A Criminal History of Mankind (2 page)

It is phrases like this that seem to provide a clue. There is a basic desire in all human beings, even the most modest, to ‘become known’. Montaigne tells us that he is an ordinary man, yet that he feels his thoughts are worthy of attention; is there anyone who can claim not to recognise the feeling? In fact, is there anyone in the world who does not secretly feel that he is worthy of a biography? In a book called
The Denial of Death
, Ernest Becker states that one of the most basic urges in man is the urge to heroism. ‘We are all,’ he says, ‘hopelessly absorbed with ourselves.’ In children, we can see the urge to self-esteem in its least disguised form. The child shouts his needs at the top of his voice. He does not disguise his feeling that he is the centre of the world. He strenuously objects if his brother gets a larger piece of cake. ‘He must desperately justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe; he must stand out, be a hero, make the biggest possible contribution to world life, show that he
counts
more than anyone else.’ So he indulges endless daydreams of heroism.

Then he grows up and has to learn to be a realist, to recognise that, on a world-scale, he is a nobody. Apparently he comes to terms with this recognition; but deep down inside, the feeling of uniqueness remains. Becker says that if everyone honestly admitted his desire to be a hero, and demanded some kind of satisfaction, it would shake society to its foundations. Only very simple primitive societies can give their members this sense of uniqueness, of being known to all. ‘The minority groups in present-day industrial society who shout for freedom and human dignity are really clumsily asking that they be given a sense of primary heroism ...’.

Becker’s words certainly bring a flash of insight into all kinds of phenomena, from industrial unrest to political terrorism. They are an expression of this half-buried need to
be
somebody, and of a revolt against a society that denies it. When Herbert Mills decided to commit a ‘perfect murder’, he was trying to provide himself with a reason for that sense of uniqueness. In an increasing number of criminal cases, we have to learn to see beyond the stated motivation -social injustice or whatever - to this primary need. There was a weird, surrealistic air about Charles Manson’s self-justifications in court; he seemed to be saying that he was not responsible for the death of eight people because society was guilty of far worse things than that. Closer examination of the evidence reveals that Manson felt that he had as much right to be famous as the Beatles or Bob Dylan (he had tried hard to interest record companies in tapes he had recorded); in planning Helter Skelter, the revolution that would transform American society, he was asserting his primacy, his uniqueness.

I was struck by the difference between these typical crimes of the late sixties - Manson, the Moors murders, Frazier, Zodiac - and the typical crimes of ten or twenty years earlier - Haigh, Heath, Christie, Chessman, Glatman. John Christie killed girls for sexual purposes - he seems to have been impotent if the woman was conscious - and walled them up in a cupboard in his kitchen. The cupboard is somehow a symbol of this type of crime - the place where skeletons are hidden by people who are anxious to appear normal and respectable. Manson’s ‘family’ sat around the television, gloating over the news bulletin that announced the killings in Sharon Tate’s home. The last thing they wanted was for their crimes to be hidden.

Clearly, there is some sort of pattern here. But what are the underlying laws that govern it? In the mid-1960s, the psychologist Abraham Maslow sent me his book
Motivation and Personality
(1954), and it was in the fourth chapter, ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’, that I thought I saw the outline of some kind of general solution to the changing pattern. The chapter had originally been published in 1943 in the
Psychological Review
, and had achieved the status of a classic among professional psychologists; but for some reason it had never percolated through to the general public. What Maslow proposed in this paper was that human motivation can be described in terms of a ‘hierarchy of needs’ or values. These fall roughly into four categories: physiological needs (basically food), security needs (basically a roof over one’s head), belongingness and love needs (desire for roots, the need to be wanted), and esteem needs (to be liked and respected). And beyond these four levels, Maslow suggested the existence of a fifth category: self-actualisation: the need to know and understand, to create, to solve problems for the fun of it.

When a man is permanently hungry, he can think of nothing else, and his idea of paradise is a place with plenty of food. In fact, if he solves the food problem, he becomes preoccupied with the question of security, a home, ‘territory’. (Every tramp dreams of retiring to a country cottage with roses round the door.) If he solves this problem, the sexual needs become urgent - not simply physical satisfaction, but the need for warmth, security and ‘belonging’. And if this level is satisfied, the next emerges: the need to be liked and admired, the need for self-esteem and the esteem of one’s neighbours. If all these needs are satisfied, the ‘self-actualising’ needs are free to develop (although they do not always do so - Maslow recognised that many people never get beyond level four.)

Now, as I worked on a second study in criminology,
A Casebook of Murder
, it struck me that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs corresponds roughly to historical periods of crime. Until the first part of the nineteenth century, most crimes were committed out of the simple need for survival - Maslow’s first level. Burke and Hare, the Edinburgh body-snatchers, suffocated their victims and sold the corpses to the medical school for about £7 each. By the mid-nineteenth century the pattern was changing; the industrial revolution had increased prosperity, and suddenly the most notorious crimes are ‘domestic murders’ that take place in respectable middle-class homes: Dr Palmer, Dr Pritchard, Constance Kent, Florence Bravo. (American parallels would include Professor Webster and Lizzie Borden.) These people are committing crimes to safeguard their security. Charlie Peace, housebreaker and murderer, practised burglary to subsidise a respectable middle-class existence that included regular churchgoing and musical evenings with the neighbours.

But even before the end of the century, a new type of crime had emerged: the sex crime. The Jack the Ripper murders of 1888 were among the first of this type, and it is significant that the killer’s contemporaries did not recognise them as sex crimes; they argued that the Ripper was ‘morally insane’, as if his actions could only be explained by a combination of wickedness and madness. The Ripper is the first in a long line of ‘maniac’ killers that extends down to Heath and Glatman, and that still throws up appalling examples such as Dean Corll, John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy. To the crime committed for purely sexual reasons we should also add the increasing number of crimes committed out of jealousy or the desire to get rid of a spouse in favour of a lover - Crippen, Bywaters and Thompson, Snyder and Gray.

So what I had noticed in 1959 was a transition to a new level in the hierarchy: to the crime of ‘self-esteem’. From then on, there was an increasing number of crimes in which the criminal seemed to feel, in a muddled sort of way, that society was somehow to blame for not granting him dignity, justice and recognition of his individuality, and to regard his crime as a legitimate protest. When, in October 1970, Victor Ohta and his family were found murdered in their California home, a note on the doctor’s Rolls-Royce read: ‘Today World War III will begin, as brought to you by the people of the free universe ... I and my comrades from this day forth will fight until death or freedom against anyone who does not support natural life on this planet. Materialism must die or mankind will stop.’ The killer, the twenty-four-year-old drop-out John Linley Frazier, had told witnesses that the Ohta family was ‘too materialistic’ and deserved to die. In fact, Frazier was reacting with the self-centred narcissism of the children described by Becker. (‘You gave him more juice.’ ‘Here’s some more then.’ ‘Now she’s got more juice than me ...’) He felt he had a long way to go to achieve ‘security’, while Ohta had a swimming pool and a Rolls-Royce parked in the drive.

The irony is that Ohta himself would serve equally well as an example of Becker’s ‘urge to heroism’. He was the son of Japanese immigrants who had been interned in 1941; but Ohta had finally been allowed to join the American army; his elder brother was killed in the fighting in Europe. Ohta had worked as a railway track-layer and a cab driver to get through medical school, and his success as an eye surgeon came late in life. Ohta achieved his sense of ‘belonging-ness’ through community work; he was one of the founders of the Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz - a non-profit-making hospital - and often gave free treatment to patients who could not afford his fees. Frazier was completely unaware of all this. But it would probably have made no difference anyway. He was completely wrapped up in his own little world of narcissism.

Clearly there are many ways in which human beings can satisfy the narcissistic craving for ‘being first’. Ohta’s was balanced and realistic, and he was therefore a valuable member of the community. Frazier’s was childish and unrealistic, and his crimes did no one any good, least of all himself.

Maslow’s theory of the hierarchy of needs developed from his observation of monkeys in the Bronx zoo in the mid-1930s. He was at this time puzzling about the relative merits of Freud and Adler: Freud with his view that all neurosis is sexual in origin, Adler with his belief that man’s life is a fight against a feeling of inferiority and that his mainspring is his ‘will to power’. In the Bronx zoo, he was struck by the dominance behaviour of the monkeys and by the non-stop sex. He was puzzled that sexual behaviour seemed so indiscriminate: males mounted females or other males; females mounted other females and even males. There was also a distinct ‘pecking order’, the more dominant monkeys bullying the less dominant. There seemed to be as much evidence for Freud’s theory as for Adler’s. Then, one day, a revelation burst upon Maslow. Monkey sex
looked
indiscriminate because the more dominant monkeys mounted the less dominant ones, whether male or female. Maslow concluded, therefore, that Adler was right and Freud was wrong - about this matter at least.

Since dominance behaviour seemed to be the key to monkey psychology, Maslow wondered how far this applied to human beings. He decided to study dominance behaviour in human beings and, since he was a young and heterosexual male, decided that he would prefer to study women rather than men. Besides, he felt that women were usually more honest when it came to talking about their private lives. In 1936, he began a series of interviews with college women; his aim was to find out whether sex and dominance are related. He quickly concluded that they were.

The women tended to fall into three distinct groups: high dominance, medium dominance and low dominance, the high dominance group being the smallest of the three. High dominance women tended to be promiscuous and to enjoy sex for its own sake -in a manner we tend to regard as distinctly masculine. They were more likely to masturbate, sleep with different men, and have lesbian experiences. Medium dominance women were basically romantics; they might have a strong sex drive, but their sexual experience was usually limited. They were looking for ‘Mr Right’, the kind of man who would bring them flowers and take them out for dinner in restaurants with soft lights and sweet music. Low dominance women seemed actively to dislike sex, or to think of it as an unfortunate necessity for producing children. One low dominance woman with a high sex-drive refused to permit her husband sexual intercourse because she disliked children. Low dominance women tended to be prudes who were shocked at nudity and regarded the male sexual organ as disgusting. (High dominance women thought it beautiful.)

Their choice of males was dictated by the dominance group. High dominance women liked high dominance males, the kind who would grab them and hurl them on a bed. They seemed to like their lovers to be athletic, rough and unsentimental. Medium dominance women liked kindly, home-loving males, the kind who smoke a pipe and look calm and reflective. They would prefer a romantic male, but were prepared to settle for a hard worker of reliable habits. Low dominance women were distrustful of all males, although they usually wanted children and recognised that a man had to be pressed into service for this purpose. They preferred the kind of gentle, shy man who would admire them from a distance for years without daring to speak.

But Maslow’s most interesting observation was that
all
the women, in all dominance groups, preferred a male who was slightly more dominant than themselves. One very high dominance woman spent years looking for a man of superior dominance - meanwhile having many affairs; and once she found him, married him and lived happily ever after. However, she enjoyed picking fights with him, provoking him to violence that ended in virtual rape; and this sexual experience she found the most satisfying of all. Clearly, even this man was not
quite
dominant enough, and she was provoking him to an artificially high level of dominance.

The rule seemed to be that, for a permanent relationship, a man and woman needed to be in the same dominance group. Medium dominance women were nervous of high dominance males, and low dominance women were terrified of medium dominance males. As to the males, they might well show a sexual interest in a woman of a lower dominance group, but it would not survive the act of seduction. A medium dominance woman might be superficially attracted by a high dominance male; but on closer acquaintance she would find him brutal and unromantic. A high dominance male might find a medium dominance female ‘beddable’, but closer acquaintance would reveal her as rather uninteresting, like an unseasoned meal. To achieve a personal relationship, the two would need to be in the same dominance group. Maslow even devised psychological tests to discover whether the ‘dominance gap’ between a man and a woman was of the right size to form the basis of a permanent relationship.