Читать книгу Murder of the Black Museum - The Dark Secrets Behind A Hundred Years of the Most Notorious Crimes in England - Gordon Honeycombe - Страница 6

Murder is a very rare event in Britain. Its exceptional nature is, in fact, part of its fascination. More than ten times as many people are killed on the roads each year as are victims of a murderer.

In 1980, 564 cases of murder, manslaughter and infanticide, all now classed as homicide, were currently recorded in England and Wales. On the roads of Britain in 1979-80, 6,352 people were killed and 81,000 injured. It must be said, however, that these figures for death on the roads were the lowest for thirty years and that the homicide figure was unnaturally high. Indeed, the car-death figure, when compared with that of other decades and with the number of cars on the roads, shows an astonishing decrease in fatalities. In 1931, for instance, when 1,104,000 cars and vans were on the roads, 6,691 people were killed and over 200,000 injured. Yet in 1979-80, with over 15 million cars on the road, the death toll was much lower, as was the number of those injured. The worst year for road fatalities was, significantly, 1941, the second full year of the Second World War, when the blackout was in full force: 9,169 people were killed that year. It is worth noting that deaths caused by reckless driving are not classified as homicide by the police, who recorded 235 such deaths on the roads in Britain in 1980.

The year 1980 was unusual in terms of homicide in that, of 564 homicides, seventy occurred in fires – thirty-seven in a Soho club and ten in a hostel in Kilburn. In addition, twenty-three deaths that had occurred in fires in the Hull area between 1973 and 1978, when they were regarded as accidental, were recorded as homicides in 1980. This meant that the homicide figure for 1980, without the unusually high figure of deaths in fires, would have been under 500 – a great reduction on the 551 homicides recorded in 1979. Instead, with the figure of seventy deaths in fires included, the overall number of recorded homicides in 1980 (564) was the highest on record.

Although this figure was very small when compared with road fatalities and when seen against the total population of this country, it nonetheless showed a small increase in deaths by murder, manslaughter and infanticide. The figure, seen as a percentage per million of the population of England and Wales, was 11.5. In 1970, when 339 homicides were ultimately recorded, the figure was seven per cent.

There is no doubt that we live in an increasingly violent society, in which more violence is being committed by the young and in which even more is directed against women and the elderly. In London in 1980, there were 13,984 incidents involving robbery, mugging and violent theft – an increase of 20 per cent on the previous year. Of the victims involved in these incidents, nearly 2,000 were over the age of sixty, and 3,387 were over fifty. And in the 584,137 serious offences recorded in London in 1980, 25 per cent of those arrested were aged between ten and sixteen.

Nonetheless, although there has been a vast increase in all types of crime since 1900, the comparative rise in murder is very slight, and there is little variation in the kinds and causes of murder. The commonest murders are still domestic ones – of a wife by her husband, of a woman by a lover, of a child by a parent. Of 456 murders examined in the period 1957-60 (70 per cent of those victims over the age of sixteen were women) the victim and the murderer were related in 53 per cent of all cases. In 27.9 per cent they were known to each other and 19.1 per cent were strangers. This is very similar to the Home Office statistical interpretation of the figures for homicide between 1970 and 1980: when about 50 per cent of the victims and killers were related, when over 30 per cent knew each other and about 19 per cent were strangers. A notable feature of the Home Office statistics is that infants less than one year old, viewed as a percentage of that age group in the population, were most at risk.

The survey of the 1957-60 murders, carried out by Terence Morris and Louis Blom-Cooper, also found that a very high percentage of the murderers had previous criminal records, usually for property offences, and that 70 per cent of the men convicted of capital murder in 1960 had previous convictions. It was also found that murderers were predominantly of the lower classes; that many of these had been in the services or were merchant seamen; that not a few were coloured; and that many murders were associated with heavy drinking.

Sir John MacDonnell wrote in 1905 that murder was ‘an incident in miserable lives in which disputes, quarrels, angry words and blows are common’. This still applied 75 years later – as the 1980 Home Office Criminal Statistics for England and Wales show when listing the apparent circumstances of homicides in 1970 and in 1980.

			1970		1980
Quarrel, revenge or loss of temper			173		239
In furtherance of theft or gain			34		56
Attributed to acts of terrorism			0		4
While resisting or avoiding arrest			0		2
Attributed to gang warfare or feud			4		5
The result of offences of arson			0		84
Homicide of women undergoing illegal abortion			4		0
Other circumstances, including sex attack			51		66
Not known, because:
The suspect committed suicide			19		20
The suspect was mentally disturbed			34		39
Other reasons			20		49
	Totals		339		564

Compared with the 1950s, there was less shooting or gas poisoning in the 1970s, and a much-reduced use of the blunt instrument – a reflection of changing social conditions. One constant was, however, murder by strangulation or asphyxiation.

The Home Office list of figures for offences recorded as homicide in the decade 1970-1980 by apparent method of killing was as follows.

			1970		1980
Sharp instrument			107		160
Strangulation or asphyxiation			70		89
Hitting, kicking, etc.			57		94
Blunt instrument			43		61
Shooting			23		19
Drowning			12		14
Poison or other drugs			9		14
Burning			1		94
Explosion			0		0
Other			15		19
Not known			2		0
	Totals		339		564

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 other, and near Bishop’s Stortford, near where the poisoner George Chapman ran a pub and where Harry Roberts went to ground; that Mrs Deeming and Mr Maybrick died within a few miles of each other in Liverpool; that Frederick Deeming, Mrs Maybrick, Mahon, Armstrong, Kennedy and Wrenn at some time all lived in Liverpool; that Parker and Probert, Haigh, Thorne and Mahon killed within a twenty-mile radius of Lewes in Sussex (at Portslade, Crawley, Crowborough and Langney); that Mrs Pearcey and Samuel Furnace killed within a few hundred yards of each other in Camden – a mile away from Crippen’s house and 2 miles from where the Seddons lived; and that of forty-one murders in the London area, only eight were committed south of the River Thames.

And why is it that so many victims and murderers in this book have visited and stayed at Bournemouth? The town has had some sensational murders, such as that of Irene Wilkins in 1921 by Thomas Allaway, that of Mr Rattenbury by George Stoner in 1935, that of Walter Dinivan by Joseph Williams in 1939, and that of Doreen Marshall by Neville Heath in 1946. But Samuel Dougal, George Smith, Major Armstrong, the Thompsons, Ronald True, Emily Kaye, Frederick Browne, Neville Heath – and Montague Druitt – all stayed there within a few months of a murder. They did not choose other resorts nearer London for their visits, like Brighton or Eastbourne, or any further away to the north. Why Bournemouth?

What is most remarkable, however, is the number of murderers – indeed, mass murderers – who were born and brought up west and south of Leeds. The Wartime Ripper, Gordon Cummins, was born in New Earswick, to the north of York. Although Haigh was not born in Yorkshire, he was brought up from an early age in Outwood, south of Leeds. Christie was born and lived in a suburb of Halifax. The Black Panther, Donald Neilson, was born in Morley south of Leeds and lived in Bradford to the west; and the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, was born in Shipley and brought up in Bingley. To them can be added Peter Dinsdale, the killer-arsonist who came from Hull – to the east of Leeds, but on the same latitude – and Dr Harold Shipman. Although Shipman was born in Nottingham, he graduated from the Leeds School of Medicine in 1970, and spent his first few years as a doctor in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where it is thought he first began to kill.

Finally, besides these mass murderers, there are ten Yorkshiremen who between them caused the deaths of over 1,200 men and women. James Berry, chief executioner, was born in Heckmondwike, south-west of Leeds (between Christie and Haigh), and lived in Bradford. The three Pierrepoints – Tom, Harry and Albert, all chief executioners, who between them hanged 834 people – came from Clayton, a western suburb of Bradford. The last two also lived in Huddersfield, as did another executioner, Thomas Scott. Executioner Steve Wade was yet another Yorkshireman, from Doncaster. The four executioner Billingtons – father James and his three sons, Thomas, William and John – all came from Bolton in Yorkshire. Whoever said that God was a Yorkshireman was worshipping some strange gods indeed.