The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Does this new view of history suggest that humankind is likely to be destroyed by its own violence? No one can deny the possibility; but the pessimists leave out of account the part of us that Wells understood so well – man’s capacity to evolve through intelligence. It is true that human history has been fundamentally a history of crime; but it has also been the history of creativity. It is true that mankind could be destroyed in some atomic accident; but no one who has studied history can believe that this is more than a remote possibility. To understand the nature of crime is to understand why it will always be outweighed by creativity and intelligence.

This book is an attempt to tell the story of the human race in terms of that counterpoint between crime and creativity, and to use the insights it brings to try to discern the next stage in human evolution.

HIDDEN PATTERNS OF VIOLENCE

During the summer of 1959, my study was piled with books on violent crime and with copies of True Detective magazine. The aim was to compile an Encyclopaedia of Murder that might be of use to crime writers. But I was also moved by an obscure but urgent conviction that underneath these piles of unrelated facts about violence there must be undiscovered patterns, certain basic laws, and that uncovering these might provide clues to the steadily rising crime rate.

I had noted, for example, that types of murder vary from country to country. The French and Italians are inclined to crime passionel, the Germans to sadistic murder, the English to the carefully-planned murder – often of a spouse or lover – the Americans to the rather casual and unpremeditated murder. Types of crime change from century to century, even from decade to decade. In England and America, the most typical crimes of the 1940s and ‘50s had been for gain or for sex: in England, the sadist Neville Heath, the ‘acid bath murderer’ Haigh; in America, the red-light bandit Caryl Chessman, (he multiple sex-killer Harvey Glatman.

As I leafed my way through True Detective, I became aware of the emergence of a disturbing new trend: the completely pointless or ‘motiveless’ murder. As long ago as 1912, André Gide had coined the term ‘gratuitous act’ to describe this type of crime; the hero of his novel Les Caves du Vatican (which was translated as Lafcadio’s Adventure} suddenly has the impulse to kill a total stranger on a train. ‘Who would know? A crime without a motive – what a puzzle for the police.’ So he opens the door and pushes the man to his death. Gide’s novel was a black comedy; the ‘motiveless murder’ was intended as a joke in the spirit of Oscar Wilde’s essay about the loiter who murdered his sister-in-law because she had thick ankles. Neither philosophers nor policemen seriously believed that such things were possible. Yet by 1959 it was happening. In 1952, a nineteen-year-old clerk named Herbert Mills sat next to a forty-eight-year-old housewife in a Nottingham cinema and decided she would make a suitable victim for an attempt at the ‘perfect murder’; he met her by arrangement the next day, took her for a walk, and strangled her under a tree. It was only because he felt the compulsion to boast about his ‘perfect crime’ that he was caught and hanged. In July 1958, a man named Norman Foose stopped his jeep in the town of Cuba, New Mexico, raised his hunting rifle and shot dead two Mexican children; pursued and arrested, he said he was trying to do something about the population explosion. In February 1959, a pretty blonde named Penny Bjorkland accepted a lift from a married man in California and, without provocation, killed him with a dozen shots. After her arrest she explained that she wanted to see if she could kill ‘and not worry about it afterwards’. Psychiatrists found her sane. In April 1959, a man named Norman Smith took a pistol and shot a woman (who was watching television) through an open window. He did not know her; the impulse had simply come over him as he watched a television programme called ‘The Sniper’.

The Encyclopaedia of Murder appeared in 1961, with a section on ‘motiveless murder’; by 1970 it was clear that this was, in fact, a steadily increasing trend. In many cases, oddly enough, it seemed to be linked to a slightly higher-than-average IQ. Herbert Mills wrote poetry, and read some of it above the body of his victim. The ‘Moors murderer’ Ian Brady justified himself by quoting de Sade, and took pains in court – by the use of long words – to show that he was an ‘intellectual’. Charles Manson evolved an elaborate racialist sociology to justify the crimes of his ‘family’. San Francisco’s ‘Zodiac’ killer wrote his letters in cipher and signed them with signs of the zodiac. John Frazier, a drop-out who slaughtered the family of an eye surgeon, Victor Ohta, left a letter signed with suits from the Tarot pack. In November 1966, Robert Smith, an eighteen-year-old student, walked into a beauty parlour in Mesa, Arizona, made five women and two children lie on the floor, and shot them all in the back of the head. Smith was in no way a ‘problem youngster’; his relations with his parents were good and he was described as an excellent student. He told the police: ‘I wanted to get known, to get myself a name.’ A woman who walked into a California hotel room and killed a baseball player who was asleep there – and who was totally unknown to her – explained to the police: ‘He was famous, and I knew that killing him would make me famous too.’

It is phrases like this that seem to provide a clue. There is a basic desire in all human beings, even the most modest, to ‘become known’. Montaigne tells us that he is an ordinary man, yet that he feels his thoughts are worthy of attention; is there anyone who can claim not to recognise the feeling? In fact, is there anyone in the world who does not secretly feel that he is worthy of a biography? In a book called The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker states that one of the most basic urges in man is the urge to heroism. ‘We are all,’ he says, ‘hopelessly absorbed with ourselves.’ In children, we can see the urge to self-esteem in its least disguised form. The child shouts his needs at the top of his voice. He does not disguise his feeling that he is the centre of the world. He strenuously objects if his brother gets a larger piece of cake. ‘He must desperately justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe; he must stand out, be a hero, make the biggest possible contribution to world life, show that he counts more than anyone else.’ So he indulges endless daydreams of heroism.

Then he grows up and has to learn to be a realist, to recognise that, on a world-scale, he is a nobody. Apparently he comes to terms with this recognition; but deep down inside, the feeling of uniqueness remains. Becker says that if everyone honestly admitted his desire to be a hero, and demanded some kind of satisfaction, it would shake society to its foundations. Only very simple primitive societies can give their members this sense of uniqueness, of being known to all. ‘The minority groups in present-day industrial society who shout for freedom and human dignity are really clumsily asking that they be given a sense of primary heroism …’.

Becker’s words certainly bring a flash of insight into all kinds of phenomena, from industrial unrest to political terrorism. They are an expression of this half-buried need to be somebody, and of a revolt against a society that denies it. When Herbert Mills decided to commit a ‘perfect murder’, he was trying to provide himself with a reason for that sense of uniqueness. In an increasing number of criminal cases, we have to learn to see beyond the stated motivation -social injustice or whatever – to this primary need. There was a weird, surrealistic air about Charles Manson’s self-justifications in court; he seemed to be saying that he was not responsible for the death of eight people because society was guilty of far worse things than that. Closer examination of the evidence reveals that Manson felt that he had as much right to be famous as the Beatles or Bob Dylan (he had tried hard to interest record companies in tapes he had recorded); in planning Helter Skelter, the revolution that would transform American society, he was asserting his primacy, his uniqueness.

I was struck by the difference between these typical crimes of the late sixties – Manson, the Moors murders, Frazier, Zodiac – and the typical crimes of ten or twenty years earlier – Haigh, Heath, Christie, Chessman, Glatman. John Christie killed girls for sexual purposes – he seems to have been impotent if the woman was conscious – and walled them up in a cupboard in his kitchen. The cupboard is somehow a symbol of this type of crime – the place where skeletons are hidden by people who are anxious to appear normal and respectable. Manson’s ‘family’ sat around the television, gloating over the news bulletin that announced the killings in Sharon Tate’s home. The last thing they wanted was for their crimes to be hidden.