The following is the introductions section to Infamous True Crimes & Trials Volume #1 by Guy Hadleigh
INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND
As the Duke of Monmouth was about to kneel and place his head on the block, he held out his hand to the notorious executioner, Jack Ketch. “Here are six guineas for you. Pray do your business well. Don't serve me as you served Lord Russell.”
He had reason to be nervous. When Ketch had beheaded Lord William Russell — for his part in the Rye House Plot to kidnap Charles II—he had completely bungled the job. After several violent swipes with the axe, Russell was still twitching, and his neck was unsevered. Monmouth, now being executed for his rebellion against James II, was understandably anxious to die less bloodily.
He turned to a servant, and handed him a purse containing more guineas. “Give him that if he does his work well.” Then he felt the edge of the axe, and said, sighing: “I fear it is not sharp enough.” Ketch was unnerved by all this coolness. He raised the axe then threw it down, shouting: “I can't do it.” The sheriff had to threaten him with dire penalties before he could be persuaded to make another attempt.
The crowd gave a groan
Looking pale and ill, he raised the axe above his head, and brought it down. The crowd gave a groan, and Monmouth jerked with agony: but his head stayed on his shoulders. Now thoroughly demoralized, Ketch made three more attempts, but there was no strength in the blows. The neck was only lacerated. Finally, he threw down the hatchet, pulled out a knife, and sawed the head off. The servant holding the purse pocketed it and walked away. Meanwhile, the crowd booed and threw things.
It was no sinecure, being an executioner in those days. Ketch usually hanged his clients; but he wasn't very good at that either, and most of the condemned men died by slow strangulation. It was preferable; however, to being butchered with a blunt axe, and even when the headman was efficient, it was tiring work. In 1746, Jack Thrift had to behead two Jacobite rebels, Lord Kilmarnock and Lord Balmerino. He severed Kilmarnock's head with one clean blow, but it took him three swings of the axe to decapitate Balmerino. There were many officers of the law who felt that somebody ought to devise a swift and infallible method for taking a man’s life.
Half a century later, it became an urgent necessity. France rebelled against its rulers. The Bastille was stormed, and its defenders massacred, the king fled and was recaptured: the Terror began. The enemies of the new regime had to be killed by the hundred —by the thousand. How could it be done? The solution was found by a gentle, kindly man. Well-known for his good works: Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin.
Dr. Guillotin was a freemason —in fact, one of the founders of freemasonry in France. The freemasons are a benevolent secret society, devoted to the improvement of mankind: but the Church regarded them as wicked atheists. And it was for this reason more than for anything else that Dr. Guillotin found himself in the Constituent Assembly, with an influential voice in the new revolutionary government of France.
Now this gentle humanitarian was horrified at some of the bloodshed he had seen. He loathed those barbarous and primitive instruments of execution, the wheel and the gibbet. He was sickened by the sight of a man swinging from a gallows all day, while the crowd underneath drank beer and made merry. Guillotin foresaw the mass executions that were coming, and he brooded on how they might be made painless and swift: a moral lesson rather than a sadistic spectacle. Some kind of “machine” was needed. He consulted the public executioner, Charles Henri Sanson, and they looked over various old prints and engravings.
As early as 1555, the Italians had invented a beheading machine, in which a heavy axe blade was placed between two upright posts, so that it could be hauled up to the top with a rope, then allowed to fall down the groove on to the neck of a man kneeling underneath. These “sliding axes” had also been tried in Germany, in Persia —even in Scotland. But they'd never really caught on. The blade often got stuck in the groove, or the rope caught. The old manual method was simpler and more reliable.
An agonizing eternity
And now occurred one of those supreme ironies of history. The man who solved the problem was none other than the king himself, Louis the Sixteenth. It was shortly before the flight that cost him his life, and precipitated the Terror. The Assembly had asked Dr. Antoine Louis, the king's physician, to look into Dr. Guillotin's plan. Dr. Guillotin was asked to call on Dr. Louis at the Tuileries Palace, and he took Sanson, the executioner, with him.
As the three men were engaged in examining the sketches of the machine, a stranger knocked and entered. It was the king, dressed in ordinary clothes. He asked Dr. Louis what he thought of the machine, and looked at the drawing. Then he shook his head. “That curved blade wouldn’t suit every kind of neck.” The king picked up a pencil. “What you need is something more like this.” He drew a straight, sloping line on the underside of the axe blade. Guillotin looked at the drawing. “Yes, of course, you're right. A few weeks later, the first guillotine was tried out on three corpses. The king had been right: a curved blade failed to decapitate one of the corpses, but the sloping blade worked perfectly on the other two. Two years later, the king was decapitated by the machine he had helped perfect.
For the next two years —until the Terror ended with the execution of Robespierre in 1794 —the guillotine thudded with horrible, mechanical persistence, and thousands of heads rolled into the basket. As to the good Dr. Guillotin, he continued his humanitarian work. He was one of the earliest pioneers of smallpox vaccination, and his work on the extermination of smallpox undoubtedly saved more lives in Europe than his guillotine destroyed. But when he died, in 1814, he already knew that it would not be his medical discoveries that would immortalize his name, but that triangular blade, with all its association of horror...
There’s the interesting question:
Why is it that decapitation strikes us as so sickening and gruesome? Guillotin was right: as a method of execution, it is certainly more humane than hanging, electrocution or the gas chamber. Hanging is only about 95% certain; a slight miscalculation in the placing of the rope and the condemned man strangles to death. Men in the gas chamber have been known to hold their breath for minutes before breathing in the cyanide gas. And the criminologist Nigel Morland, who once stepped on a highly charged electric grid, is on record as saying that the last seconds of an electrocuted man must seem to be an agonizing eternity.
Only the guillotine has never failed to carry out its work with perfect swiftness and efficiency. Yet Guillotin is remembered as a monster, because the idea of decapitation touches some deep chord of horror in the human psyche. It may be because the loss of the head is so final; men can lose an arm or leg and still survive; not the head. Or could it be, perhaps, because our earliest ancestors cut off the heads of their enemies in battle, and often ate the brains? Is the-twinge of horror due to some deep racial memory?
Whatever the reason, there can be no doubt that crimes involving beheading always seem more cruel and brutal than other types of crime. And this is absurd. For sheer vicious cruelty, slow poison is probably the most inhuman method of killing. Then there are the murderers who get pleasure from the fear of their victims —like Jose Marcellino, Mexico's “lover's lane killer”, captured in 1973, who admitted: “I liked it so much, to see the males squirm, and the women frightened and crying, that I'd make my threats last a long time... I enjoyed the fear of death in their eyes.”
By comparison, murderers like Crippen and Patrick Mahon seem decent and sane. Yet it is Crippen and Mahon whose cases are endlessly rehashed by crime journalists under titles like: “Horror of the headless corpse.” Still, no matter what the general public may feel about them, Crippen and Mahon are of scant interest to the professional criminologist. He is concerned with the motivations behind a crime, and it hardly matters to him what the killer does to dispose of the body. On the other hand, he finds a criminal like Patrick Byrne, the Birmingham Y.W.C.A. killer, of altogether greater interest.
There is no need to ask why Byrne killed Stephanie Baird —that is perfectly obvious. He was drunk, and he wanted sex. When he had strangled her into unconsciousness, he undressed her and raped her. All that is straightforward, if horrible; but why did he then cut off her head, and commit further sexual acts on the body? Why did he, even then, go out and try to kill another girl by hitting her with a stone? Why did he write a note saying: “This was the thing I thought would never come.”
In the course of his confession, Byrne said one thing that provides a key to his strange personality. He said he wanted to terrorize all the women in the hostel “to get my own back on them for causing my nervous tension through sex”. This is a curious statement. Even the most stupid man must see that women are not to blame for making him sexually excited. A cat may as well blame mice for making it feel hungry.
But Byrne was not trying to be logical; he was trying to explain, in his own fumbling way, what dark forces had suddenly mastered him when he found himself in a room with an unconscious girl.
He also admitted to a psychiatrist that he had been indulging for years in daydreams in which he cut up girls with a circular saw. This brings us altogether closer to the heart of the problem, for what we can see so clearly, in Byrne's case, is that when he made his way into the Y.W.C.A. that December afternoon, it was not simply a girl he wanted — ordinary sexual intercourse. It was somehow all women, all the women in the world. He was expressing one of the savage, basic frustrations of man.
Craving for gratification
In 1930, Freud published a book called Civilization and Its Discontents, in which he advanced a disturbing —and profoundly pessimistic —theory. He suggested that man is not made for civilization, or civilization for man. Man is a carnivorous animal, and his basic instincts are violent and aggressive. Whether we like it or not, it is “natural” for him to go on a raiding party to another village, kill the men, and then drag off the women for his own pleasure, as natural as it is considered for a tiger to eat antelopes.
But this human tiger was also intelligent and gregarious. He learned to live with other human beings in communities, and to create civilization. Every step he has taken into civilization has been a violation of his basic instincts. Culture is another name for suppression of these instincts. The great basic conflict of all human existence, says Freud, is the conflict between the individual's craving for personal gratification and the claims of society. So how can man be happy? Unhappiness is a basic part of his condition...
Less pessimistic psychologists, like Abraham Maslow, have pointed out that this is a one-sided view. Happiness does not mean unlimited self-indulgence. The history of crime and violence reveals to us that the men who could indulge themselves without self-discipline —Caligula, Ivan the Terrible, Vlad the Impaler — were not particularly happy men. Long-term happiness must involve self-discipline. Nowadays, there are very few reputable thinkers who take Freud's argument about civilization seriously.
Nevertheless, without fully intending it. Freud had expressed the basic psychology of psychopathic killers like Patrick Byrne, Jack the Ripper, Peter Kurten. These are men who feel that Man and Civilization were simply not made for one another. Consider, for example, the nature of the male sexual drive. Unlike most women, man is not basically “faithful”. Particularly when young and virile, the average man would be perfectly happy to sleep with a different girl every night; even healthy men have their sexual fantasies.
Avenging sexual tensions
Surely, where sex is concerned, civilization is intended to torment males, as you might torment a caged tiger by poking it with a stick? Taking it a step further, is a man to blame if he seizes his opportunity to grab a girl and pull her into a dark alley way...? This is what Byrne meant when he talked about “getting his own back on women for causing my sexual tensions”, and he was almost paraphrasing Sigmund Freud.
But why the decapitation? This is also easy to explain. Once a man is possessed by this urgency —like a fox in a chicken farm —he is subjected to endless twinges of desire, like electric shocks. He compensates for an increasing feeling of frustration and inferiority with daydreams in which he dominates the girl completely; and the longer the fantasies continue, the more violent they are likely to become.
Charles Melquist, arrested in 1958 for the sex-murder and decapitation of 15-year-old Bonnie Leigh Scott, near Chicago, admitted to years of fantasizing about naked women, and of tossing them into huge grinding machines. When such a man finally finds himself with his hands around the throat of an unconscious girl, sexual intercourse is not enough. It seems an anti-climax. His overheated desires crave some stronger satisfaction, some ultimate act of violation and possession. And here, the basic human revulsion at the idea of decapitation rises up from the subconscious —the ultimate act of aggression...
What is equally significant is that both Byrne and Melquist were horrified by what they had done. Byrne said he was glad the police had found him; the murder had tormented him for the past two months; Melquist also made his confession in a long, relieved babble, and admitted that he had been unable to sleep after the murder. Not only is their act of violence no solution to the cravings that produced it; the killer recognizes that he is further than ever from a solution. Many killers of this type commit suicide.
The pattern can be clearly seen in the case of Jack the Ripper. The early victims—Mary Anne Nicholls, Annie Chapman, Catherine Eddowes —were mutilated in the area of the genitals, indicating that the Ripper's basic obsession was with the woman's sexual function —perhaps with the womb. The last murder took place indoors; this time, the killer had unlimited time at his disposal, and the victim—Mary Kelly —was not only disembowelled but almost decapitated. Then the murders ceased, and all the evidence suggests that the Ripper committed suicide.
The novelist Zola based a novel on the Ripper crimes, La Bete Humaine — the human beast. This goes to the heart of the problem. Such a man has decided to become the solitary hunter in search of prey, rather than a responsible human being. In doing so, he has retreated from society as deliberately as if he had decided to become a Trappist monk. But men like Byrne. Melquist or the Ripper lack the qualifications for becoming hermits; they need society. Hence the conflicting whirlpool of urges that may end in suicide.
“Mad butcher”
The case that most clearly demonstrates the complex morbid psychology of “the human beast” took place in Cleveland. Ohio, in the mid-1930s: the curious unsolved case of the Butcher of Kingsbury Run. Between 1935 and 1938, the “mad butcher” killed at least a dozen people, hacking the bodies into small pieces, and removing the heads —several of which were never found.
On September 23, 1935, two decapitated bodies were found in the area of Kingsbury Run and East 45th Street, a slum area. Both had been mutilated with a knife; both were men —one, a 28-yearold medical orderly, the other, a 40-yearold vagrant, who was never identified. The fact that both victims were male suggested that the killer was homosexual, and a sadistic pervert. But when, four months later, the headless body of a 42-year-old prostitute was found not far from Kingsbury Run, the police became less sure that they were looking for a homosexual; the woman's body had been hacked as if in a frenzy, and the head was never found.
At intervals during 1936, three more victims were found in the area; all were men, all were headless, and in one case, the head was never found. The killer was obviously possessed by some kind of frenzy; some of the bodies were little more than a pile of mangled pieces.
On February 23, 1937, the victim was again a woman —headless, and in pieces. In June, the dismembered body of a 30-year-old Negro woman was found in a burlap bag under the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge. The ninth victim, a man was found in July; he had been decapitated and the body hacked in pieces. The head was never found. And in 1938, there were three more victims; a dismembered and headless woman was found on April 8, and on August 17, the “Mad Butcher" (as the press called him) committed another double murder, a man and a woman. In each of these cases, the killer decapitated the victim, and in six of them, the heads were never found.
The man who was then in charge of Cleveland's police department was Eliott Ness —hero of T.V.'s “Untouchables". Ness recognized that the usual methods of detection were of doubtful value here. But he realized that the mad killer was finding most of his victims among prostitutes and down-and-outs. The latter congregated in a shanty-town area in the centre of the city, near the market. One night in August, Ness raided the place, forced its inhabitants to leave, and burnt it down. This had the desired effect of depriving the killer of his victims; there were no more murders.
Ness also reasoned that the “mad butcher” must be of a certain type. He must be big and powerful to overpower his victims. He must own a car, to transport the bodies. He must live alone, and in some quiet area —perhaps an unfrequented cul de sac—in order not to arouse the curiosity of his neighbours. And in order to fit this pattern, he must be rich, or at least well off.
Ness's team made painstaking enquiries in Cleveland society and, according to Oscar Fraley, chronicler of the “Untouchables", soon found a suspect who fitted. He was physically huge, homosexual, sullen and paranoid, and well-to-do. Ness had the man brought in for questioning, and for months played a cat and mouse game with him. The man, confident he was cleverer than the police, almost admitted the murders, and dared Ness to find evidence.
And, finally, while Ness was still searching, he had himself committed to a mental home, where he died a year later. Ness never doubted that this was the torso killer.
Ness’s suspect was an intelligent, literate man; he may well have read Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents. If so, he could have added a final footnote; that the man who lives as a beast of prey will almost certainly die as one alone and unmourned by his fellow creatures.
