Sadistic Killers: Profiles of Pathological Predators (38 page)

Ramsden also stresses that the mainstream notion of the submissive as doormat is totally wrong: ‘Most supposed submissives are seeking to control their dominants and in consensual play they actually are in control. As the submissive gets most of the action in return for a little pantomime of letting the dominant feel powerful it is a tempting option, particularly as you get to lie down while other people fuss over you.’

So a carefully controlled consensual situation is arguably a win-win situation, yet it’s still illegal in Britain for a recreational sadist to leave any but the most trifling marks on a consenting partner and they can be imprisoned for a maximum of five years under the charge of causing actual bodily harm.

In December 1990, 16 consenting gay sadomasochists were found guilty of this very charge and some of them were sent to prison for terms of up to four and a half years. Following a public outcry about this decision, the Law Commission produced a consultation paper on Consent in the Criminal Law.

They found that sadomasochism was ‘surprisingly widespread’

and provisionally proposed that minor injuries should not be regarded as criminal ‘if the other person consented to the injury of the type caused.’

This proposal has yet to be enshrined in law, which makes for endless confusion. As the situation stands, sadomasochism itself 317

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is legal, but leaving the kind of marks that it necessitates can be illegal and lead to prosecution, regardless of the submissive’s consent.

Undoing the damage

Understandably given such legal censure, the consensual sadomasochist is often conflicted about his sexuality.

Meanwhile, the public’s perception of the criminal sadist is that he remains indifferent to his crimes. But is this always the case? Patrick Byrne’s chronic insomnia, Christopher Wilder’s stomach upsets, Richard Cottingham’s ulcer and Dayton Rogers’ extreme weight loss and migraines suggest otherwise.

And if these men are capable of feeling guilt about their crimes, they can probably benefit from therapy.

An irate public justifiably doesn’t want these sadists treated for their own sake – but a prison system which could calm such dangerous men would be a system which was much safer for prison officers and prison tutors, as well as the numerous medical and dental staff who have to spend time with such killers. As such, the final chapter explores a treatment model which has had impressive results.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHANGING THINGS

Only six per cent of British killers are considered
insane – which leaves 94 per cent presumably capable
of some form of legitimate communication. Many
of these men are psychopaths and the psychiatric
profession has always maintained that they are
untreatable. As such, they are simply locked away
without therapeutic help.

But this approach can have its dangers and lead to acts
of violence in jail, as occurred with prisoner Darren
Blancheflower. Sentenced to life imprisonment for
armed robbery, he took offence when his carpentry
tutor criticised his work and attacked the unfortunate
man with a hammer, ignoring his pleas. During the
assault, another prisoner shouted to Blancheflower
and he looked over at the man then calmly continued
to rain crushing blows upon his tutor’s head. His
victim died, after which Blancheflower told his
fellow prisoners that he wanted to kill again.

A therapeutic approach

He believed that he was born evil and would die evil, so was initially resistant to therapy, threatening to strangle prison psychiatrist Dr Bob Johnson with a pyjama cord. For a while the sessions were halted, then Dr Johnson resumed his work, 319

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eventually exploring Blancheflower’s childhood. At this stage the typical abused upbringing of the sadist emerged.

The prisoner initially refused to talk about his mother, simply making dark statements about how he wanted to hurt her. But slowly he gave details of what he’d been through. Later, he talked about his childhood abuse of animals which included starving his pet rabbit for several days then cutting it in half.

He’d also put numerous live frogs through a crushing machine when he was only ten years old, taking pleasure from seeing their flesh and blood squirt out.

Responding to Johnson’s therapy, the psychopath became much more relaxed, the change noticeable in his voice tone and body language. He eventually acknowledged that he might be able to resolve issues through talking, that he didn’t have to use violence.

Bob Johnson treated 18 such psychopaths in Parkhurst Prison between 1991 and 1996 at the invitation of the then governor.

He recorded 700 hours of interviews with these men, finding that they had invariably become evil after suffering childhood trauma which left them with repressed toxic memories. They tended to see themselves as being faultily wired, but the doctor made clear that they were only faultily programmed and therefore salvageable. (Sceptics believe that such violent men merely invent an abusive upbringing but the cruel childhoods of numerous prisoners has been well documented.) Dr Johnson found that it was often two years into treatment before these damaged individuals could talk about certain aspects of their childhoods. They initially said that they were indifferent to their toxic parent or that they’d like to get their own back by inflicting hellish tortures – but further sessions revealed that subconsciously they were still afraid of them.

And these men had good reason to be afraid. One killer told Dr Johnson about being abused from the age of four by a close relative. Widely regarded as an unfeeling hard man, he broke 320

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Changing Things

down and wept, admitting, ‘I’ve been hurt too much.’ Another murderer told the psychiatrist that he’d been multiply abused by his father, being sodomised from the age of eight and made to cross-dress by age ten. He went on to molest his friends at school – and in adulthood he shot dead his pregnant girlfriend.

Talking at last about his violent parent, he admitted, ‘I was terrified of him… he was a nutter.’ He began unravelling the past.

This man too visibly relaxed after being treated by Bob Johnson – and Johnson himself noted similar changes in his other psychopathic patients. ‘They changed visually… stopped hitting each other… showed a more relaxed body language and began sleeping better. They also stopped having stomach pains.’

It was obvious to everyone that his approach was paying dividends – after all, the bell which signalled a violent incident had rung numerous times prior to the psychiatrist’s arrival, whereas after several months of treating these killers, it didn’t ring at all.

But in 1996, Parkhurst decided to close its C-Wing so all of Dr Johnson’s patients were moved to different prisons, despite the fact that some were at critical stages of their therapy. Aware that his newer patients would regress, the psychiatrist resigned in disgust.

Only a naïve or foolish prison service would have released these men early because they self-reported that they no longer felt violent and because they now behaved peaceably in a community setting – after all, many sadists wise up and become model prisoners. But a prison service which denies prisoners a seemingly effective treatment, knowing that they will eventually serve their tariffs and be released back into the community, is foolish in the extreme.

The following year, the BBC programme
Panorama
decided to publicise Johnson’s impressive work, but all information about prisons had to be cleared by the then Home Secretary Michael 321

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Howard. He favoured a ‘born evil’ explanation of prisoners so applied to the High Court to prevent the programme being aired. Thankfully the judge allowed
Panorama
to be broadcast and it was shown on the BBC in March 1997.

Emotional Health

Subsequently, Johnson co-founded the James Nayler Foundation, a charity which researches and treats all types of personality disorder. The Foundation has begun to produce videos exploring how frozen terror from childhood makes people violent or afraid and they are training other therapists to carry on their work.

The psychiatrist has had great success in treating everyone from persistent thieves to agoraphobics by unlocking their hidden trauma. (Some abused children turn their anger inwards and become self-destructive adults – 170,000 self-harmers a year are presented at casualty departments in Britain whilst numerous others blot out the pain with alcohol, food and drugs. Others turn the anger outwards and become violent parents and spouses or indiscriminately violent criminals.) Dawn, who features in one James Nayler training video, had tried everything from counselling to acupuncture to hypnotherapy in an abortive attempt to rid herself of crippling panic attacks, but it was only when she sought therapy from Dr Johnson that she realised that her symptoms had arisen ‘because my dad used to hit me when I was little’. She also became aware that she’d been terrified of both of her parents, and by taking her back to the point where she first got frightened, the psychiatrist was able to free her from her fears.

To expound his theories, Johnson has written a book,
Emotional
Health
, subtitled
What Emotions Are And How They Cause Social
And Mental Disease.
Aware of the sadism that violent upbringings can produce, he states on the title page that ‘nothing written here excuses, nor remotely justifies, any atrocity’. He adds that it’s 322

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nevertheless vital that we look at the reasons for such atrocities if we are to prevent them from happening again.

Johnson explains that all adult emotional disease has its roots

‘firmly based in the remnants of an infantile strategy’. He notes that we need truth, trust and consent in order to enjoy emotional health and writes that ‘In their absence there is not the remotest chance of controlling aberrant emotions, however destructive or even self-destructive they may become.’

So why were prison hospitals such as Ashworth so resistant to his work? Dr Johnson told this author that ‘Patients, nursing management, hospital board and NHS executives all desperately wanted me to stay, but the consultant psychiatrists had the power to block learning something new, and did so.’

Sadly, the prison system has yet to embrace his therapeutic model, so are violent prisoners now given a chemical cosh?

‘Not so much sedation, but sadism and deracination and control and solitary confinement.’

He’s convinced that sexually sadistic men can benefit from his therapy in the same way as more generally violent men, though acknowledges that ‘it could take longer – certainly it has worked well with those I have treated successfully’.

Young psychopaths

Other institutions have had success with child and teenage psychopaths when they are removed from their home environment. For example, the normal repeat offending rate is 40 to 45 per cent but when Professor Pamela Taylor worked with teenage psychopaths in Broadmoor in the 1990s, she got the recidivism rate to under 20 per cent. In the same time frame, Odenkotte Special Hospital in Holland also trained young psychopaths to cope in the community.

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School’s out forever

Ironically, those sadists who end up in community institutions have often been ill-treated in their previous institution, that of the schoolhouse. Abuse in schools also had a deleterious effect on several of the sadists profiled here with Neville Heath, Richard Cottingham and Colin Ireland being caned – and watching other children being caned – in class. The removal of corporal punishment from state schools will have lessened the chance of future sadists being formed through such practices, though private schools are still allowed to beat their pupils. In the main, only parents who approve of corporal punishment send their children to schools which administer it, so these children are also likely to be beaten at home.

Cruelty also occurs in schools abroad: in 2003, a 17-year-old Japanese schoolboy who fell asleep in class was handed a knife by his teacher and told to slice open his index finger. He did so, whereupon the teacher ordered him to write a punishment essay in his own blood.

Hell house

But being repeatedly and inconsistently chastised in the home is the strongest indicator that a child will go on to become sadistic or masochistic, with working class men the most likely to become violent. Anthropologist Elliot Leyton has noted that this is because working class parents are the most likely to resort to physical punishment in the home so that ‘their children are exposed to violent and aggressive role models; they mature with fewer inhibitions – and more positive associations – towards aggressivity.’ (11 out of the 15 sadists profiled in this book were working class, as were most in the case studies which form the themed chapters.)

At the moment, hitting a child is legal, though since the Children’s Bill came into effect in Britain on 15 January 2005

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it’s illegal for a parent to hit a child and cause swelling, bruising or grazing of the skin. It’s also illegal to shake a child or hit them about the head or with an implement, and parents guilty of such excessive chastisement can now face a jail term of up to five years.

But the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has pointed out that there shouldn’t be an
acceptable
way to hit children, that the guidelines still leave them vulnerable to abuse. They’ve stated: ‘The law needs to send out a clear message that it is as wrong to hit a child as it is to hit an adult.’