Читать книгу The Fatal Cup: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and the strange deaths of his relations - John Price Williams - Страница 32

severe depression had turned him into a reckless spender and a criminal.

Havelock Ellis, the psychologist, who was also a literary critic and essayist, described Wainewright “the perfect picture of the instinctive criminal in his most highly-developed shape” and concluded in his book The Criminal in 1901 that he was probably insane at the time.

“It is extremely probable that he never recovered from the effects of that illness……if we possessed a full knowledge of every instinctive criminal we should always be able to put our hands on some organically-morbid spot”.

Jonathan Curling, who published a biography of Wainewright in 1938, hazarded a guess at sleeping sickness, Encephalitis lethargica, which could lead to cerebral derangement and turn a man into a criminal.

In January 2017, I showed one of London’s leading consultant psychiatrists, Dr Edward Burns, the above eight paragraphs to seek his medical opinion. He was told Wainewright was possibly a murderer, according to previous reports, but given no information about his past.

He dismissed Curling’s hypothesis saying it was unlikely that a physical illness would turn him into a murderer. People often searched for reasons, such as an illness, which turned for someone into a serial killer, but often there was no physical cause for these behaviours. Wainewright seemed rather to be suffering from a lack of empathy, suggestive of a dissocial or antisocial personality, probably brought on by something that happened in his childhood.

THE FATAL CUP

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