A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

She met Baker returning to the town, and asked him what he had done with her daughter; he
seemed perfectly calm and self-possessed, and assured her that Fanny had gone off to buy sweets. It
was many hours later that a search party found the body in a nearby hop garden; it had been hacked
into fragments and scattered over a wide area. Baker was arrested; he continued to protest his
innocence. But his diary was found to contain the entry; ‘Killed a young girl today. It was fine and
hot.’ He was sentenced to death, and a huge crowd watched his hanging at Winchester gaol.
The Illustrated Police News was a scandal sheet that catered for the public appetite for gore and
violence; it was full of hair-raising pictures of horrible murders and accidents: men hacking up
corpses or being bitten in two by sharks. Yet its account has no hint that this is a sex crime. Not
only does it omit to mention that the child’s genitals were missing (which is perhaps
understandable in a Victorian journal); it also says nothing about the crucial diary entry. So far as
its reporter was concerned, Baker was simply suffering from an attack of ‘mania’. (Krafft-Ebing
added the sexual details in his account of the crime twenty years later.)
In fact, there are enough clues even in the Illustrated Police News account to enable us to play the
detective and piece together the story. We observe, first of all, that when Baker met Mrs Adams he
seemed perfectly calm, and there was no sign of blood on his clothes. Yet he should have been
soaked in blood. This suggests that he removed all his clothes before killing the child - he had
probably throttled her into unconsciousness. It also suggests premeditation. A man who has given
way to a sadistic impulse on the spur of the moment would be shaken and frightened afterwards.
Baker’s calm suggests that he had thought this out in advance. Few sex killers commit a crime of
this sort without either leading up to it with minor offences, or fantasising about it long in advance.
Since Alton was a small town, and there is no mention of previous offences - Baker was ‘a young
man of great respectability’ - we may assume that he was a fantasist. He was a solicitor’s clerk in a
dull country town; his family background had probably been difficult - since his father suffered
attacks of ‘acute mania’ - and he must have found life boring, frustrating and lonely. He is a
paedophile, his sexual fantasies are sadistic, involving decapitation. (Fanny’s head was the first part
of her to be found.) He finally convinces himself that he can only achieve the kind of full sexual
satisfaction he craves by killing a child. This is dangerous - in a small town - but he feels that the
satisfaction will be worth the risk. He persuades Fanny to go with him, and completes the crime,
finding it as satisfying as he had expected. (‘It was fine and hot.’) If he had not been caught, he
would certainly have killed again. In fact, if he had taken the precaution of committing the crime in
a city, where no one knew him, he would probably have killed many times, and England would
have had its ‘Jack the Ripper’ twenty years earlier.
What made the Victorians incapable of understanding a crime like this was their rigid and
inflexible idea of ‘normality’. Even a man as intelligent as John Stuart Mill believed it ought to be
possible to reason madmen out of their delusions; he felt that the delusions were consciously held
beliefs - like the notion that the earth is flat. He was incapable of understanding the inner turmoil of
a schizophrenic. In the same way, the average Victorian believed that the attraction of men for
women and vice versa was a law of nature, like hunger and thirst and protection of offspring. So a
man who felt sexual desires for members of his own sex must be wilfully perverse; he had chosen
to be wicked, like a burglar or murderer. Lesbianism was not a crime under Victorian law because
they held a fixed idea of the ‘normality’ of women; women were therefore incapable of anything as
perverse as sexual desire for their own sex.
In short, the Victorians were crude realists in all matters pertaining to psychology - it was all part of
their obsession with domesticity and security. Life had to be sane and predictable. As a result they