A Criminal History of Mankind (4 page)

There was no confession. Brady stonewalled every inch of the way. He insisted that Lesley had been brought to the house by two men, who also took her away. The tape was played in court, and provided the most horrifying moment of the trial. Myra later said she felt ashamed of what they had done to Lesley (although she would only confess to helping to take pornographic photographs); Brady remained indifferent. He explained at one point that he knew he would be condemned anyway. On 6 May 1966, he was sentenced lo three concurrent terms of life imprisonment; Myra Hindley was sentenced to two. Since then, there has been occasional talk of releasing Myra from prison; but the public outcry reveals that the case still arouses unusual revulsion. No one has even suggested that Brady should ever be released.

The central mystery of the case remains: how a perfectly normal girl like Myra Hindley could have participated with a certain enthusiasm in the murders. At the time I was studying the case (for a book called
Order of Assassins
’) I had long discussions with Dr Rachel Pinney, who had met Myra in jail and had become convinced of her innocence. In her view, Myra had been ‘framed’. ‘I still think Myra had no part in the killings or torture,’ she wrote in a letter to me, ‘and the end result of my work will be a fuller study of the psychology of being “hooked” - e.g. Rasputin and the Tsarina, Loeb and Leopold, Hitler and his worshippers.’ This seems to me a penetrating comment; but it still leaves us no clue as to how a girl who loved animals and children became involved in such appalling crimes.

Her early background suggests that the answer may be partly that she was not as ‘normal’ as she seemed.  Daughter of a mixed Catholic-Protestant marriage, she had been sent to live with her grandmother from the age of four - her father was something of an invalid after an accident. Myra undoubtedly felt that she had been rejected in favour of her younger sister Maureen. Moving between two homes a few hundred yards apart, Myra knew little of parental discipline; her grandmother adored her and spoiled her. She had a forceful personality, which manifested itself in her large, firm chin and her share of Lancashire commonsense and hard-headedness. Her school report described her personality as ‘not very sociable’, although her classmates remembered her as something of a comedienne. Then, shortly before her fifteenth birthday, she received a severe psychological shock. She was friendly with a thirteen-year-old boy named Michael Higgins; he was shy and delicate and seems to have aroused maternal feelings in her. On a hot June afternoon he asked her to go swimming in a disused reservoir; she declined. The boy was seized with cramp and drowned; Myra, going along to see why Michael had not returned home, found police standing around his body. She was shattered. She spent days collecting money for a wreath and attended the funeral. She wore black clothes for months afterwards and became gloomy and silent. Then she reacted to the shock of the death by becoming a Roman Catholic. She left school a few weeks after the funeral and took a succession of office jobs. She found them utterly boring, and made a habit of absenteeism; the result was that they never lasted for more than a month or so. She went to dances and changed the colour of her hair repeatedly; but she never allowed boys any liberties. In fact, she was a prude. Engaged briefly at seventeen, she broke it off because ‘he is too childish’. When her dog was killed by a car, she again went into a state of traumatic gloom.

Myra’s problem was that of many strong-willed girls. Where males are concerned, determination is not a particularly alluring feminine characteristic. The male image of the eternal feminine is of softness, gentleness. But the strong-minded girl cannot help being strong-minded, and feeling a certain impatient contempt for most of the males of her acquaintance. So most men find her off-putting and she finds most men off-putting. This does not prevent her longing for the right man - particularly if, like Myra, she has strong nest-building instincts. It only prevents her being experimental, from having the kind of experience that weaker and sillier girls have every night of the week. Even if she finds a man attractive, it is difficult for her to send out the signals that might attract him - the yielding look, the lowered eyelids. Sheer cussedness makes her glare defiantly, or say something that implies she knows better than he does. She is her own worst enemy.

Brady’s first impression of Myra was probably that she was a hard-looking bitch, the kind who would want to cut him down to size. Then, as it became clear that this big-chinned female was ‘gone on him’, the vague dislike would be replaced by pleasure; we all find it hard not to see the best side of people who approve of us. He notices she looks rather Germanic - a bit like one of those concentration camp guards. He begins to enjoy the game, like an angler playing a salmon; he wants it to go on as long as possible. She speaks to him in July and he looks embarrassed. In August she notices that ‘Ian is taking sly looks at me.’ And from then on, it is all ups and downs; one day he has got a cold and she wants to mother him, the next he has been rude to her and she hates him. Bur although it is sweeter to travel than to arrive, these preliminaries cannot go on for ever, and five months later, he takes her out. And, like Martha Beck, she has suddenly found the lover of her daydreams.

The next stage is the difficult one to understand. How does he turn her into a murderess? The earlier trauma about the death of Michael Higgins must have played its part. It remains a psychological scar; but Brady’s tough-minded attitude towards death acts as a catharsis. The books about concentration camps, the Nazi marching music, the records of Hitler making speeches, all seem to launch her on to a level of vitality where the tragedy ceases to depress her.

If she had been a quiet, efficient girl who enjoyed office work, all this would have been impossible. But it bored her silly; she had lost job after job through absenteeism.

Brady had been through the same stage. He had also lost job after job; but these had all been hard manual jobs, and the position as a stock clerk must have seemed a pleasant change. Now the only sign of his earlier instability was his constant unpunctuality, and his tendency to slip out of the office to place bets. There were always books about the Nazis in the office drawer. He seldom spoke to the other employees. He spent his lunch breaks reading his books on war crimes. He had successfully withdrawn into his own fantasy world. In due course, he found no difficulty in fitting Myra into the fantasy. He called her ‘Hessie’, not just because her name was Myra, but because he admired Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess.

All this helps to explain how Myra became his devoted slave. But none of these factors was crucial. The fundamental explanation lies in the recognition that she was medium dominance and Brady was high. She, in spite of her hard-headedness, was a typical romantic typist longing to be embraced by a masterful but gentle male. But for Brady, she was the catalyst that turned him from a fantasist into a killer. For him it was not a love game but a power game. No doubt this is a simplification: all male sexuality contains an element of the ‘power game’. But when the male belongs to a higher dominance group, then the sense of power provides the chief pleasure in the relationship.

These observations afford important insights into crime on Maslow’s fourth level, the level of ‘self-esteem’. But there is still a question that remains unexplained: the psychology of the ‘submissive’ partner. In the case of Leopold and Loeb, or Brady and Hindley, the question is blurred by the sexual relationship between the partners, which suggests a kind of equality of responsibility. But in the Albert T. Patrick case, there was no such relationship and the question becomes insistent. When Patrick first called on Charles Jones, he was looking for information that he could use against Jones’s employer, William Rice. Jones indignantly refused: yet for some reason, he did not tell Rice. Already, Patrick had established some subtle dominance. He called again; Jones weakened, and allowed Patrick to persuade him to forge his employer’s signature to a letter to be used against Rice in a law suit. Six months later, Jones was administering poison to his employer, the man to whom he owed everything. We may object that perhaps Jones had reason to dislike his employer; perhaps the old man was a bully. But this would still not explain the ascendancy that made Jones agree to cut his throat in prison. This brings to mind another curious criminal case of the mid-1930s. A woman on a train to Heidelberg - where she intended to consult a doctor about stomach pains - fell into conversation with a fellow passenger who claimed to be a nature healer. This man, whose name was Franz Walter, said he could cure her illness, and when the train stopped at a station, invited her to join him for coffee. She was unwilling, but allowed herself to be persuaded. As they walked along the platform he took hold of her hand ‘and it seemed to me as if I no longer had a will of my own. I felt so strange and giddy.’ He took her to a room in Heidelberg, placed her in a trance by touching her forehead, and raped her. She tried to push him away, but she was unable to move. ‘I strained myself more and more but it didn’t help. He stroked me and said: “You sleep quite deeply, you can’t call out, and you can’t do anything else.” Then he pressed my hands and arms behind me and said: “You can’t move any more. When you wake up you will not know anything of what happened.”’

Later, Walter made her prostitute herself to various men, telling her clients the hypnotic word of command that would make her unable to move. And when she married, he made her attempt to kill her husband by various means. The latter became suspicious after her sixth attempt at murder - when his motor cycle brake cable snapped, causing a crash - and when he learned that she had parted with three thousand marks to some unknown doctor. The police came to suspect that she had been hypnotised, and a psychiatrist, Dr Ludwig Mayer, succeeded in releasing the suppressed memories of the hypnotic sessions. In due course, Walter received ten years in prison.

How did Walter bring her under his control so quickly and easily? Clearly, she was a woman of low vitality, highly ‘suggestible’. Yet holding her hand hardly seems to be a normal means of inducing hypnosis. In fact, there is a certain amount of evidence to suggest that hypnosis can be induced through a purely mental force. In 1885, the French psychologist Pierre Janet was invited to Le Havre by a doctor named Gibert to observe his experiments with a patient called Léonie. Léonie was an exceptionally good hypnotic subject, and would obey Gibert’s mental suggestions
at a distance
. Gibert usually induced a trance by
touching Léonie’s hand
, but Janet confirmed that he could induce a trance by merely thinking about it. On another occasion he ‘summoned’ Léonie from a distance by a mental command. Gibert discovered that he had to concentrate hard to do these things; if his mind was partly on something else, it failed in work - which suggests that he was directing some kind of mental ‘beam’ at her. In the 1920s, the Russian scientist L. L. Vasiliev carried out similar experiments with a patient suffering from hysterical paralysis of the left side. She was placed under hypnosis and then mentally ordered by Vasiliev to make various movements, including movements of the paralysed arm; she obeyed all these orders. (In the 1890s, Dr Paul Joire had conducted similar experiments in which the patients were not hypnotised but only blindfolded, and again he discovered that the mental ‘orders’ would only be obeyed if he concentrated very hard.) J. B. Priestley has described how, at a literary dinner, he told his neighbour that he proposed to make someone wink at him; he then chose a sombre-looking woman and concentrated on her until suddenly she winked at him. Later she explained to him that she had experienced a ‘sudden silly impulse’ to wink.

Whether or not we accept the notion that hypnosis is, to some degree, ‘telepathic’, there can be no doubt about the baffling nature of the phenomenon. Animals are particularly easy to hypnotise, a fact that first seems to have been recorded by a mathematician named Daniel Schwenter in 1636. Schwenter noted that if a small bent piece of wood is fastened on a hen’s beak, the hen fixes its eyes on it and goes into a trance. Similarly, if the hen’s beak is held against the ground and a chalk line is drawn away from the point of its beak, it lies immobilised. Ten years later, a Jesuit priest, Fr Athanasius Kircher, described similar experiments on hens. All that is necessary is to tuck the hen’s head under its wing and then give it a few gentle swings through the air; it will then lie still. (French peasants still use this method when they buy live hens in the market.) A doctor named Golsch discovered that frogs can be hypnotised by turning them on their backs and lightly tapping the stomach with the finger. Snapping the fingers above the frog is just as effective. Crabs can be hypnotised by gently stroking the shell from head to tail and un-hypnotised by reversing the motion. In
Hypnosis of Men and Animals
(published in 1963), Ferenc Andrä Völgyesi describes how Africans hypnotise wild elephants. The elephant is chained to a tree, where it thrashes about savagely. The natives then wave leafy boughs to and fro in front of it and chant monotonously; eventually, its eyes blink, close, and the elephant becomes docile. It can then be teamed with a trained elephant and worked into various tasks. If it becomes unmanageable, the treatment is repeated, and usually works almost immediately.

Völgyesi also discusses the way that snakes ‘fascinate’ their victims. Far from being an old wives’ tale, this has been observed by many scientists. Toads, frogs, rabbits and other creatures can be ‘transfixed’ by the snake’s gaze - which involves expansion of its pupils - and by its hiss. But Völgyesi observed - and photographed - a large toad winning a ‘battle of hypnosis’ with a snake. Völgyesi observed two lizards confronting each other for about ten minutes, both quite quite rigid; then one slowly and deliberately ate the other, starting at the head. It was again, apparently, a battle of hypnosis. What seems to happen in such cases is that one creature subdues the will of the other. Völgyesi observed that hypnosis can also be effected by a sudden shock - by grabbing a bird violently, or making a loud noise. He observes penetratingly that hypnosis seems to have something in common with stage fright - that is, so much adrenalin is released into the bloodstream that, instead of stimulating the creature, it virtually paralyses it. (We have all had the experience of feeling weakened by fear.)