A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

‘blocked out’ state. And Myra Hindley helped Brady to murder children yet continued to strike her
family as a person who loved children. When she heard that her dog had died under anaesthetic
when in the hands of the police she burst out: ‘They’re just a lot of bloody murderers.’ For practical
purposes, she had become two people.
Yet although crime - particularly violent crime - contains this element of ‘dissociation’, of
‘alienation’, there is another sense in which it is an attempt to break out of this state. The sex
murderer John Christie remarked that after strangling and raping one of his victims, ‘once again I
experienced that quiet, peaceful thrill. I had no regrets.’ The killing had removed the tension that
kept him trapped in the vicious circle of his own emotions and desires; he was awake again.
We can discern the same factor in the petty crimes committed by Leopold and Loeb before they
killed Bobby Franks. Loeb was the one who ‘got a thrill’ from crimes; it was like a game of
Russian roulette in which he experienced relaxation and relief every time he ‘won’. (After all, to be
caught in a burglary would mean social disgrace.) Crime was Loeb’s way of discharging tension, of
waking himself up.
This is also quite plainly the key to the Moors case. When he murdered Edward Evans, Brady was
trying to involve David Smith, with the intention of making him a part of a criminal gang; his aim
was to commit bank robberies. We may assume that, since he had been planning bank robberies
from the beginning, he regarded his murders as some form of training for the ‘bigger’ crime. It was
Brady’s intention to become a kind of all-round enemy of society, the English equivalent of Public
Enemy Number One - with the difference that, like Charlie Peace, he hoped to remain undiscovered
and live happily ever after on his gains. Crime would become a way of life involving continual
stimulation and excitement.
And in this we can note another interesting aspect of the ‘pattern’. At any given level, crime
contains an element that reaches towards the next level of the hierarchy. Charlie Peace’s crimes are
crimes of ‘subsistence’ (to make a living), but he shows a powerful urge towards security and
domesticity. Many ‘domestic’ crimes - Dr Pritchard, Constance Kent, Adelaide Bartlett - contain a
strong element of sadism, reaching towards the sexual level. Jack the Ripper’s sex crimes contain a
strong element of exhibitionism - in the lay-out of the corpses, the letters to the police - reaching
towards the self-esteem level. And the crimes of Manson and Brady contain a distorted element of
self-actualisation, reaching towards the creative level. (In my Order of Assassins I have labelled
such killers ‘assassins’ – those who kill as a violent form of self-expression; we can see a clear
relationship between such crimes and the ‘violent’ art of painters such as Munch, Ensor, Soutine or
Pollock.)
The case that, above all others, embodies this notion of crime as a ‘Creative act’ is scarcely known
outside the country in which it took place, Sweden, and may serve as a demonstration of the main
threads of the preceding argument. It concerned a real-life Professor Moriarty, Dr Sigvard
Thurneman, who came rather closer than Charles Manson to the dream of one-man Revolution.
In the early 1930s, the small town of Sala, near Stockholm, was struck by a minor crime wave. It
began on 16 November 1930, when the body of a dairy worker, Sven Eriksson, was discovered in a
half-frozen lake near Sala; Eriksson had vanished two days before, on his way home from work. He
had been shot in the chest - apparently alter a fierce struggle, for his clothes were torn and his face
bruised. He had been alive when thrown into the lake. The motive was clearly not robbery, since he
was still carrying his week’s wages in his wallet. Mrs Eriksson said her husband had been suffering