A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

kept tied up in his room until he brought the second one back, and so witnessed the rape of Denise
Naslund. He had become a man possessed by a need that absorbed his whole life. He is a terrifying
example of a type of killer that has only existed since Jack the Ripper.
The total number of Bundy’s murders is unknown; police suspect that it could be in excess of those
committed by Dean Corll or John Gacy. But in any case, Gacy no longer holds the American
murder record; by 1980, unknown men known as the Freeway Killers had murdered forty-four
teenage male hitchhikers, dumping their sexually abused bodies around California’s highways. (In
1981, William Bonin confessed to twenty-one of the murders and was sentenced for ten of them;
three other men were charged with him, one of whom committed suicide in prison.)
The most obvious point to emerge from this survey of crime since 1945 is that, as the figures have
continued to rise, the nature of the crimes themselves has become steadily more horrific. It is as if
some basic inhibition in human beings is finally beginning to break down. Like the Ik, many
criminals seem to have lost all capacity for fellow feeling. But the Ik had an excuse: starvation and
the disruption of their traditional life. The worst criminals of the past twenty years have been the
product of a comfortable welfare society.
As the nature of the crimes becomes more brutal, they cease to produce a shock effect on society.
In 1913, the murder of Mary Phagan made headlines all over America; today it is doubtful if it
would achieve more than local coverage. The following three items were collected from
newspapers over the New Year period of 1983. In Manchester, a youth of fifteen was sentenced to
life imprisonment for a sexual attack on his music teacher and stabbing her fifteen times. In San
Francisco, two men were arrested and charged with kidnapping a three-year-old girl and an elevenyear-old
boy, and keeping them as ‘sex slaves’ in a van for almost a year; when arrested, one of the
men was in bed with the girl, both naked from the waist down. In Bolton, Lancashire, a seventyeight-year-old
woman was mugged by three children, aged six, eight and nine, and left bleeding on
the ground. Three weeks before that, her eighty-one-year-old brother, partially blind, was attacked
by an intruder in his home and had to spend two weeks in hospital recovering from his injuries. The
woman commented: ‘I feel very bitter and angry. I don’t know what is happening these days.’
After this survey of the criminal history of mankind, we are at least in a slightly better position to
answer that question.
THE SENSE OF REALITY
In 1750, a traveller in Haworth, Yorkshire, was puzzled to see men jumping out of the windows of
a public house and scrambling frantically over walls. The reason, he discovered, was that someone
had seen the parson coming with his whip. The vicar of Haworth (where the Brontës would live a
few years later) was the Rev. William Grimshaw, a man who spread terror throughout the district.
When the church service had started and the congregation were singing hymns, he used to slip out
to the village and use his whip to drive any truants to the church.
In this permissive age, we find it difficult to imagine just how powerful was the religious and moral
code of a few centuries ago. Men like Grimshaw were by no means uncommon, for Sabbath
breaking was regarded as the most shocking of sins. A prison chaplain remarked that men
sentenced to death often began their confession with Sabbath breaking before they went on to
robbery or murder. When Dr Johnson visited the death bed of the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, he
made him swear never to paint on Sunday. Even humming a merry tune on Sunday was regarded as