The Ability to Kill (2 page)

Some of the pieces in this book, particularly
The Lizzie Borden Memorial Lectures
, were written for
Holiday
magazine,
and parts of my account of the Finch-Tregoff murder trial originally appeared in
Life. The Ability to Kill
I wrote for my own enlightenment and reassurance. I am one of those who think things through best by committing their thoughts to paper.

—
Eric Ambler

Word goes round outside the court that the jury is returning. Counsel, solicitors and reporters hurry to their places inside. The prisoner is brought back into the dock. The jurors answer to their names. The judge re-enters and takes his seat. The clerk faces the jury.

‘Members of the jury, are you agreed upon your verdict?’

‘Yes,’ answers the foreman.

‘Do you find the prisoner guilty or not guilty of murder?’

‘Guilty.’

Eyes go to the dock.

‘You say he is guilty, and that is the verdict of you all?’

‘Yes.’

The clerk turns to the prisoner.

‘Prisoner at the bar, you have been arraigned upon a charge of murder, and have placed yourself upon your country. That country has now found you guilty. Have you anything to say why judgment of death should not be pronounced upon you, and why you should not die according to law?’

‘I can only say that I am innocent.’

The judge places a square of black silk upon his wig and addresses the prisoner.

‘You have received a fair trial and have been found guilty, to my mind rightly so, of the cruel and abominable crimes of which you were accused. For those crimes the law appoints one sentence only. It is that you be taken from hence to a place of lawful execution, and you be there hanged by the neck until you be dead, and that your body be afterwards buried within
the precincts of the prison in which you shall last have been confined. And may God have mercy on your soul.’

The court Chaplain intones an ‘Amen.’

One of the wardens in the dock touches the arm of the convicted man. He turns and goes below.

For those who are not unduly disturbed by the prospect of a hanging, a useful ritual has been performed. Both crime and punishment have been internalised and the recesses of many uneasy minds have been purged, for a while, of some of their guilt secretions. ‘But for the grace of God, there goes John Bradford.’

Goethe said that there was no crime of which he did not deem himself capable. Certainly, most men, and many women, believe themselves capable of murder. The belief is not wholly absurd. Given the necessary outlandish combination of persons and circumstances—a vile enemy, an ultimate infamy, the overwhelming moment of hatred, the self-righteous conviction that summary justice must be done, the deadly weapon to hand, and, possibly, the superego-solvent alcohol to loose the final inhibition—the thing can be done. It sometimes is.

Was that all that Bradford had in mind? I think not. When we say that we are capable of murder, we do not mean that we might just conceivably kill in a moment of ungovernable anger if someone put a loaded gun into our hands; we are admitting that we sometimes entertain murderous thoughts of another kind. The remains of that tin of arsenical weed-killer which we so carefully emptied down the drain—was it only fear of accidents that moved us to dispose of it, or was there another, less acceptable fear also present? Most probably there was. The belief that, simply because a person has murderous fantasies, he is automatically capable, given sufficient incentive, of committing a premeditated murder, is astonishingly widespread. In the course of allaying some of my own anxieties in
the matter, I discovered that it is also quite erroneous. The will to destroy is common enough (‘I wish he were dead.’) and any reasonably good organiser can plan the deed; but the ability to put the plan into action, calculatedly to kill another human being, without the sanction of war or law, belongs only to a remarkable few—the sane murderers.

What is the word ‘sane’ worth in this context? According to the law, it seems to be worth a great deal. The McNaughten Rules—in essence, ‘he knew what he was doing and he knew that it was wrong’—were able to find even the child-murderer Straffen sane after he had escaped from Broadmoor for a few hours and murdered yet another child. The Rules found Christie sane, and they found Neville Heath sane, too. In America, where in the past the English McNaughten Rules have generally been applied, some states are beginning to modify them. The Durham Rule of the District of Columbia, which, in effect, diminishes criminal responsibility where there is mental disease or defect, and the Vermont Statute, which recognises that a mentally diseased person may know that what he is doing is wrong but still be unable to stop himself doing it, are encouraging signs of change. Still, by and large, the law continues to distrust psychiatric explanations of behaviour. It prefers to believe in the concept of unmitigated wickedness that judges may denounce and the people punish with a will.

However, the murderers we are discussing here are certainly not insane, nor, unless we are prepared to stretch the phrase’s application until it becomes meaningless, could they even be described as ‘mentally ill.’ If a medico-legal classification is needed for their characteristic and special ego-formations, ‘moral defectives’ has to suffice. They possess the ability to kill, for a financial or other material advantage, without passion and without remorse. They are the emotionally
un
disturbed. As G. J. Smith himself expressed it, they are ‘a bit peculiar.’

In Smith’s own particular case that was an understatement; but when he made it about himself, he was not admitting that he was a murderer, only allowing that his past relations with society might have been more satisfactory.

He was born in 1872, the son of a Bethnal Green insurance agent. At nine he was committed to a reformatory, probably for stealing. At nineteen he received his first prison sentence, for stealing bicycles. At twenty-four, after a period in the army, he was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for larceny and receiving. At twenty-six he married. He used his wife to steal for him by forging references and planting her in likely homes as a servant. At twenty-seven he took to bigamy. His practice, of course, was to ‘marry’ a woman, take her savings and disappear. Sometimes, he did not have to marry. On several occasions, having secured their money, he left the ladies high and dry after taking them on an excursion to some public place. There, he would excuse himself to go to the lavatory and then fail to return. When he was twenty-nine he was recognised in the street by his real wife. She had by then served a prison sentence on his account and had a score to settle. She had him arrested, and he went to prison for two years. That was his last prison sentence. Of course, he went back to stealing from women the moment he was released; but the experience with his first wife had taught him a lesson. He took care to move about more now—Brighton, Southampton, Bournemouth, Margate and other seaside towns—and he opened a second-hand furniture shop in Bristol to provide himself with a background and a base.

He was forty when he committed his first murder, that of Bessie Mundy. She had a trust fund of £2500 administered by an uncle. Smith found that he, her ‘husband,’ could only get
his hands on the money if she died and left it to him. So what else could he do but kill her? There is nothing in his history to suggest that the murder was a psychological turning point for him. He seems rather to have been in the position of a man who had by accident hit upon a new way of solving an old problem. It is not surprising that, after seeing how well the bath trick worked, he should decide to use it again. No trust-fund difficulties figured in his subsequent murders. He married the women, insured their lives, made certain that their wills were in his favour, and then killed them. The extent of his emotional involvement in the deaths is best gauged by a remark he made after the first of them. Even as he pretended to labour under the shock of his bereavement, he could not help congratulating himself. ‘Wasn’t it a good job I got her to make a will?’ he said. He also returned the bath he had used to the ironmonger’s without paying for it.

In its artlessness, Smith’s remark is reminiscent of the question J. G. Haigh asked the police when he realised that they were going to arrest him for murder: ‘Tell me, frankly, what are the chances of anybody being released from Broadmoor?’

Smith and Haigh had, as well as moments of unwitting indiscretion, other things in common.

Haigh was born in 1909, at Stamford in Lincolnshire. His father was an electrical engineer. Both parents belonged to that religious sect which calls itself ‘The Peculiar People’—the Plymouth Brethren—and discipline in the home was strict and sanctimonious. He was an only child. He disliked games, loved music and drawing, became a choir-boy and won a divinity prize. At the grammar school he was also known as a ready and resourceful liar with a taste for practical jokes of the kind which inflict pain on the victim. After he left school he worked for a time in a second-hand car showroom, then as an electrician in a cinema, then as a salesman. When he was twenty-five,
he was arrested on charges of obtaining money under false pretences by means of a hire-purchase swindle. He was sentenced to fifteen months’ imprisonment. When he came out of prison he worked briefly for a firm of cleaners before being sacked for dishonesty. He then went south and set up, under a false name, as a solicitor. He was quite a skilful forger and by selling non-existent shares managed to defraud his ‘clients’ of over thirty thousand pounds before he was arrested again. This time, he was sentenced to four years’ penal servitude.

He was thirty-one when he came out of Dartmoor. It was 1940; but for a man of his ingenuity it was not difficult to secure exemption from National Service on the grounds that he was in a reserved occupation. He then took to stealing from evacuated houses. In 1941 he was caught and sentenced to twenty-one months’ hard labour. As a convict on licence, he also had to serve the balance of his previous sentence. He spent his time in prison studying law and doing some curious experiments with mice; he found that they could be dissolved in sulphuric acid. He was released in the autumn of 1943, and went to work for an engineering firm in Crawley. The following year he started a sideline business of his own. He rented a basement in Kensington and fitted it up as a workshop for repairing the pin-tables and automatic machines used in some amusement arcades. They were owned by a man named McSwann. Of the six persons whom Haigh is known for certain to have murdered, McSwann was the first.

In his statements to the police and the psychiatrists who examined him, Haigh always insisted that it was only the desire to drink human blood which made him murder, and that the desire always became overwhelming following a recurring nightmare about a forest of trees dripping with blood. He also claimed, as if for good measure, that he
frequently drank his own urine. However, if we omit those embellishments and consider only the verifiable facts, a more convincing picture emerges.

Haigh needed money badly. McSwann had plenty. When he told Haigh that he was ‘dodging the call-up,’ Haigh saw that the situation had possibilities. He ordered some carboys of sulphuric acid and a forty-gallon tank. When McSwann next came to the workshop, Haigh hit him on the head with a cosh, dissolved the body in the acid and poured the solution down the drain.

His next move was to go to McSwann’s elderly parents, tell them that their son had gone north into hiding from the army authorities and that he, Haigh, had agreed to look after the amusement arcades in their owner’s absence. The explanation was accepted. He now proceeded, using a forged power of attorney, to gain possession of all the dead man’s property and assets. When the old McSwanns heard that he had sold some of the pin-tables and began to ask questions, he took them separately, and on the pretext of having arranged a meeting with their son, to the basement workshop, killed them and dissolved their bodies in acid. Having supplied himself with a further power of attorney, he then took possession of their property also. By murdering the McSwann family, he made more than ten thousand pounds.

His subsequent murders—of the two Hendersons and Mrs Durand-Deacon—followed the same pattern. All were done for profit. After his arrest, and when he had had time to realise that his vampire motivation needed support, he confessed to a further three murders. In those cases, he claimed, there had been no coincidental profit; the victims had been killed only for their blood. He did not know their names. The police could find no evidence at all that they had ever existed. The inevitable conclusion was that Haigh had invented them. The
nightmare was described convincingly enough, and Haigh may very well have been troubled by such dreams; but the blood-drinking episodes that they were said to have engendered seemed to belong to a clinical picture sketched, too hastily, by Bram Stoker.

In Haigh’s account of the murder of Mrs Durand-Deacon, he described how, after he had shot her, he collected a glass of her blood and drank it. He went on to describe his preparations for disposing of the body. Then, he corrected himself. Before pumping the acid into the tank, he had gone out to a nearby restaurant for a cup of tea. It was perhaps necessary to mention this. He was known in the restaurant and someone might have remembered seeing him there at that time. He wanted to appear completely truthful. But he destroyed his effect. Tea? On top of a nice glass of fresh blood? The defence plea of insanity never really had very much chance of succeeding.

William Bolitho wrote of ‘the narrow chasm that separates the theft of property from the theft of life.’ We sometimes speak of killing as taking life. A great many murderers, the insane as well as the sane, have been thieves before they became killers. Christie (another choir-boy, by the way) had a record of four convictions for stealing and obtaining money by false pretences before he killed; Neville Heath, H. D. Trevor, J. D. Merrett and Sidney Fox had similar records.