A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

The same motivation can be seen in the case of the twenty-two-year-old Steven Judy, executed in
the electric chair in Indianapolis in March 1981. Judy had murdered and: strangled a twenty-yearold
mother and thrown her three children to their death in a nearby river. A child of a broken home,
Judy had committed his first rape at the age of twelve, stabbing the woman repeatedly and severing
her finger. He told the jury: ‘You’d better put me to death. Because next time, it might be one of
you, or your daughter.’ And before his execution he told his stepmother that he had raped and
killed more women than he could remember, leaving a trail of bodies from Texas to Indiana. Like
Panzram, Judy opposed every effort to appeal against his death sentence.
It may seem that there is a world of difference between a Russian peasant suffering from ‘obsessive
neurosis’ and a young American rapist. But it is important to try to go to the heart of the matter.
Human happiness is based upon a feeling of the reality of the will, or the ‘spirit’. When a man
looks at something he has made with his own hands, or contemplates some catastrophe he has
averted by courage and determination, he experiences a deep sense of satisfaction. Conversely, the
feeling of helplessness, of losing control, is a good definition of misery. Physical strength is
normally something that a man would be proud of; but when Merkhouloff feels that he can
accidentally inflict death it becomes a source of misery. It destroys his relationships with other
human beings; he cannot like someone without feeling that a single blow could terminate the
relationship. Steven Judy is in the same position. Every time he sees an attractive girl he is
tormented by desire; but after killing and raping a number of women, he knows that every twinge
of desire is an invitation to risk his freedom and his life. Part of him remains normal, sociable,
affectionate; like all human beings, he has the usual needs for security, ‘belonging’, self-esteem.
But the killer-Alsatian guarantees that he will never be allowed to satisfy these in the normal way.
It has placed him outside the human race.
What becomes clear is that the central problem of the criminal is the problem of self-division. And
it is easy to see how this comes about. All human beings experience, to some extent, the need for
‘primacy’, the desire to be ‘recognised’. This obviously means to be recognised among other
human beings; the individual wishes to stand out as a member of a group. There is a great
satisfaction in achievement for its own sake; but half the pleasure of achievement lies in the
admiration of the other members of the group. Crime obviously demands secrecy. And this explains
why so many clever criminals experience a compulsion to talk at length about their crimes once
they have been caught. Haigh would probably never have been convicted if he had not boasted to
the police about dissolving the bodies of his victims in acid and pouring the sludge out in the
garden. Thurneman made his own conviction doubly certain by writing a detailed autobiography of
his crimes.
Panzram’s crimes were based upon a conviction that he would never achieve ‘primacy’ in the
normal way - by winning the admiration of other people. After the Warden Murphy episode, he
tried to live out this conviction with a ruthless and terrifying logic; his murders were a deliberate
attempt to crush the ‘human’ part of himself out of existence. Yet it refused to die; maimed,
bleeding, horribly mutilated, it still insisted on reminding him that he would like to be a man
among other men. The declaration: ‘I’d like to kill the whole human race’ was a kind of suicide.
At this point, it is necessary to look more closely into this paradox of human self-destruction: the
paradox of ‘the divided self.