implications of what he’d done, including years of imprisonment. He nodded and said, ‘I had no life anyway.’

He talked at length about his philosophy, completely failing to see the irony in his own words. He told police that ‘white people were the best mentally’; this from a boy who wrote about being a ‘profit’ when what he meant was ‘prophet’. He added that he hated homosexuals because ‘the whole point is to breed’. But he’d never bred, only briefly having a girlfriend.

Belated voices

At first Copeland was on remand in Belmarsh prison but he became increasingly tearful and suffered from insomnia, 70

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plus there were fears that he was schizophrenic, so he was transferred to Broadmoor, a prison hospital for the mentally ill. There he went on hunger strike, protesting at the drugs he had to take. An insightful psychiatrist noted that Copeland had

‘significant sadistic elements to his thoughts and behaviour’. It was a sadism which had previously been ignored, the bombings being labelled as racist and homophobic crimes.

At the Old Bailey, he pleaded guilty to causing the three explosions and guilty to manslaughter rather than to the murder of the dead victims. The defence said that he was schizophrenic but a psychiatric nurse who had examined him when he was first taken into custody noted that he was sane.

Copeland himself told doctors that he’d originally faked symptoms of mental illness in order to get ‘nutted off ’ to Broadmoor, but now he found the mental hospital much worse than a regular prison.

The prosecution noted that, though he had a personality disorder, it was not strong enough to impair his judgement.

He’d known exactly what he was doing when he’d planted all three bombs. On 30 June 2000, he was given six life sentences and returned to Broadmoor indefinitely.

Copeland remains in the maximum security hospital, doubtless disturbed that the notoriety he so desired is already fading. In 2003 he was attacked by another patient whilst in his room.

JOHN TAYLOR

John Taylor was cruel towards animals from an early age, but as he matured into manhood he extended this cruelty towards his female lovers. In time, he became predatory towards young girls then committed at least two particularly savage rapes. In 71

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2000 he abducted a teenage girl and took her to his home where he sadistically murdered her.

He was born in 1956, the first child of Margaret and Frank Taylor. They went on to have another two children, a girl and a boy. His introduction to lawlessness came early when an unnamed adult in his life took him poaching and encouraged him to kill animals and birds. At nine, he joined the Boys’

Brigade and enjoyed going camping with them in Lindley Woods.

John didn’t do well at school and left at age 15 without any qualifications. Thereafter he drifted from one unskilled job to the next. At 18 he became a Boys’ Brigade officer at Armley United Reformed Church, but he horrified one young boy during a countryside outing by snatching a fox from the hounds and stabbing it to death with a knife. On other occasions he would catch a rabbit, torture it then kill and mutilate it.

Whilst carrying out his Boys’ Brigade duties one day he met Janet, who ran the Girls’ Brigade from the same church and worked as a nursery school teacher. They married when John was 21.

Three years later they had a son and two years after that a daughter. They then bought a family home – a terraced house