It was around this same time that Matthews started seeing her first serious boyfriend, James Gilbert. Ten years her senior and working as a teacher, Gilbert had a reputation as a bit of a ladies’ man and liked to treat his women roughly. He and Matthews experimented with a vast range of fetishes and perversions; she desperately wanted to find something that gave her the same level of satisfaction that she had felt when she cut into that first body. Nothing even came close and after less than a year together the couple split.
As time went by, the thrill of cutting into a long dead, cold body faded more quickly that she could ever have imagined. Like a drug addict, she realized that she needed a more powerful high, a more intense hit, if she was ever going to re-create that first beautiful moment. She would need to witness the moment of death itself.
She began seeking out snuff movies – an extreme form of pornographic film in which the performers are allegedly killed on camera. Matthews soon learned that such films were little more than an urban legend and, a few poorly made fakes aside, did not exist. The closest she came to true snuff were dozens of so-called ‘crush’ videos in which small animals were tortured and killed on film.
Her favourite began with a close-up of a guinea pig lying spread-eagled on the floor, each of its tiny legs fastened in place by sticky tape. The camera slowly pulled back to show a woman, seen only from the knees down, pacing around the stricken creature in bright red stilettos. Her voice was soft and low: ‘You are my victim. Are you frightened, little man? You know that your destiny is under my heels …’ Squeals of pain rang out as the sharp point of one stiletto was brought down on each leg in turn, shattering the bones. Next, the creature’s back was crushed under a toe, cigarettes were stubbed out on its fur, and hip and shoulder bones were systematically trampled and broken, until, finally, the woman killed it by driving her heel through its skull. The torture lasted almost thirty minutes.
For Matthews the film was an interesting diversion, but she knew that she needed something involving real people, not just animals.
Once more, she discovered she was not alone. Her research soon threw up the fact that several murderers had recorded their acts on video, and she sought out the results. In the early 1980s Charles Ng and Leonard Lake videotaped their torture of the women they would later kill. Serial killers Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka had videotaped some of their sex crimes in the early 1990s. Time and time again she was led to believe she had finally tracked down the footage, only to be disappointed.
The rise of the internet, combined with the war in Iraq, proved to be her saviour. Again and again she watched gruesome videos depicting actual murders and deaths, but still felt removed from the activity. Before too long, she realized she would have to get more involved herself.
Then she came across the case of Alexander Pichushkin, an unassuming supermarket worker from Russia. He would offer passers-by in a southern Moscow park a shot of vodka or beer. Sometimes he offered to show them his dog’s grave. Or he would invite them to a game of chess. Then, without any warning, he would bludgeon them to death with a hammer. He would record each murder by marking each one on the square of a chessboard. He had been caught after one of his intended victims escaped. Arrested, he instantly confessed to what he had done and claimed to have murdered at least forty-eight people.
In a televised confession after his arrest Pichushkin told his interviewer: ‘For me, a life without murder is like a life without food for you. I felt like the father of all these people, since it was I who opened the door for them to another world. I never would have stopped, never. They saved a lot of lives by catching me. For me, the act of killing was a perpetual orgasm.’
There was little doubt about what Matthews had to do. Becoming a serial killer opened up a whole new world of sensation and pleasure. She learned that spontaneous orgasms at the moment of death were common among serial killers. Matthews desperately wanted to experience that for herself.
But how to choose her victims, how to avoid being caught? One obvious answer was to pursue pathology as her speciality. That would bring her into regular contact with police and other law enforcement authorities and keep her one step ahead of them and their techniques.
Having studied the work of others in the field, Matthews also decided that her victims had to be people that no one would care that much about, people no one would look too hard to find if they vanished. Deciding what to do with the bodies would be the most important part of her work. Without a body, it was unlikely that a murder case would ever begin and there would be nothing to point the finger of suspicion at her.
It was around this time that she bumped into her old boyfriend, James Gilbert, once more. He was depressed and contemplating a move abroad. He had threatened to expose a paedophile ring at the school where he had been teaching. He told Matthews – far too insistently, she thought – that he himself had not been involved in the abuse but that several of the guilty men had said they would name him if they were themselves exposed.
The couple briefly reconciled. But this did little to lift Gilbert out of his increasingly deep depression at the prospect of having to come forward and testify against the paedophile ring. And that’s when Matthews realized he would be her perfect first victim.
Unable to provide her with sexual satisfaction in life, he would make amends in death.
Matthews planned the crime carefully. With access to corpses and cadavers all day long at work, she had perfected her technique long before she came to kill for the first time. And she instantly knew that her first time would not be her last.
In the space of thirty-six hours – the time that had elapsed since she had gone on the run to avoid being arrested – Jessica Matthews had seen it all. She had watched Collins rise first thing in the morning and then go out jogging. Collins had returned home half an hour later, via the paper shop, and cooked breakfast. At around eight fifteen she had climbed into her car to take her daughter to school. From there she had driven directly to the incident room. The routine had differed slightly the day before.
Since Matthews had disappeared, Collins had spent increasing amounts of her time interviewing family members, friends and colleagues in order to build up a picture of what the pathologist was really like, in an attempt to discover her hiding place.
Matthews wasn’t at all concerned by any of this. She knew that there was no one out there who would be able to do anything to lead them to her. She was as safe as safe could be. And in the meantime she was free to continue stalking her prey. Eager to know every little thing about the woman who was pursuing her, she logged her daily movements, her clothes and even went as far as to learn what she ate for lunch.
Once she was convinced that Collins had seen her but it turned out to be a false alarm. The disguise that she had chosen was extremely effective. So much so that Collins could almost have run into her with a supermarket trolley and been none the wiser.
Matthews hadn’t quite decided how she felt about Stacey Collins. She was by far the cleverest of the officers on the murder squad. She had seen her work her magic in previous cases and known what a thrill and challenge it would be to go up against her head to head.
She had to admit she was surprised when she got the early morning call when Collins had clearly begun to suspect her. She knew she had been taking an enormous chance when it came to meeting up with Collins for dinner and slipping little clues into the conversation. She knew too she had been taking an enormous chance when it came to helping Collins along, giving her the information about the possibility of the bodies being frozen and about the tattoo. But it had been worth it. The thrills she had felt as a result had been so completely and utterly delicious.