The increasing use of sharp instruments in violent crimes from 1998 to 2007 has become a cause for some alarm. National Health Service statistics published in 2008 showed that in the previous ten years there had been a 32 per cent rise in the number of patients being treated for stab wounds or similar injuries. Home Office statistics also revealed that police in England and Wales had recorded 22,151 offences involving knives in 2007. Of these, 7,409 offences had occurred in London, where twenty teenagers had died. In one week in July 2008, twelve people were stabbed to death in the UK. Despite these knife-crime figures, the Home Office said that overall crime in 2008, as recorded by the police, was down by 9 per cent.
The term ‘homicide’ covers the offences of murder, manslaughter and infanticide. Murder and manslaughter are common law offences that have never been defined by statute. In the Home Office statistics for 2005-2006, covering the period up to 9 October 2006, it should be noted that ‘homicide offences are shown according to the year in which the police initially recorded the offence as homicide’ and do not necessarily mark the year in which the homicide occurred.
A summary of these statistics reveals that 766 deaths in England and Wales in 2005-2006 were recorded by the police – a decrease of 9 per cent since 2004-2005. Of that number, 67 per cent were male deaths. The most common method of killing, at 28 per cent, involved a sharp instrument. Compared to the seventy-five victims who were shot and killed in 2004-2005, only fifty were shot in 2005-2006. In general, female victims were more likely to be killed by someone they knew. For instance, 54 per cent of female victims knew the main suspect, compared with 38 per cent of male victims. But the main suspect was known by 67 per cent of victims under the age of sixteen, 44 per cent of whom had been killed by their parents. At 38 per million of the population, children aged one year old and less were the age group most at risk, baby boys being the most vulnerable.
Several multiple deaths this century have bumped up the annual homicide statistics. The London bombings of 7 July 2006, in which fifty-two people died, accounted for 7 per cent of the homicides in 2005-2006. In 2003-2004, in Morecambe Bay, twenty cockle-pickers were drowned; 172 victims were attributed to Dr Harold Shipman in the 2002-2003 statistics – although well over 200 deaths were later accredited to him; and in the period 2000-2001, fifty-eight people in a group of Chinese nationals being smuggled into the UK in a lorry suffocated en route.
Of some interest is the fact that suicide (there were 4,200 in Britain in 1979), homicide and mental illness are connected and complementary. Between 1900 and 1949, 29 per cent of the persons suspected of murder committed suicide, a proportion that rose to 33 per cent in the next decade. Again, between 1900 and 1949, 21.4 per cent of the persons found guilty of murder were also adjudged to be insane or unfit to plead. This figure rose in the next decade to 26.5 per cent. It seems that a person suffering from morbid depression, frustration or anxiety, whose mental balance is disturbed, may, as that mental stress or illness increases, commit either suicide or murder. If it is murder, that person may recover as a result of such an act, or become insane. There also seems to be a case for viewing murder as an act of displaced self-destruction, when the disturbed person, unable to kill himself or herself, kills someone near as a substitute. Some women, unable to kill themselves or a husband or a lover, direct their act of destruction against someone more vulnerable – a child – almost as a token sacrifice.
Another factor connected with the causes of murder is the actual or subconscious yearning of a nonentity for notoriety, a desire inflamed these days by the ease with which other nonentities achieve a spurious fame through appearing on television or from the inflated attentions of the press. People desire to be noticed, to be distinguished in some way by what they are or do. In some cases, where a person is totally undistinguished and untalented, desperate measures are taken to remedy the defect.
Bruce Lee, aged twenty – his real name was Peter Dinsdale – killed people by setting fire to the houses in which they lived in and around Hull. Said to be suffering from a psychopathic personality disorder, he admitted in court to twenty-six cases of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and to ten charges of arson. He was committed on 20 January 1981 to a psychiatric institution in Liverpool for an indefinite period. His counsel, Mr Harry Ognall, QC, said at Dinsdale’s trial: ‘No words of mine could assist this crippled, solitary and profoundly disordered young man. This pathetic nobody has, by his deeds, achieved a notorious immortality.’ Perhaps this was one of Dinsdale’s unacknowledged desires.
It was certainly the aim of seventeen-year-old Marcus Serjeant, from Capel le Ferne in Kent, who on 13 June 1981 fired five blank shots at the Queen as she rode down the Mall to the ceremony of Trooping the Colour in Horse Guards Parade. Tried under Section 2 of the Treason Act, he was sentenced to five years in jail. He claimed he had been influenced by the shooting of John Lennon and by the assassination attempt on President Reagan. To a friend he wrote: ‘I am going to stun and mystify the whole world with nothing more than a gun … I may in a dramatic moment become the most famous teenager in the whole world. I will remain famous for the rest of my life.’
Such a desire was probably not shared by Crippen, Christie or Haigh. But the last two certainly relished their notoriety, and they may have been subconsciously influenced by a desire to be different, to do something alien, at least to become notable by doing something notorious, like taking another person’s life.
One interesting trait shared by many murderers is their use of pseudonyms. It appears that they assume false names not only to evade detection, but chiefly to invent for themselves new personas – as though they cannot bear to be what they are.
In most if not all premeditated murders, the act of murder is not the only solution to a particular emotional or mental problem. Yet it is the one way out that a potential murderer chooses. There are many and complex reasons for this, apart from the minor factors outlined above. There is supposedly an X factor, a chemical reason – strictly speaking, an extra Y chromosome in the genetic structure of a few people – that turns them into psychopaths, if not into killers. There is undoubtedly a rage in the blood and in the mind that leads to murder, whatever its cause. But what the murderers in this book have in common – and most are to some degree amoral, vain, cunning, cruel, avaricious, selfish, stupid and bad – is that without exception they are, and behave, like fools.
What is also interesting is the fact that not a few, earlier in their lives, suffered blows to their heads or were involved in accidents that might have resulted in such damage. Could it be that damage to their frontal lobes impairs those areas of the brain controlling common sense, compassion, pity and remorse, and that physical or chemical factors should be added to genetic factors of omission and excess?
There is one other factor that the case histories in this book reveal – the apparent significance of place in the perpetration of a murder. This may only be an oddity. But in this connection it should be noted that of the thirty-seven women poisoners executed for murder between 1843 and 1955 (sixty-eight women in all were hanged in this period), twenty lived in towns and seventeen in the country. Of the latter, five lived in or near Boston in Lincolnshire and six in and around Ipswich in Suffolk. The Ipswich murders may have been imitative – they all occurred within a period of eight years – but the Boston murders were many years apart.
In considering the murders described in this book, one wonders how great a part chance and coincidence played in the following facts: that Miss Holland and Mrs McKay were murdered within a few miles of each