I am fascinated not by the grisly act of killers but by the banal details of their ordinary lives
My wife thinks that I might be a serial killer. Of course, on one level she realises I’m not. She knows that not only do I have an aversion to violence, I’m also hopelessly impractical. If I bought a shovel and started building a patio, the police would arrive without being called.
If I am ever responsible for anybody’s death, it will be because they knocked over the pile of books teetering on the edge of my desk and suffocated underneath a stack of pamphlets about welfare policy.
Nevertheless, Nicky remains worried. She can’t understand why I keep buying books about murderers. She thinks my interest in such things is extremely unhealthy and is worried that I might get some funny ideas.
My fascination, however, is not with the grisly acts of killers, with their large and terrible crimes. I am riveted by the banal details of their small, ordinary lives and by the insight that these awful stories provide into the workings of the minds of killers, victims and observers alike.
In Brian Masters’s book Killing for Company there are full and horrible descriptions of the murders carried out by Dennis Nilsen, the man who disposed of bodies in the drains of his house in Muswell Hill. But what I found extraordinary was Nilsen’s parallel life as an executive officer at the Kentish Town Job Centre, the way he continued going to work, complaining about petty office slights and applying for promotion, acting as normal while the corpses piled up at his home.
Fifty years ago this week saw the arrest of one of the most notorious of all serial killers – John Reginald Halliday Christie, inhabitant of the ground-floor flat of a tiny, claustrophobic house, 10 Rillington Place.
Christie killed eight people and, when he was eventually apprehended, two bodies were discovered buried in his garden and three in an alcove behind a cupboard. His wife was found underneath the floorboards. But his other two victims were no longer at 10 Rillington Place. They had been found years earlier while Christie’s murderous impulses were still a secret. And it was then that he did something which has guaranteed his place in the annals of devilish crime. Christie succeeded in having another man blamed and hanged for their murder.
In 1950 Timothy Evans, a 25-year-old van driver for the Lancaster Food Company with the mental age of a ten-year-old boy, was executed for the crime of killing his baby daughter, having first killed his wife in the house that he shared with Christie.
The latter, posing as an innocent invalid, was the main prosecution witness. Evans blamed Christie but was not believed. This miscarriage of justice stands as one of the strongest arguments against capital punishment, an argument that I, for one, am unable to resist.
There is one more amazing part of the Christie case, one that speaks volumes about human behaviour. It took thirteen years from the discovery of Christie’s other crimes for Evans to be given a posthumous pardon. In the meantime, two inquiries continued to maintain that Evans was guilty. Despite Christie confessing to the murder of Mrs Evans, it was concluded that this was ‘no ground for thinking that there may have been a miscarriage of justice’.
Now for this to be true, two necrophile stranglers would need to have been operating entirely independently inside one little house at the same time, killing only women, using exactly the same methods, telling the same lies, wrapping the bodies in the same way and hiding them in the same places.
When one was discovered he must have decided, completely coincidentally, to blame his crimes on the one other man in the world secretly committing exactly the same crimes as him. This is, let’s agree, unlikely.
Why, then, did such a ridiculous story remain the official version for so long? Because no one wished to believe that they had hanged an innocent man. Accepting that Evans was not guilty was too painful. The political establishment had maintained for too long that the British legal system would never allow such a thing to happen.
Human beings have an incredibly strong attachment to consistency, to being able to show that we never alter our positions, never change our mind. We will bend our stories and the truth, convince ourselves of all kinds of nonsense so we can maintain the comforting illusion that we are consistent. Evans’s innocence contradicted a deeply held, oft-stated view, therefore Evans must be guilty.
The value we attach to consistency can be seen every day in countless small ways. The politician attacked for making U-turns or the fuss about the coalition having to change its plan in Iraq.
From Ludovic Kennedy’s classic book 10 Rillington Place, about the injustice done to Timothy Evans, I have learnt that we value consistency too highly, that there is much to be said for the man who does a far more difficult thing: changes his mind.