A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

In January 1959, a truck-driver named Carrol Jackson, out for a Sunday afternoon drive with his
family in East Virginia, was run off the road by a blue Chevrolet. A thin-faced man with ape-like
arms forced the family - Carrol and Mildred Jackson with their two daughters, Susan, aged five,
and Janet, eighteen months - to get into his boot. The Jacksons vanished. Two months later, Carrol
Jackson’s body was found in a ditch; he had been shot in the skull. Janet had been thrown in
underneath him and had apparently died of suffocation. Two weeks later, the bodies of Mildred and
Susan were found in a shallow grave. The police investigation had come to a halt for lack of clues
when they received a letter from a salesman which named a jazz musician named Melvin Rees as
the killer. He quoted Rees as saying: ‘You can’t say it’s wrong to kill. Only individual standards
make it right or wrong.’ When he had asked Rees point blank if he had killed the Jackson family,
Rees had merely evaded the question.
A search of the home of Rees’s parents left no doubt that he was the killer. The police discovered
the revolver with which Carrol Jackson had been shot, and a kind of diary containing an account of
the murders. ‘Caught on a lonely road... Drove to a selected spot and killed the husband and baby.
Now the mother and daughter were all mine.’ He described taking them to an empty building, and
forcing Mildred Jackson to commit a sex act, probably fellatio. ‘Now I was her master...’. After
raping both, Rees killed them.
Rees was arrested at a music shop in Arkansas, where he was working. Like other sex killers
already mentioned, he was an itinerant, never staying long in the same place. His friends found it
hard to believe that this mild, quietly-spoken, intelligent man could be the murderer of the
Jacksons, but investigation also tied Rees to five more sex murders. He was executed in 1961.
The case may be regarded as a turning point in twentieth-century crime. Other criminals - such as
Ravachol and Prado - argued that they had a right to kill; but no one had ever used this kind of
logic as an excuse for sexual self-indulgence. Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov states that he has a right to
kill an old pawnbrokress in order to rescue himself from poverty and be able to lead a fruitful life.
Rees was arguing, in effect, that sexual desire blocks self-fulfilment as much as poverty, and that
he had a right to commit sex crimes to release his tension and restore a sense of reality. The
argument is similar to that of Harry Lime in Graham Greene’s The Third Man, who looks down
from the top of the big wheel in a Vienna amusement park and asks whether the life of any one of
those black dots on the ground is really worth twenty thousand pounds. Once this step of the
argument - the ‘depersonalisation’ of human beings - has been granted, it is possible to justify
anything from cannibalism to genocide.
The problem here, we can see, is that Rees is intelligent, and that he is using his intelligence to
justify an act - violation - of which every normal male is potentially capable. What has happened
could be compared to the situation in the nineteenth century, when the spread of education made it
possible for every working man to read Voltaire and August Comte, and rehearse all the standard
arguments to prove that religion is a delusion. Whatever our view of religion, it is obvious that this
kind of shallow scepticism did as much harm as good. With Melvin Rees we come upon a parallel
phenomenon: the man who is intelligent enough to argue that crime is merely a matter of law, and
that law is another name for social oppression. A few years later, Ian Brady was using the same
argument to justify the sex murder of children; Charles Manson used it to justify the killing of
‘pigs’ like Sharon Tate and the LaBiancas; John Frazier used it to justify the killing of the Ohta
family on the grounds that they were too rich; San Francisco’s ‘Zebra killers’ used it to justify the
killing of whites at random, on the grounds that all whites are the enemies of all blacks.