Byline: GORDON RAYNER;GEOFFREY LEVY
DAVID COPELAND was a creation of the pressures of modern life and the curse of its incessant message that to be popular you must be beautiful, and to be happy you must be envied. Like millions of others, he hungered to be admired, to 'belong'.
In a previous, gentler age, David Copeland would probably have accepted being smaller than most other men and probably come to terms with his pubescent uncertainty about his sexuality.
In the libertarian times at the end of the 20th Century he had only to switch on his computer to learn how to make nail bombs from the Internet.
Then he blew up people by way of easing his own frustrations.
Three dead, scores disabled and maimed, lives ruined in a malign, confused 'revenge' attack on society ... when he was arrested on May 1 last year he proudly explained to police that he wanted to rid the country of gays and ethnic minorities.
Such misfits are normally associated with a deprived upbringing, financially, morally or domestically. But there was no broken home in Copeland's life until he was 19.
No poverty either - his father Stephen was a self-employed heating and air conditioning engineer, his mother Caroline a nurse. When David was born on May 15, 1976, they lived in Hounslow, West London, but by 1985 they were able to move to peaceful Yateley, Hampshire.
There with their three sons, Jonathan, David and the youngest, Paul, they lived comfortably in a [pounds sterling]175,000 detached, four-bedroom house.
David Copeland wanted for nothing. His toy cupboard was always full, there was a slide in the garden, he had his own set of golf clubs and a guitar.
Family holidays included a trip to Disney World in Florida.
He was, says his 48-year-old mother, a 'sweet, gentle, beautiful little boy' who would trot off happily to Cubs once a week and enjoyed swimming and cycling. He went to Yateley School, one of the better comprehensives.
SO WHAT went wrong to change him into a killer who was able to plant bombs without caring, as he admitted, about the appalling human consequences?
We live in an age when sexuality, as well as sex itself, is constantly being thrust at the public and gays are exhorted to 'come out'.
Just what effect this had on David we can never be certain, but by the time he was 13 he was uncertain about his emerging sexuality and began to worry that he might be gay. He remembers wondering how his parents would react if he ever came home with a boyfriend, and decided they would be horrified. This in itself set off a cycle of loneliness that added to his problems for in his confused mind - a mind, incidentally, that would achieve nine GCSEs at the age of 16 - even a normal friend might be construed as something more intimate by his parents. So he was a boy who feared friendship.
In a conventional suburban community somewhat influenced by the Aldershot army base not far away, homophobia was rife and the idea that he might be homosexual filled him with panic.
According to his family, he never confided his fears. And, locked up in his own mind, these uncertainties escalated to obsession. He convinced himself that others had guessed his innermost thoughts.
Imagine, now, a teenage boy in a comfortable home hearing his family singing the theme song to The Flintstones, and dreading the line 'we'll have a gay old time' because he thought it was an oblique reference to him, their way of saying they knew his secret. That was David Copeland. In his troubled mind he recalls an occasion when some of the family turned and looked at him as they reached the dreaded line in the song.
Copeland's father says it was his wife - they are now divorced - who turned and stared at David, taunting him. But Copeland's mother, who does love the Flintstones, can't remember this ever happening. 'Not at all. I would never do that.' She, intuitive as all mothers are to the behaviour of a troubled child, remembers asking him from time to time if there was 'anything you want to tell us'. But instead of helping, it only compounded the problem.
The irony, albeit one you would expect, lies in what his mother told the television programme Tonight With Trevor McDonald: 'I never really thought about it (David being possibly gay) a great deal but if that was the case it wouldn't have mattered because he's my son and I love him and we would have dealt with it.' But Copeland had another problem - he was little and bullied at school, so little that his worried parents took him to a growth clinic where he was given a full examination, including his underdeveloped genitals.
In fact he was eventually to grow to a quite respectable 5ft 6in without treatment and improve his physique with body building, but he never forgot the humiliation and in later years found himself raging against it.
THAT WAS the moment, it seems, that he retreated into a world of fantasy where his sexual fears and feelings of inadequacy could be conquered.
Dr Philip Joseph, consultant forensic psychiatrist at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, interviewed Copeland extensively after his arrest and confirms: 'His problems stem from his sexual insecurity and his inability to cope with the examination at the growth clinic. Most people would have been able to deal with both and go on to become balanced and normal.' But for Copeland, and for those who would suffer at his hands, the damage was done. He told prison doctors that by the age of 14 he was fantasising about rape and other forms of power, dreaming in particular of being an SS officer at a concentration camp where he could dominate people's lives, killing them if he wished and having sexual control over them. In fact, as Dr Joseph points out, 'people who fear they are homosexual often join very heterosexual organisations. Rightwing organisations are very homophobic.' Hitler, who was also small, became his hero, and Copeland willingly took on board his racism.
He had turned from a naturally shy boy, brought up, says his mother, 'not to hate anyone or anything', into a dangerous bigot, deliberately copying the prejudices of his bullying former school classmates in the hope that he would no longer be an outsider.
One school contemporary remembers the loner Copeland 'using racist language' because he thought it might make him popular.
By 16 he was growing his hair long and listening to heavy metal music but he couldn't attract girls, envying his bigger, good-looking brother Jonathan, older by three years, who never had trouble in this department.
Then came his drugs phase as Copeland experimented with almost every one available, as well as alcohol. In his search for kicks and satisfaction he took heroin, LSD, amphetamines, ecstasy, cocaine, valium, cannabis and temazepam. He also sniffed solvents.
Inevitably, he turned to crime to fund his habit, finding his smallness convenient for squeezing through small windows to burgle houses, but he was never caught.
He was convicted, however, for smashing windows and a telephone box and for common assault when a neighbour intervened during a drunken fight with Jonathan.
HE DID have one other problem - he was dyslexic. But this did not prevent his creditable GCSE performance and he had an IQ of 126, which put him in the top 20 per cent.
He could have taken A-levels and gone on to university but he opted for a yearlong electronics foundation course at Farnborough College of Technology, little realising how useful and deadly his grounding in electronics would become several years later. After this he worked for his father. He was 19 when, quite unexpectedly, his mother left his father and went to live with her parents in Bracknell, Berkshire.
Stephen Copeland, 51, puts a heavy emphasis on his wife's desertion, claiming this triggered his son's problems, causing him 'great upset ... he was violent and kept getting drunk for about two or three weeks. His mind never settled.' Mrs Copeland, a maternal, caring women who continues to work as a nurse, says this suggestion is nonsense. 'I can't accept that,' she says.
'David was 19, nearly a man. I left on my youngest son's 16th birthday and I did explain to the boys why I left and they understood that their dad was difficult to live with.' After that she didn't see so much of David but, she says, 'he was a young lad with other things on his mind than visiting his mother. We would speak on the phone a bit.' Some months later, when David had argued with his father and she collected him to stay with her at her mother's home, she 'knew that he had changed.
He was much more aggressive and he wasn't the boy that I knew.
He'd been weight training and was physically bigger. He wasn't gentle any more.' She remembers asking him if he had any grievance against her and he 'brought up various things like I never bought him a karate outfit when he was eight and that I kept him too sheltered as a child'.
A year later Copeland was spending long hours alone in his bedroom reading books on Hitler and Stalin and on serial killers such as the American Henry Lee Lucas, who claimed to have abducted and killed hundreds of victims. On his bedroom TV he was excited by news reports of the Centennial Park nail bombing at the Atlanta Olympics. Flicking channels, he watched the coverage of the Notting Hill carnival and, as he admitted after his arrest, realised that he had reached the moment of his 'destiny' as he fantasised about bombing it.
He would start a race war on the streets which would sweep a far-Right party such as the British National Party to power.
He would be a hero and, he told Dr Joseph, believed he would be given a powerful job such as Minister for Ethnic Cleansing. At last he would have the acclaim and attention he had always craved.
'But there was a sexual element to it as well,' says Dr Joseph, 'for he knew that soldiers in Kosovo responsible for the ethnic cleansing would have raped a lot of the women they killed.' THE JOURNEY from uneasy, lonely teenager to potential mass killer had reached its critical moment. From that moment he abandoned drugs and drink. His 'mission' gave him a purpose in life.
Psychiatrists are divided over whether Copeland was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, making him unable to control his actions as the defence argued, or a personality disorder which still allowed him sufficient control to stop himself, as Dr Joseph argued.
But the planning was chilling in its deliberation, as David Copeland spent three years assembling the constituent parts of terror and learning how to use them. He bought household items such as alarm clocks and household batteries, bought hundreds of fireworks and stripped them of their explosive chemicals and trawled the Internet until he found a web-site which gives details about bomb construction.
His electronics training helped, but first efforts to make a bomb - a small, demonstration effort - failed.
Depressed, he consulted a doctor who gave him tablets.
In March 1997, now nearly 21, he got a job testing equipment on London's Jubilee Line underground extension.
By now sporting a British Bulldog tattoo (he also had a Union Jack T-shirt) Copeland moved to Bermondsey to be closer to his job.
Still without a girlfriend, he paid prostitutes for sex and was developing a taste for sadomasochistic pornography because it involved power over one's partner.
That June he joined the British National Party, but quickly decided it was 'too democratic' and switched to a neo-Nazi ragbag collection calling itself the National Socialist Movement, handing over [pounds sterling]20 to become one of only eight members.
The chief, Tony Williams, appointed him a 'unit leader' for the Home Counties, and suddenly, for the first time in his life, Copeland felt he was someone. He was in a position of power and his desire to start a war burned even deeper.
Returning to the Internet, he found a simpler way of making bombs. This time his efforts worked.
Copeland's mother fretted and worried that she never heard from him. 'My mum and I used to sit at night and go through everything - why is he in London?
Why is he not contacting us? Why has he got no friends and why isn't he doing anything?' But her son was doing something.
Indeed, for the first time he felt focused and in control of his life. He was about to make war on the society that had always rejected him.
He was making bombs and packing them with hundreds of long, lethal nails.
At 4.30pm on April 17, 1999, he left a pipe bomb in Brixton, targeting the black community. It exploded at 5.25, injuring 40 people. Two police officers each lost an eye, others were maimed by shrapnel. A boy of 23 months had a nail embedded in his skull which penetrated the outer layer of his brain.
Blood, mayhem, despair, anger ... One week later Copeland planted a bomb in Brick Lane, in London's East End, this time targeting the Asian community which he believed had a Saturday market.
But when he got there he found he was a day early, so he dumped the holdall containing the bomb, still primed to go off at 6pm.
A man who thought it might be lost property put it in the boot of his car intending to hand it in. It exploded in the boot. Another ten people injured.
COPELAND planted the Soho bomb on April 29, two days earlier than intended because of a news report that a security camera image of the prime suspect had been issued.
This time the gay community was his target.
He left the bomb in the Admiral Duncan pub, set to go off at 6.30pm when it would be filling up with people. Appalling injuries were suffered by 79 people and three friends died.
Copeland went back to a hotel room to watch the results of his handiwork on TV. It was, he said calmly after his arrest, a 'political' attack.
Caroline Copeland, who has reverted to her maiden name of Woolard, contemplated suicide when she learned that her own son was responsible for the nail bombings. When she visited him in prison, she says, 'he wouldn't talk to me about what had happened.
He just sat there, my child, with a haunted look about his eyes.' But, agitated by what her husband had suggested, she did ask him 'if it was because I left. He said, "No, mum".' She continues to work as a nurse, her former husband continues to fit central heating systems. Eldest son Jonathan is an electrician and Paul is at university in Luton.
David's future is in a prison cell, perhaps still contemplating the success and acclaim of which he dreamed and for which he killed.
His paternal grandfather, William Copeland, 75, says: 'David should rot in hell for what he has done. He is the last person in our thoughts.' As for the victims and their families and friends, many will never recover. Frances Hogg, whose pregnant daughter Andrea Dykes died in the Soho blast, says the pain of losing 27-year-old Andrea and the baby she was expecting remains as acute as ever.
'When something like this happens it's as if time stands still. She was so young, healthy and happy.
'We have endured the agony of seeing Andrea lying in a mortuary.
We had no opportunity to say goodbye or to tell her how much we loved her.'
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