A woman is running. In the path, a man appears as if from nowhere. He is masked and he holds a knife. What are her choices? On one side is the canal and on the other a high, impassable fence, aluminum and concrete. She can run back to where she came from, but he will be faster and quicker. Perhaps she will be lucky, and some cyclist or walker will show up and the man might vanish as quickly as he had appeared. She calculates her chances of surviving. At this moment, they don't seem good. Perhaps he wants to rape her without taking her life? Perhaps her desire to live will lead her to undergo whatever the man wants, hoping it will be short of death. Would a struggle, an attempt to escape, make him angry enough to wield that knife to stab or slash her? Her rapid thoughts and instincts are in the hope of life. The base tone of them all: a man who wants to rape her could be careless enough of her to kill her. In this, she turns out to be right, not just psychologically and ethically but as a matter of history.
She, her. I am avoiding the first person. I, me. I was raped. This happened to me.
Almost forty years after I was raped, I happened upon the place where it occurred. I was on a walk. Some genius loci, some presentiment told me that I was very near, if not at, a place my body remembered.
I was raped at knifepoint along a canal towpath in the East End of London in the summer of 1984. I did not realize until recently -- prompted by that strange spirit of place to do my own research -- that the man who raped me was likely to be John Francis Duffy, who may have raped as many as seventy women at knifepoint across London from 1982 to 1986. Some of these attacks were perpetrated with David Mulcahy, with whom he formed a duo that became known as the Railway Killers. Duffy and Mulcahy raped and murdered Alison Day on December 29, 1985, near Hackney Wick, within walking distance of where I had been raped eighteen months earlier. In 1986, they murdered Maartje Tamboezer in Horsley, near Guildford, and Anne Lock in Brookmans Park, Hertfordshire.
"Two bodies with one brain, soulmates," is how one intended victim described the attackers' silent choreography of nods and glances and mutual understanding. It was an eerie distortion of Aristotle's definition of friendship: "one soul dwelling in two bodies." Duffy raped on his own; Mulcahy apparently did not. For the murders, it was always the two of them. This was an aspect that fascinated forensic psychologists. Their double act had begun at secondary school, in North London, where Mulcahy protected the diminutive Duffy from bullies. From the beginning, they apprenticed themselves in cruelty. It moved them to hilarity to club a hedgehog to death. They stole cars and went on joyrides; they got a kick out of spooking couples on Hampstead Heath, and cornering girls to grope and grab them. When did the inexorable escalation happen? It is not clear exactly when they expanded their repertoire of violation.
Duffy's mode of domination was rape. Mulcahy was reportedly more excited by the extremes of fear that he could instill in his victims. He prolonged their terror by striking them, marching them to other locations before raping them; he enjoyed watching them perform dangerous feats he would improvise. He forced Alison Day to walk across a narrow outer ledge of an iron bridge over a canal. He sought to control Duffy, too, by deepening his involvement in cruelty. Often, the two men gagged the women. One looked out, the other raped; they decided who should go first with a toss of a coin. They wore balaclavas and carried knives and used various methods to distract and overpower their victims. They chose spots near railway lines whose edgelands, tracks, and exit paths they had meticulously researched. According to Duffy's later testimony, Mulcahy talked about the "god-like feeling" he had when he committed murder. They developed a crude method of covering up their crimes: they would ask their victims to wipe themselves down with tissues, which the pair later burned. They both brought boxes of Swan Vestas matches, and Mulcahy stuck strips of tape inside his jacket to silence their victims. After murdering the women, they sometimes set fire to them to destroy "evidence."
It is possible that Mulcahy pushed Duffy into murder to deepen his complicity. On December 29, 1985, Mulcahy used Duffy's first name in front of Alison Day. They might have feared she could identify them, but Mulcahy's need for violence and terror had intensified, too, so he may not have needed any reason to escalate things. "We are in it together. We have got to do this together," Duffy later said, recalling Mulcahy's exhortations, his insistence. Both of them twisted the tourniquet that Mulcahy had made from Alison Day's blouse before they cast her into the water.
Operation HART -- short for Harley's Area Rape Team, after Superintendent Ian Harley, who led it -- an inquiry into a series of rapes that had been taking place across London, was disbanded in 1983, because of a lack of progress and funds. It was reconstituted, the following year, when investigators discovered more connections among the cases. In time, John Hurst, a police officer in Guildford who was investigating the murder of Maartje Tamboezer, and Charlie Farquhar, an officer in Romford investigating the murder of Alison Day, realized that there were similarities in the murders which had not been revealed to the press, and that both murders could be linked to the rapes. DNA testing was in its infancy; indeed, it was first used in a criminal case in 1986, in England. Computer databases were not yet widely shared among local authorities.
For a long time, I did not realize my part in the narrative. The decision to report the rape was taken out of my hands. The man on the towpath had grabbed the keys to my flat and told me that he knew where I lived. Less than a hundred yards on, around a bend in the path, there was a lockkeeper's cottage, and the lockkeeper saw me as I walked in shock toward the cottage. He asked me what was wrong. When I told him, he rushed off to search for the man, and his wife ushered me into their home. Despite my protestations -- the rapist had said he could find me -- the lockkeeper phoned the police, and I was taken to the Bow Road Police Station. I made a statement. They took swabs from all the entrances to my body; they took my clothes as evidence. Will I get them back? I asked forlornly.
But after that I heard nothing from the police for two years, until I was called to an identification parade, or police lineup, in Guildford, in November, 1986. By then, I was living and working in a new city. Two coppers in an unmarked car, cheery, burly, aftershave competing, picked me up from my home and drove me to a police station a hundred and fifty-odd miles away. I had little to go on -- the balaclava my rapist had worn had largely concealed him. But I hoped that confronting him in the lineup might prompt some identifying memory: I had seen his inflamed face, scarred by old acne, flushed with excitement, when, in an unbearably incongruous gesture, he had momentarily pulled up his mask to kiss me.
I remembered his cheap trainers, white but dirty. I remembered the smell of him. He smelled as if he came from an institution -- a rancid undertone and the harsh detergents used to bleach it out. Afterward, I realized it might have been the smell of unlaundered poverty. Perhaps I would smell him again and so single him out. I trusted that I would simply know when I stood in front of him, for in those days no glass screened the men from the women who hoped to recognize them. You met in the same space and breathed the same air again. I remember the distant curiosity of some of the men in the lineup; they seemed so casually divorced from our fears and our hopes. To my chagrin and frustration, I failed to identify the man who raped me, though I learned later that he was there.
Much later, when I read Simon Farquhar's book "A Dangerous Place: The Story of the Railway Murders," I discovered that five women in the Guildford lineup that I was part of had identified John Francis Duffy. A fourteen-year-old girl, face streaming with tears, had gone right up to him and pointed at him.
Before the identification parade, they put all the raped women together in a room. I can't recall exact numbers, but the room was full. I later read that twenty-seven women had been linked by Operation HART. Some of us had been raped by one man; others by two men acting together. The numbers cannot communicate what happened to this woman, to that woman, to each and every one. But they show the importunity, the scale. Even after one of the most extensive investigations in modern English history, the police can't know for certain exactly how many women the pair raped. Duffy kept thirty-seven sets of keys, perhaps including mine, as souvenirs.
I am now astonished that they gathered us all in the same room before we were called, one by one, to attempt our identifications, but if they had not done so I would never have heard a story that I have held in my heart ever since. I remember her as a young woman, and since I myself was young then -- twenty-five -- she must have been several years younger than me. She had been dragged and pushed by two men into a copse on Hampstead Heath. As she entered the dark woods, where the ground, I imagine, was sloped and full of tangled tree roots, she tripped and began to fall. The smaller man was the one holding her and pulling her along. But, as she tripped, he supported her and stopped her from falling. The young woman said that the small one then argued with the big man and persuaded him to let her go. I like to think that for a transforming moment he had experienced himself in a different way. He was a savior, not a rapist, and he could not harm her.
After the lineup, I once more heard nothing. I was not given the man's name or told whether he had been caught. I did not read the red-top papers that covered Duffy's trial or see the more discreet notices in the broadsheet papers, so I had no idea that the man I had been called in to identify was tried at the Old Bailey -- or, as it's formally known, the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales -- and convicted and sentenced to life, in 1988, for five rapes and for the murders of Maartje Tamboezer and Alison Day. (He was acquitted of the rape and murder of Anne Lock.) In 1989, I left Britain and took a job in the United States, teaching medieval English literature, still knowing nothing about his arrest, trial, and conviction.
Here is how I discovered my part in this story. In September, 2023, on a visit to the U.K., I was walking the Capital Ring, an ingeniously composed seventy-eight-mile route circumnavigating London's center, with my niece. The trail traverses parks, woodlands, pastures, and cemeteries. It's an urban walk, of course -- passing great Victorian terraces, the suburbs spawned by the Tube lines of the thirties and forties, the docklands hugging the Thames and its arteries, once the commercial hub of maritime traffic and seaborne trade. Inside the Woolwich Foot Tunnel, the Sweet Thames, singing softly, flows over and over you. The route casually encompasses the palatial follies of rich men from long ago and the built hallucinations of more recent architects -- bulbous, curvy, fantastic. It incorporates sudden drops into the uncanny silence of the waterways and canals with their locks, joins, and channels, with their cold smells, coots, and dragonflies.
We walked the ring in stages, as the weather and our schedules permitted. We had taken to linking two or three sections together for treks that lasted a leisurely day. On this particular morning, we planned to begin in Stoke Newington, in North London, and head south and east via Hackney Wick; these eight or so miles skirt the canalized section of the River Lea, as it branches out into the myriad channels that make up the area known as Bow Backs. There's a complex lock system -- Bow Locks -- that links the industrial trading routes with the Lea. The warehouses that line the canals are being converted into luxury flats and artist studios. Any barges are now kept for love or for living. In the summer, open-air pubs are lively with Pimm's-fuelled laughter. The path passes the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park on its left, part of the massive reconstruction of the entire area undertaken, at the millennium, for the London Olympics of 2012. Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond's Orbit pushes into the East London skyline, with its deliberate counterpoint of wobble and structure.
I've reconstructed the exact geography retrospectively. At the time, my niece was reading the maps, and I had no idea where, exactly, I was. I knew only that I was vaguely near my former home in Bow. Our walk was a saunter, a delightful, wayward, exploratory street haunting, to use Virginia Woolf's term for the adventure and discovery of walking in the city. We emerge from our houses, she says, and "the shell-like covering which our souls have secreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all of these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye."
It is this deeply pleasurable way of being that the rapist interrupts. And now your enormous eye must be watchful, forever on the alert; the exhilarating self-forgetfulness that allows the world to reveal itself to you has disappeared. Now the place you are in might obscure a threat, a menace you must hold in mind. The world is no longer yours to behold or to share in. The philosopher Susan Brison, in her book "Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self," writes that after suffering a nearly fatal assault and rape, in France, in 1990, she felt as if she had a "perceptual deficit": a "hazardous lack of eyes in the back of my head."