GRACIOUS David-West, 26, is your prototypical guy next door— young, nonchalantly rumpled as they come, and blessed with a mien that even an angel would envy. But appearances can be deceptive, and no more so than with Mr. David-West, whom the Rivers State police recently revealed as the brains behind the deaths of 15 different women across three states: five in Port Harcourt, seven in Owerri, Imo State, and another three in Lagos. Mr. David-West was picked up after operatives of the Rivers State Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), acting on a tip, flagged down a Uyo-bound commercial bus in which he was travelling and ordered all the passengers to disembark.
Why would a young man go on a killing spree just for the fun of it, and why would he persist in stalking and killing innocent young women even after his cover had been blown and law enforcement had placed a bounty on his head? Mr. David-West’s apparent confession to the Commissioner of Police (CP) Rivers State, Mustapha Dandaura, offers some clues: “I don’t know what is making me kill, immediately the urge comes on me, I kill. After killing, I will start regretting. I even went to a church and told the pastor that I have been killing girls in hotels. The pastor invited me to see the senior pastor during a programme but I waited and couldn’t see him, so I left the church and went back and lodged in a hotel and resumed killing.”
We can surmise from the above excerpt that Mr. David-West drew some pleasure from killing, even as he was frustrated by his inability to stop. This element of psychological gratification is consistent with basic psycho-social theorizing on crime. Two other elements of the David-West killings that make them psychologically “sensible” are sex (according to reports, Mr. David-West typically killed his victims after consensual sexual intercourse); and financial remuneration (he would typically collect ATM cards and pin numbers from his victims, which he then used to make withdrawals from their accounts after he has killed them).
But do these elements suffice to justify the killing spree? Did Mr. David-West kill for sex? Hardly. He typically had sex before falling upon his victims and could very easily have let them go scot free. Was it for the money? Perhaps, but from his ostensible testimony, he hardly made the sort of money that someone would want to kill for. In any case, all his victims offered him money so that he could spare their lives, meaning that he could have taken their money and walked away without killing them.
So, why did he do what he did? There are no easy answers. Clearly, Mr. David-West is a deeply disturbed man, and his altered psychological profile will probably come up at some point during his criminal trial. What we find rather disturbing about this case is the drift that appears to have characterised Mr. David-West’s life, and the absence of any moral or parental authority to ground him. Even the church was of little avail in this case as the pastor to whom he had been referred failed to follow through for some reason. Mr. David-West resembles a lot of 26-year-olds out there.
Having nowhere else to look, we are forced to turn our gaze upon the Nigerian society. The historian and polymath Henry Thomas Buckle, famously wrote that “The society prepares a crime, the criminal commits it.” Buckle didn’t imply that the individual who commits a crime bears no responsibility; on the contrary, he was merely affirming another sociological insight, this time Emile Durkheim’s, to the extent that crime is always implicated in “the fundamental conditions of social organisation, as they are understood.”
There is something foul and sinister in the Nigerian body politic. Yes, Mr. David-West must face the music for his crimes, but it is the Nigerian society that is ultimately on trial.