The Mind of the Murderer

Why People Kill

W. Lindesay Neustatter

• Publisher: Philosophical Library/Open Road
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781504067270
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Clinical Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This study by a British psychologist explores the relationship between mental illness, murder, and the Homicide Act of 1957.

In 1957, a new bill went before Parliament addressing the use of capital punishment in cases of murder. It sparked a debate—as relevant today as it was then—about how to prosecute a killer who suffers a mental illness or disability. In order to shed light on the terms of this argument, psychologist W. L. Neustatter published this study of recent homicide cases that touched on the subject.

Here, Neustatter examines the minds of murderers known to be schizophrenic or psychopathic, or suffer from such conditions as epilepsy or paranoia. He also looks at a case of murder under hypnosis; a man who made, then retracted, his guilty confession; and a variety of other cases that fall into a troubling grey area of culpability.

Chapter One

Bennet—The Schizophrenic

It is necessary for the reader to know something of schizophrenia, a malignant disease—popularly referred to as a ‘split mind’ and the commonest of all forms of insanity—not only because it may be occasionally associated with murder, but because reference to it will often need to be made throughout the book when discussing other types of disorder.

It is an illness which usually comes on in young adults; it can recover spontaneously, and nowadays the outlook is greatly improved with insulin shock treatment; but many of these patients go on to become chronic mental invalids.

The disease shows itself in a variety of overlapping forms. In the ‘simple’ form there is a gradual withdrawal from reality, the patient becomes devoid of feeling and lacks spontaneity; he may, for instance, be all sound and and fury in his words, but no actions follow. The ‘split’ is between reason and emotion, rather than in the existence of any ‘double personality’. One of the early signs of the illness is when a formerly energetic adolescent begins to lose himself in fantasies, falls off at work and will not get out of bed in the morning. He lacks energy: and the lack of will power is accompanied by a dearth of any ordinary emotional response.

It is impossible to arouse any feeling by provoking the simple schizophrenic, as may be done with the individual who is merely hiding his feelings. It is as though a wall is erected around him, and one is unable to breach this, or make the contact such as can be made with a normal individual. Very shy persons may give a somewhat similar impression, and psychologically the same mechanisms may underlie the two conditions, but, whereas shyness can be gradually overcome, this is not so with the schizophrenic. This ‘flattening of mood’ as it is called is well exemplified by the charming old lady in a mental hospital, who welcomed me into her room, remarking, with a quiet air of well-bred detachment: “I suppose the Superintendent has sent you here to kill me. Do sit down.”

Schizophrenic behaviour cannot be judged by normal standards. The callous detachment of the schizophrenic is, as often as not, the end process in an abnormally sensitive individual, who has originally felt so keenly, that he finally cannot feel at all. It may also be that there is some, as yet undiscovered, disease process, which, as after the operation of leucotomy (where the fibres in the frontal lobe brain fibres are severed), interferes with the patient’s capacity to feel keenly. Both on account of their callous disregard for anything or anyone and a liability to spontaneous outbursts of ‘cold anger’, these patients can be very dangerous.

In interesting contrast to the simple schizophrenic, who is lacking in emotional response, yet may otherwise be normal, is the ‘catatonic’ patient. He may be completely mute, posturing and unresponsive; pins can be stuck into him, so the text-books record—I have not tried the experiment myself—and although tears come into his eyes, he says nothing. Yet he can relate all about what has occurred if he subsequently recovers, showing he has been well aware of what has gone on around him all the time.

In such patients, a danger lies in the suddenness with which they can change from being veritable statues to extreme violence; and indulge in sudden, impetuous outbursts of wildly disturbed behaviour. This impulsiveness may really be the outcome of their delusions or hallucinations, in which the imaginary voices they hear, urge them to perform deeds of violence.

Finally ‘paranoid schizophrenics’ may commit crimes as an outcome of delusions of persecution.

Only a very small number of schizophrenics are, however, criminals, but those who are also of low intelligence and poor endowment are apt to become vagrants and tramps.

Characteristic of the impetuous behaviour of an apparently quiescent schizophrenic, is the following case of John Bennet, a Scotsman, who killed a workmate, Walter Elderfield, at Southampton Gas Works.

Bennet had come to Southampton from Scotland, and obtained work as a casual labourer. No one during this time found anything suspicious or peculiar about him: indeed, at his trial, he was described as quiet and well behaved. Then, one day, he unexpectedly presented himself to his foreman, and announced: “You had better go and see Pluto [Elderfield’s nickname], I think I have killed him.” When asked why he had done so, Bennet only replied that he had “killed him with a pick”. On investigation, this was found to be true: Pluto was discovered lying dead in a ditch, his head battered in by numerous blows from a pickaxe. Later Bennet said: “I must have lost my reason.”

Pluto appeared to have been a very stupid man, probably he was a high-grade mental defective. For some time Bennet, who often referred to him as a ‘softie’, had been getting more and more irritated with him, and he confessed he had had difficulty in keeping his hands off Elderfield. One day Pluto had released a winch handle, which had resulted in Bennet being knocked down; but there was no reason to think that this was anything but accidental. Nevertheless, on the day of the murder, Bennet, who had been to the dentist, for some reason thought Pluto was going to grab a pick lying on the ground and hit him (Bennet) with it. Bennet evidently decided to get in first; and thereupon lifted the pick up and hit Pluto, and, when the latter fell into a trench, went after him, still raining blows on him.

In prison, awaiting trial, Bennet was well-behaved, self-contained, not at all forthcoming, and every inch the most dour of Scots. He showed none of the irrelevancies or illogicalities which are so characteristic of the schizophrenic’s mode of speech, and there was no evidence of delusions or hallucinations.

Bennet related that he had come from a poor home, and was one of a large family in a Scottish town. That was all the past history that could be got from him at the time.

Shortly afterwards, however, the police were able to supply a more important piece of information. Bennet had been sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment for culpable homicide of a man called Christie, who was a relation of his wife, in Scotland, some seven years before. The initial charge of murder had been reduced to one of culpable homicide on account of his mental state. Under Scottish law, for many years, where a prisoner is not regarded as sufficiently deranged to be found insane in law, yet he obviously is not mentally normal, the verdict of diminished responsibility (i.e. culpable homicide) can be returned in murder charges, as is now proposed in England. The first crime had a distinct similarity to the one for which he was now being tried. Christie had been in charge of some blasting operations, and Bennet complained that he had “nearly blown his head off”. This seemingly angered him, just as he had been angered by the windlass incident on the second occasion. Sometime later, although they continued to be on good terms when drinking together, Bennet had killed Christie with a piece of railway sleeper in a sudden fit of anger. A similar pattern of events is discernible in the two crimes.

Taxed with his past record, Bennet admitted to his previous murder. That he should have concealed these facts was perhaps not very surprising, but what was more peculiar was that a little later it was discovered that, thirteen years before, he had spent a month in a mental hospital, where the diagnosis of schizophrenia had been made. This information he had never revealed. Apparently he was more concerned about it becoming public knowledge that he had been certified insane, than he was about the danger of being hanged, a point which did not escape Mr. Justice Oliver, who conducted the trial and commented on his peculiar attitude.

The facts of the case were put before the Court by Mr. J. S. Laskey, who opened for the Crown when Bennet was tried at Winchester Assizes.

Mr. Laskey himself remarked of Bennet: “The ordinary layman would say of him he was mad.”

Mr. Ewen Montagu, Q.C., who, with Mr. R. Hughes, conducted the defence, conceded the facts, and pleaded insanity.

Ostensibly, Bennet did not help him. In the witness box he emphatically denied being insane, saying: “I attacked Pluto, he hit me with a stick.”

The judge asked: “Is it your view, if someone attacks you, it is right to kill him?”

Bennet replied: “I do not think so.”

Mr. Laskey then asked: “What you are telling us is that you were perfectly sane at the moment?”

Bennet replied: “I have always been perfectly sane.”

Asked why he hit Pluto, Bennet said: “I was terribly angry with him.”

While in the dock, Bennet showed no signs of emotion; he appeared quite indifferent to the proceedings. Such composure in the dock is, however, by no means uncommon, though he was perhaps more detached than most. On this occasion, however, such disinterestedness tied up with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Nevertheless, with an unsympathetic Court, matters might have gone very differently; but, as already mentioned, the judge had been forcibly struck by the prisoner’s apathy and complete indifference to the proceedings.

Mr. Montagu called Dr. J. A. Jenkins, Superintendent of Bellsdyke Hospital, who gave evidence of Bennet having been in the mental hospital in Scotland with schizophrenia 13 years before, and gave it as his opinion that Bennet was suffering from a “disease of mind”.

What constitutes criminal responsibility is a question which will crop up repeatedly in this book, and at this stage the reader should learn how it is decided. Until 1957, the court was guided entirely by the McNaughten Rules. These lay down that for a man to be found irresponsible in law, that is, for the jury to be able to bring in a verdict of ‘guilty but insane’, he must have been suffering from a “defect of reason due to disease of mind, in consequence of which, he either did not know the nature and quality of the act at the time he performed it, or did not know that the act was wrong”. It should be added that the Court of Criminal Appeal has ruled that ‘wrong’ means “contrary to the law of the land”, not morally wrong.

In view of the doctor’s opinion that Bennet had disease of mind, the latter’s indifference to his fate was surely a defect of reason, so the first hurdle was surmounted.

But what of the “nature and quality of the act, and knowing it was wrong”? It was impossible to contend, after Bennet’s statement in the witness box, that he did not know what he was doing. But did he know it was wrong? Here a situation arose, which in fact often arises, and leads to one of the major criticisms levelled at the McNaughten Rules. I had been called to see the defendant, but I felt I could not say that Bennet did not know that what he was doing was wrong. I was, therefore, not called to give evidence as, holding this view, I was no use to the defence. Dr. Fenton, the prison doctor, initially also gave it as his view that Bennet knew that what he did was wrong at the material time, but the judge evidently felt (quite rightly) that Broadmoor, rather than the gallows, should be Bennet’s destination, and he put it to Dr. Fenton that such conclusions were always very hard to reach, and was he quite convinced of what he said? Did not the fact that Bennet had gone straight to the foreman and reported his deed, show that he could not have realized that what he was doing was wrong? Prison doctors are always scrupulously fair to the prisoner and Dr. Fenton conceded that the alternative explanation was possible, and the jury accepted the latter view and brought in a verdict of guilty but insane.

A willingness to accept the point of view that a prisoner with a mental illness does not know his acts are illegal, is virtually the only way a verdict of ‘guilty but insane’ can be secured. It is a controversial matter. Those who favour the McNaughten Rules contend that they work, and that it is permissible to stretch them in the prisoner’s favour. The objection of many psychiatrists is that in cases where the Court is unsympathetic, even though the doctor thinks the man irresponsible on account of his mental state, this rationalization is not accepted, and that on such occasions the psychiatrist may be ruthlessly cross-examined and made to look very foolish. But if the Court is sympathetic, then it will allow the doctor great latitude in his views. Yet a doctor who should be strictly objective—and the lawyers are the first to criticize any lapse from grace in this respect—is forced to subscribe to statements which can only be defended by very specious arguments as the only way a verdict of insanity can often be reached as the law stands.

In the case of Giffard, diagnosed as a psychopath, although admittedly his was not as straightforwardly impetuous behaviour as Bennet’s—in spite of his history of near schizophrenia as a boy—the plea of insanity under the McNaughten Rules was not accepted, yet one wonders if he really had any more control over his behaviour than Bennet.

The only evidence Bennet showed of schizophrenia, at the time of the second murder, was the impetuousness of the act itself, i.e. killing Pluto: his lack of judgment and proper emotional response, shown by his seeming indifference to his fate, even to the extent of concealing his past mental history, and his heated denial that he had ever been mad. It is also possible that his outbursts, on both occasions some while after being accidentally injured by someone else, may have been due to underlying delusional thinking, i.e. that he imagined that these accidents were really part of a plot to attack him. No such delusions were, however, ever elicited; and he had only spent one month in a mental hospital thirteen years before. One cannot help wondering if this information had not come to light, whether he would not have been regarded only as psychopathic and, like Giffard, have been found straightforwardly guilty.

It is also possible that Bennet’s insistence that he killed because Pluto, he thought, was going to attack him was not a delusion, but was an explanation advanced because he thought he was putting up a good defence.

Bennet’s case is interesting, not only because it illustrates schizophrenia in a far from evident or gross form, but illustrates how difficult these questions of diagnosis can be.

As I have already argued in my Introduction, the case of Bennet raises a difficulty under the new Homicide Act. There is a real danger, under the provisions of Clause 2, that a man who has killed another may be given a lighter sentence, as he is regarded as less culpable, but he will not be sent to Broadmoor. Bennet had, in fact, been imprisoned once already under the Scottish legal code, benefiting from the doctrine of ‘diminished responsibility’ and receiving a verdict of culpable homicide rather than murder. Yet he was released to kill again. In a mental hospital, or special institution, his latent schizophrenia might well have been recognized, and the second tragedy averted.

Chapter Two

Christie—The Hysteric

Christie, the notorious killer of a number of women, was, in the opinion of one of the doctors who examined him, a striking example of an hysteric. Expressed in simple terms, this means he was one who could turn a blind eye on what displeased him, either in himself or in the world around him, and one who had the capacity for preventing his right hand from knowing what his left hand was doing. The other examining doctors did not entirely agree with this diagnosis, though it was more of a difference of emphasis than fundamental disagreement. In any case Christie shows enough hysterical features to warrant his inclusion as a murderer illustrative of this type of personality.

Hysteria, in the sense that the term is used in medicine, has nothing to do with hysterics in the lay sense of the term. The popular conception of an hysteric is that of an histrionic, excitable individual in an emotional, overwrought state—a stout old body making a scene, for example. Hysteria in the medical sense refers to an illness which shows a splitting of the personality in its more severe forms. Some of the patients’ functions become ‘dissociated’ from the rest, resulting in symptoms such as paralysis of the limbs, blindness or deafness—none of which have any physical basis. At the other end of the scale, hysteria borders on malingering, the crucial difference being whether the subject’s motives are conscious or unconscious.

Hysteria is often defined as the simulation or the exaggeration of a physical disorder for the purpose of gain. The object of such gain may be material, where, for example, compensation is at stake; or it may be psychological, affection or attention being the desired goal. The motivating force in hysteria is said to be unconscious, i.e. the hysterical patient, unlike the malingerer, is not consciously simulating or exaggerating. How far he may or may not be conscious of his motives is a debatable point. Some hysterics definitely give the impression that they are not at all aware of their mental processes. In others—especially where financial gain is in question—it it is very difficult to believe that their motives are as entirely unconscious as is sometimes supposed, though powers of self-deception are strong. To ‘see ourselves as others see us’ is an uncommon attribute.

Mild hysterical symptoms may occur in anybody—the soldier who has a pain in the back before a route march, or the schoolboy who has a headache before prep. are examples, and imply little of consequence. Much more seriously, in the First World War there were many cases of ‘shell shock’, in which soldiers became paralysed, for example in the legs, and consequently were evacuated as casualties. At first it was thought that these conditions were due to blast (hence the term ‘shell shock’), but it gradually transpired that there was nothing organically wrong with these men: what had occurred was that some soldiers were understandably very afraid, but their fea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Foreword by Lord Pakenham of Cowley
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Bennet—The Schizophrenic
• Chapter Two: Christie—The Hysteric
• Chapter Three: John Alcott—The Hysteric
• Chapter Four: Straffen—The Mental Defective
• Chapter Five: Ley—The Paranoiac
• Chapter Six: Elwell—The Epileptic
• Chapter Seven: A Bargain to Strangle
• Chapter Eight: A Case of Manslaughter
• Chapter Nine: Sadistic Murder on a Common
• Chapter Ten: Neville Heath—The Psychopathic Sadist
• Chapter Eleven: Haigh—Simulator of Insanity
• Chapter Twelve: The Man Who Confessed and Retracted
• Chapter Thirteen: Lee Smith—The Man Who Killed His Mother
• Chapter Fourteen: Miles Giffard—the Man Who Killed His Parents
• Chapter Fifteen: Melancholic Murderers
• Chapter Sixteen: Murder Under Hypnosis
• Appendix: The Homicide Bill (5 Eliz. 2)
• About the Author
• Copyright