The Ability to Kill Read Free Page B

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.
    Is the ability to kill, then, only an extension of the ability to steal? In a sense, it would seem to be; but only in a very special sense. By no means all premeditated murders of the kind we are discussing are committed by persons with criminal histories. Before he became a murderer, Seddon was a hardworking insurance manager; Armstrong was a solicitor, Vaquier a skilled mechanic. Yet, between the mind of the murderer and the mind of the thief there is a discernible relationship. With all of us, death, money and aggression begin aselements of the same oral-anal fantasy system. Sometimes, however, the primitive, infantile valencies persist, more or less unmodified, as part of the adult ego-formation. Generally, given even a small measure of adjustment, the resultant conflicts constitute no more than a misfortune, in terms of neurosis, for the person concerned; but, in some cases, neurotic solutions will not answer, and some infantile components are accommodated without modification.
    The danger inherent in such a personality structure is that of regression. Whether that process begins or not is decided by time and circumstances; but if it does begin it almost always continues. Murder is not the inevitable outcome; it may never be necessary; but it becomes, in the end, within the bounds of possibility. An American psychiatrist, Paul Schilder, has written: ‘The child’s idea of death is essentially deprivation. It is ready to believe that this deprivation, like any other, is reversible.’ And of those who kill, he says: ‘They are not more concerned about their own death than children are. It almost seems that these “normal murderers,” who are not otherwise so badly adapted to their reality, show particular infantile trends in their reaction to life and death. One may say that they kill because they do not appreciate the deprivation they inflict upon others.’
    Steal or be stolen from; kill or be killed.
    To apply, as lawyers and prison governors so often do in their memoirs, the words ‘callous’ and ‘cold-blooded’ to men like Smith and Haigh and Seddon, is as absurd as to complain that a youth with an intelligence quotient of fifty is unable to grasp the principles of the calculus. Their kind of emotional incapacity cannot be related to any normal feeling situation.
    Not many murderers make full and frank written confessions. Haigh’s were certainly full, but they were made in order to lay the groundwork for a plea of insanity. Although they tellus a lot about what he did, or wanted us to believe he did, they tell us almost nothing of his thought processes. For anyone who wishes to catch a glimpse of what it is like to have the ability to kill, the confession of Alfred Arthur Rouse, written when he had resigned himself to death on the gallows * is more revealing.
    He was born in London in 1894. His father kept a hosiery shop in Herne Hill; his mother was Irish. When he was six the parents’ marriage broke up and thereafter he was raised by an aunt. There is evidence to suggest that the separation from his mother had a profound effect on his development. However, that did not become apparent until much later. He did well at the council school, and after he left to take a job as an office boy, he attended evening classes. When war