Faced with Hedstrom’s signed confession, Thurneman decided to tell everything. In fact, he wrote an autobiography while in prison. As a child, Thurneman had had an inferiority complex because of his small build and poor health. He was a solitary, deeply interested in mysticism and the occult. At thirteen – in 1921 – he had begun to experiment in hypnotism and thought-transference with schoolmates. He also read avidly about mysticism and occult lore. Then, at sixteen, he had met a mysterious Dane who was skilled in yoga. In 1929, he claimed, he had been to Copenhagen and joined an occult group run by the Dane. On his return to Stockholm he had started his own magic circle, gathering together all kinds of people and making them swear an oath of obedience and secrecy.
The position of cult-leader seems to have given Thurneman a taste of the kind of power he had always wanted. He used hypnosis to seduce under-age girls, and then – according to his confession – disposed of them through the white slave trade. Other gang members were also subjected to hypnosis and ‘occult training’ (whatever that meant). Thurneman was bisexual, and became closely involved with another gang member who was a lover as well as a close friend. When this man got into financial difficulties, Thurneman became worried in case he divulged their relationship – which, in 1930, was still a criminal offence. He claimed that, by means of hypnotic suggestion over the course of a week, he induced the man to commit suicide. In 1934, he placed another member of the gang in a deep trance and injected a dose of fatal poison.
Thurneman’s aim was to make himself a millionaire and then leave for South America. The two Sala murders – of Axel Kjellberg and Tilda Blomqvist – brought in large sums of money. But the ‘big job’ he was planning was the robbery of a bank housed in the same building as the Stockholm Central Post Office. The gang had stolen large quantities of dynamite – thirty-six kilos – and the plan was to blow up the post office with dynamite and rob the bank in the chaos that followed. Thurneman had also become involved in drug smuggling.
Thurneman was brought to trial in July 1936, together with Hedstrom and three accomplices who had helped in the killing of Eriksson and Petterson. All five were sentenced to life imprisonment; but after six months in prison, Thurneman slipped into unmistakable insanity and was transferred to a criminal mental asylum.
The Thurneman case throws a powerful light into the innermost recesses of the psychology of the self-esteem killer. He was the kind of criminal that Charles Manson and Ian Brady would have liked to be. His dominance over his ‘family’ was complete. Men accepted him as their unquestioned leader; women submitted to him and were discarded into prostitution. His life was a power-fantasy come true. He was indifferent to all human feeling. When his closest friend became a potential danger, he was induced to commit suicide; when a gang-member’s loyalty became suspect, he was killed with an injection like a sick dog. When the gang committed robbery, witnesses were simply destroyed, to eliminate all possibility of later recognition and identification. (Thurneman must have reflected with bitter irony that it was Hedstrom’s failure to observe this rule that led to discovery.) Thurneman had found his own way to the ‘heroic’, to a feeling of uniqueness; by the age of twenty-eight he had achieved his sense of ‘primary value’.
But why, if he was such a remarkable individual, did he choose crime? No doubt some deep resentment, some humiliation dating from childhood, played its part. Yet we can discern another reason. As a means of achieving uniqueness, crime can guarantee success. Thurneman might have aimed for ‘primacy’ in the medical field; he might have set himself up as a guru, a teacher of occult philosophy; he might have attempted to find self-expression through writing. But then, each of these possibilities carries a high risk of failure and demands an exhausting outlay of energy and time. It is far easier to commit a successful crime than to launch a successful theory or write a successful book. All this means that the ‘master criminal’ can achieve his sense of uniqueness at a fairly low cost. Society has refused to recognise his uniqueness; it has insisted on treating him as if he were just like everybody else. By committing a crime that makes headlines, he is administering a sharp rebuke. He is making society aware that, somewhere among its anonymous masses, there is someone who deserves fear and respect…
There is, of course, one major disadvantage that dawns on every master criminal sooner or later. He can never achieve public recognition – or at least, only at the cost of being caught. He must be content with the admiration of a very small circle – perhaps, as in the case of Leopold and Loeb, Brady and Hindley, just one other person. This explains why so many ‘master criminals’ seem to take a certain pleasure in being caught; they are at last losing their anonymity. Thurneman not only wrote a confession; he turned it into an autobiography, in which he explained with pride the details of his crimes. This is the irony of the career of a ‘master criminal’ in that unless he is caught; he feels at the end the same frustration, the same intolerable sense of non-recognition that drove him to crime in the first place. It may have been the recognition of this absurd paradox that finally undermined Thurneman’s sanity.
The Thurneman case illustrates in a particularly clear form the problem that came to fascinate me as I worked on the Encyclopaedia of Murder and its two successors. Thurneman was convinced he was acting out of free will, and thus demonstrating his ‘uniqueness’. But to see him as part of a ‘pattern’ of crime implies that he was neither unique nor free. Which is the truth? It only begs the question to point out that we can also see Shakespeare or Beethoven as part of the historical pattern of their time, for, as Shaw points out, we judge the artist by his highest moments, the criminal by his lowest. Creativeness involves a certain mental effort; destructiveness does not.
The question was raised in the 1890s by the sociologist Emile Durkheim in his study of suicide. Fellow sociologists were doubtful whether suicide could be treated scientifically, since every suicide has a different reason. Durkheim countered this by pointing out that the rates of suicide in individual countries are amazingly constant; therefore it cannot depend on individual choice. There must be hidden laws, underlying causes. Besides, there are quite recognisable patterns. ‘Loners’ kill themselves more often than people who feel they belong to a group. Free thinkers have a higher suicide rate than Protestants, Protestants than Catholics, and Catholics than Jews – who, at least in the 1880s, had the lowest suicide rate of all because Jews have such a powerful sense of social solidarity.
Durkheim also observed a type of suicide that corresponds roughly to ‘motiveless murder’; he called it suicide anomique, suicide due to lack of norms or values. Bachelors have a higher suicide rate than married men. Moreover, during times of war, the suicide rate drops; it rises again in times of peace and prosperity. (In 1981, the Lebanon Hospital for Mental Disorders recorded that admissions rise during the cease-fires and drop when the shooting starts.) From this, Durkheim deduced that people need social limits to keep them balanced and sane. Suicide is, therefore, a ‘social act’ not an individual one. He concludes that there are ‘suicidal currents’ in society that act mechanically on individuals and force a number of them to commit suicide. The same argument could obviously be applied to crime anomique, the type of crime committed by socially rootless individuals such as Thurneman, Manson, Brady, Frazier.
The arguments of this chapter have placed us in a position to see precisely where Durkheim was mistaken. He believed that it is the individual’s social orientation that leads to suicide (or crime – as we shall see later, there is a close connection). But our study of the relation between crime and ‘hypnosis’ has shown that this fails to get to the heart of the matter. It is true that society provides norms and values; but these in turn provide a sense of reality, the essential factor in preventing both suicide and crime. The most amazing realisation that emerges from the study of hypnosis is that our sense of reality is so easily undermined. In chickens it can be done with a chalk line or a bent piece of wood on the beak; in frogs, with a few taps on the stomach. In human beings that process is slightly more complicated, but not much. Völgyesi talks about the ‘law of point reflexes’, which states that any monotonously repeated stimulus of the same point in the cerebral cortex produces compulsive sleepiness. Similarly, our eyes cannot focus for long on unmoving objects; they keep de-focusing. It takes a sudden movement to shake the ‘controlling ego’ awake again, to ‘restore us to reality’.