The Knife Went In

Real-Life Murderers and Our Culture

Theodore Dalrymple

• Publisher: Gibson Square
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781783341191
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

More than half a century ago, George Orwell wrote an essay about the decline of the English murder. Since the 1990s, Theodore Dalrymple has witnessed its modern variety in real life. For over a quarter of a century he has treated and examined many more murderers than most as a prison doctor, psychiatrist, and court expert in some of Britain's most deprived areas. Here, he delves deep into his life of personal encounters with the murderous underclass to determine what has changed overtime and what has not. Inimitably, his unique portrait of modern criminals is at the same time a parable of dysfunction in our own culture. Through his experiences, he exposes today's vicious cult of denial, blaming and psychobabble that hides behind a corrosive sentiment of caring. Illustrated with scores of eye-opening, true-life vignettes, The Knife Went In is in turn hilariously funny, chillingly horrifying, and always unexpectedly revealing. Taken together, this lifetime of experience is a clear and unsentimental mirror in which we view modern progress without its varnish.

1 The Decline of the Modern Murder

There is a permanent tension between regarding men as individuals and as members of a class of men. From the fact that boys from Stratford did not generally go off to be actors in London, one might conclude that Shakespeare was never an actor in London. And from the fact that his work is unique in world literature, one might conclude that its author could not possibly have existed.

Murder is the worst crime, of course, but similarly murderers are not necessarily the worst individuals. It is disconcerting to find oneself liking a person who has strangled someone with his bare hands, but this happened to me often in my career as a psychiatrist and prison doctor. It is not that I thought, ‘There but for the grace of God go I’. I have never wanted to strangle anyone, however lost my temper. But most people are not wholly defined by the single worst act of their lives, which may however be their only act of any public significance — there is always more to them than that.

Some murderers are beyond the reach of natural sympathy, to be sure. I remember a man who, twelve years before, had impaled three children on railings because they had made too much noise; he was baby-sitting them while he wanted to watch television. A man of limited imagination, he could not see even after many years in prison that he had done anything wrong. He threatened a medical colleague of mine with death because he refused to prescribe him sleeping tablets. He was evidently one prisoner who would never be released and, in so far as he had nothing to lose by committing another murder, his threat was not taken lightly (he was swiftly moved to another prison).

Such a man as he raises important metaphysical questions which to this day are unanswered and, being philosophical in nature, are perhaps unanswerable. He was almost certainly what would once have been designated ‘morally insane’; a century later he would have been called a ‘psychopath’ (a phrase coined by the German psychiatrist J. Koch at the end of the 19th century), then a ‘sociopath’; nowadays he would be called a sufferer from ‘antisocial personality disorder’— psychiatrists think they are advancing knowledge and understanding when they change terminology.

From the very first moment he was able to act at his own volition, he would invariably have chosen to do those things that would most have distressed, disgusted or frightened others around him. He would, for example, have been cruel to animals, putting cats in washing machines and dousing dogs with petrol. He would have lied almost as a matter of principle, and stolen from those to whom he owed most duty. If intelligent he would have been able to avoid the consequences of his acts, but no punishment would in any case have corrected him or deterred him from repetition.

This pattern of development has been recognised for a long time, well before it was labelled by psychiatrists. Richard III’s mother, the Duchess of York, tells him:

Thou cams’t on earth to make the earth my hell.

A grievous burden was thy birth to me:

Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy,

Thy school days, frightful, desperate, wild and furious;

Thy prime of manhood, daring, bold, and venturous;

Thy age confirm’d, proud, subtle, sly and bloody,

More mild, and yet more harmful, kind in hatred.

It is not that the psychopath, at least the more intelligent sort, does not know the language of morality; it is more that morality itself finds no echo in him. It means no more to him than the curious custom of a distant and obscure tribe means to the reader of an anthropological text.

Except, that is, when he finds himself the object of a perceived injustice, to which he may be exquisitely sensitive, and which he may use as a justification (to himself and others) for further crimes and misdemeanours. Richard III explains his evil by the fact that he was sent into this breathing world scarce half-made up, and so lame and unfashionable that dogs barked at him in the streets as he stopped by them; and therefore, since he could not be a lover, he was determined to prove a villain. Yet within a very short time he seduces a woman for whose husband’s and father-in-law’s death he was recently responsible. So much for his deformity preventing him from being a lover.

The eminent professor of developmental psychopathology, Simon Baron-Cohen, suggests that persistently evil men may have some neurological damage or deficit, and presents brain-scan evidence that this is so. But this leaves the philosophical problem largely untouched. People who are evil (or in Baron-Cohen’s less emotive language, lack ‘empathy’) may have brain scans of type X; but does this mean that people with brain scans of type X are evil? The fact that London taxi drivers have altered brain scans after they have committed the street plan of the capital to memory does not mean that their altered brain scans are the cause of their knowledge of London or of their choice of career.

Moreover, like everyone else, Baron-Cohen is reduced to the language of morality. The subtitle of his book is A New Theory of Human Cruelty. Obviously, like everyone else, he believes that cruelty is morally undesirable. But no sifting of brain scans, no number of scientific examinations, will ever resolve the question of what is morally desirable or reprehensible. We cannot put a man in a scanner to find out whether or not the lie he told was justified. Baron-Cohen speaks of ‘appropriate’ empathy, or the lack thereof, but ‘appropriateness’ is not a measurable quality of the physical world. There is no instrument, no matter how sensitive, that could ever determine it. If someone empathised, say, with Mengele, would we put him in a scanner to find out whether it was right or wrong of him to do so?

It is easy to get in a terrible muddle over psychopathy. The difficulty lies in transposing general conclusions about mental disorders from scientific test results to the specifics of a real-life situation, particularly where someone has committed a crime.

I was once an expert witness retained by the prosecution in the trial for murder of a young man of limited intellect who lived in a kind of dosshouse which occupied several floors of a dilapidated building. Like the other residents, he drank a lot and misused tranquillisers, notably Valium (diazepam).

He had had a dispute with another resident whom he accused of stealing the gold chain he put round his neck. One evening this resident had retired early to bed on the top floor of the house, drunk as usual. There was a drinking party on the ground floor in which the accused took part. The drink fuelled his resentment against the other resident and he climbed the narrow and rickety stairs to administer him a beating, after which he returned to the party.

Further drink inflamed him, and he again climbed the stairs to administer a worse beating, this time with fatal results. He again returned to the party, though whether he was aware or not that the other resident was dead could not be established with any certainty.

It was accepted by the defence that the accused had climbed the stairs and had beaten the man to death — of that there was no possible doubt. The only questions remaining were whether he was actually capable of forming the intent to kill and then whether he had any abnormality of mind that substantially reduced his responsibility for his acts. (In fact, it was at that time necessary in law only to prove that he had the intention seriously to injure, for if a man dies of injuries intended only seriously to injure him, the culprit is still guilty of murder. This means that murder was a charge easier to prove than attempted murder, where it is necessary to prove that he actually intended to kill rather than merely injure.)

The prosecution had asked me to prepare a report only on whether the young man had been capable of forming the intent to kill when he in fact killed, and on no other question. The prosecuting counsel, an eminent QC, told me that my report was the shortest he had ever read, and I don’t think (at least I tell myself so) that he meant this as a criticism. I wrote approximately as follows:

The fact that the accused climbed the stairs twice and severely beat the only man on the premises against whom he had a grudge suggests that he was capable of forming an intent to kill.

Whether he actually did so was, of course, not for me to say; that was a matter for the court.

I was present at the trial only in case I was needed in rebuttal of the defence’s expert evidence. In its attempt to prove that the accused was not fully responsible for his actions, the defence called an eminent professor who had made psychopaths and psychopathy the object of his life’s study.

Under English every man is sane and in control of his faculties unless proved otherwise (on a balance of probabilities). The onus of proof is on the defence that he wasn’t in control at the time; the prosecution has to prove nothing, not even that the accused had a motive, though it often helps its case if it can prove a motive. A motiveless crime raises suspicions of insanity; but in murder cases motives are usually obvious.

The professor stepped into the witness box. He cut an impressive figure, tall, upright and confident. All went well with his evidence-in-chief, that is to say when he was questioned by the advocate who had called him. He was able to dilate on his opinion without contradiction, having first given his impressive qualifications, experience, research and publications.

Things fell apart during cross-examination. Calmly and without any outward sign of hostility, prosecuting counsel destroyed him in two or three minutes.

‘You say, Professor, if I have understood you correctly, that the accused is a psychopath, that psychopathy is a congenital condition, and that therefore his responsibility is diminished?’

‘Yes, that is correct.’

‘What is the evidence that he is a psychopath?’

‘His crime was that of a psychopath.’

‘Apart from his crime?’

The professor stalled and looked a little flustered that his word was being doubted. I realised that he had neither examined the papers in the case carefully nor examined the accused. There was no evidence that he had ever been violent before or had any of the defining characteristics of the psychopath.

After an embarrassing silence that seemed to last an eternity, during which I covered my eyes, counsel continued:

‘There is no evidence, is there? What in effect you are saying is that we know that he is a psychopath because of what he did, and he did it because he is a psychopath.’ The professor uttered a sound that, thanks to his dry mouth and his confusion, was word-like without being quite a word.

‘Thank you, Professor,’ said counsel, with just the right hint of contempt.

The defence had one other expert witness in the case. He was a world-famous psychopharmacologist, also a professor, and a man of expansive presence and personality. He, too, strode confidently into the witness box. He wore a double-breasted navy chalk-stripe suit of the kind that only people of a type wear, and a bright yellow bow tie. Solicitors wear pin-stripes and barristers chalk-stripe — the back-room boys and the performers. They also wear different shoes. Solicitors who practice in criminal law pay no attention to their footwear, which is often cheap and scuffed, while that of barristers, even when only young and aspiring, is dear and brightly-polished. The professor had a barrel chest and a commanding manner: he would stand out in any company.

In his evidence-in-chief, the psychopharmacologist stated categorically that the accused must have been so drunk and uncoordinated from the pills he had taken, or rather said that he had taken, that he could not possibly have climbed the narrow stairs to the victim’s room even the first time, let alone a second time after having drunk yet more alcohol and taken yet more pills.

‘Let me be absolutely clear, Professor,’ said prosecuting counsel. ‘Your evidence is that the accused could not, for pharmacological reasons, have climbed the stairs?’

‘Yes,’ said the professor confidently.

‘Thank you, Professor, no further questions.

He left the witness box, the wings of his bow-tie flapping, as it were. I don’t think, and certainly hope, that he had any idea what a fool he had been made to look: for he had stated that what the defence had already conceded had happened, could not have, and indeed had not, happened.

How and why was the stature of these two men, both brilliant in their field, so easily destroyed in the witness box by opposing counsel? For two reasons, the first being simply that they were such extremely busy men, constantly juggling the demands of administration with those of teaching, research, writing, speaking and travelling, that they had neither the time nor the inclination to master and commit to memory (even temporarily) the papers relating to a case that was, after all, a garden-variety murder and utterly without what Sherlock Holmes would have called ‘points of interest.’

The second reason (I surmise) was that the professors had become too accustomed to their own eminence. It was for them to pontificate and for non-experts to believe without question.

I encountered the second of the professors, the psychopharmacologist, in another case. We met outside the courtroom before we were called. I took to him immediately. He was the kind of man one would like to have met at a dinner party, a fund of amusing, interesting and pointed stories, who clearly also had a keen enjoyment of the pleasures of the table. He was larger than life and better fun.

The case was that of a young man who had gone into a multi-storey car-park and there strangled a woman. Amazingly enough, he had done this out of the line of sight of CCTV cameras. Amazingly, for practically everything out of doors these days (at least in Britain) takes place on camera. One is a film star without knowing it.

The accused maintained that he was not and could not have been the killer because, on the day of the woman’s death, he had been so intoxicated with cannabis that he could not physically have caused it. The professor, who was a world authority on the effects of cannabis, supported this defence — if, that is, the accused had taken as much cannabis that day as he said he had.

This time, I was called in to rebut the cross-examination evidence given by the psychopharmacologist. Prosecuting counsel had not challenged the professor’s evidence directly in his cross examination. He had left that for me to do in rebuttal. The professor had, therefore, left the witness box with the air of a job well done. He did not wait to hear my response.

His evidence had been that the accused, a young ne’er-do-well, had smoked so much cannabis that he must have been physically unable to carry out a murder, if not actually unconscious.

A problem for this evidence was that there was a video of the accused walking in the street shortly before the murder was committed. The quality of the video was not good. I would not have recognised the man in it as having been the accused, but I was assured that the identity had been incontestably established. Having watched it, I said that, while it provided no evidence as to his fine coordination, it provided no evidence that he was as grossly uncoordinated as the professor said he must have been. The accused was walking as purposefully as any man might who had an appointment to keep. And it was for the defence that he was incapably uncoordinated, not for the prosecution to prove that he was not.

Furthermore, the professor’s pharmacological evidence was, in my view, not only flawed but obviously flawed (even if the accused had smoked as much as he claimed, for which there was no evidence but his word for it, which was hardly disinterested). I pointed out that the concentration of the main active ingredient of cannabis varied greatly, by several-fold; that the quantity of smoke inhaled by the smoker varied greatly, by several-fold; and that the effect on the individual of the drug varied greatly, according to experience, expectations, circumstances, temperament and other factors; such that nothing whatever could be concluded about a man’s conduct and state of mind merely from knowledge of the amount of cannabis he had smoked. Collateral evidence, therefore, was essential; and the man was convicted.

Another murder in a multi-storey car-park was the occasion of my meeting with a different type of expert, this time in forensic entomology, a discipline of whose existence I was until then unaware. He reminded me somewhat of the psychopharmacologist, though in fact he was far more self-deprecating, and his subject was insects, of course, rather than man. This murder was the denouement of a quarrel between two sellers of the Big Issue, the magazine founded to help the homeless help themselves, over territorial rights to sale pitches in the city. Nothing is important or unimportant but thinking something is makes it so.

I was waiting outside the court to testify and was joined by a man with a splendid moustache. He, too, was in a chalk-striped suit. We fell to talking, and I asked him what he did.

‘Oh,’ he replied, ‘I’m just a fly man.’

Much in the case depended upon the age of the corpse which, surprisingly, had remained undetected in the car-park for some considerable time. I have never been able, ever since this case, to enter or leave such a car-park without wondering where the corpse it might contain is hidden, even cast my eyes around for it.

The fly man, as he called himself, explained what I had only dimly apprehended before, that the species of maggots and other proofs of occupation by flies established, where circumambient conditions were taken into account, the likely age of a corpse. Flies colonise a corpse in an orderly and predictable succession of species, according to country, conditions, climate. The existence of a whole new world of erudition suddenly became evident to me.

The fly man explained his evidence to me with brilliant clarity and obvious authority, as well as love for his subject. He did so without condescension towards the ignorant, in this case me. While he spoke, the succession of species of fly inhabiting a corpse was the most important subject in the world. Yet at the same time he managed to convey that flies in a corpse were only one instance of the fascination and wonderment of the world. He was a man to whom I felt an immediate attachment.

He was called into court, too soon for me, who could have listened to him for hours. I never met him again, but a few days later received a letter, via a newspaper, from Dr Zakaria Erzinclioglu, forensic entomologist, telling me how much he had enjoyed an article I had written and expressing his agreement with it. Forensic entomologists are not numerous, and I realised that the man I had met a few days earlier had been he.

I replied at once, of course, for there was no man with wh...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Praise for this book
• The Knife Went In
• 1 The Decline of the Modern Murder
• 2 Decision Time
• 3 Sticks and Stones
• 4 Prison Officers
• 5 The Money of Frauds
• 6 Suicides
• 7 Dr No
• 8 Encouraging Thwacks
• 9 Rule Forty Five
• 10 The Thin Blue Squiggle
• 11 Recent Activity in Homicides
• 12 Psychiatric Fungus
• 13 No Good Act...
• 14 Loud Pleasures
• 15 A Simple Caution
• 16 Drunken Stress
• 17 Evil Characters
• 18 Manic Mitigations
• Pride goeth