 is one of the most agreeable conferences anywhere. My subject this year is a murderer as I have known, so that's the end of Mr Nice Guy. This is not a subject which is of great interest to most of you from the point of view of economics. So ond nid. I was asked to review a book by a psychiatrist who claimed that in the United States the murder rate rose during Republican Presidencies and declined during Democratic ones in order to produce this conclusion. There was quite a lot of statistical manipulation and he attributed this to the differences yn y dyfodol o'r redysgrifion yma ar y presidon sydd. A, wrth gwrs, yn ymdweud, sydd yn ymdweud y coralluol yw'r gwasanaeth. Y ddechrau economi yma, y dyfodol yma yw'r gwneud yn ymdweud yw'r murdd, yn ymdweud yw'r ysgrifennu ymdweud yw'r ysgrifennu, yw'r ysgrifennu yw'r ysgrifennu yw'r ysgrifennu yw'r ysgrifennu ..having been increased by at least a thousand percent. Well, first I want to ask you whether there's anyone in this room.. ..who is uninterested in murder, who finds a murder a dull and boring subject. And I'm asking in general, I'm not asking anything about.. ..any murders in particular you may have in mind. Now there's no one, no one's put his hand up. And I think it's a rather curious phenomenon actually.. ..that everyone is interested in murder.. ..and I'm not sure I can fully explain it. And certainly literature would be much the poorer without murder. Shakespeare alone would be depleted of most of his greatest plays. There wouldn't be Hamlet or Fellow, Richard II, Richard III, Julius Caesar.. ..Coriolanus and many others. And in fact if you think about Macbeth, what would Macbeth be without murder? I mean Macbeth would have to apply to be King of Scotland. He'd send in his CV and the appointment committee.. ..in which of course there would be the three witches.. ..might give him a temporary contract until Banquo's son.. ..graduated from the university and was fit to take over permanently. So I think you can see that without murder.. ..Macbeth would be a lot less interesting. Now some of you might ask why I think of individual murders at all.. ..when there are so many mass killings both in history and at the present moment. And I hesitate to mention such an authority.. ..but Joseph Stalin was definitely on to something.. ..when he said that a single death is a tragedy. ..and a million deaths is a statistic. And it comes naturally to us to think in small terms rather than large ones. Our interest is captured much more by the burglary next door.. ..than the famine several thousand miles away.. ..even though we admit that in the abstract.. ..the famine is more important than the burglary. Well in my career as a doctor.. ..I can't say it's been my good fortune or my pleasure.. ..but certainly it's been a matter of interest.. ..to meet a very considerable number of murderers. And of course I can't describe more than one or two of them. But if you're waiting.. ..I hope you're not waiting to hear from me anything.. ..that illuminates anything in a general fashion.. ..because I have no theory to propound. It is pure salaciousness and prurience.. ..and sensationalism. And really the main lesson from my contact with murderers.. ..is that I've learnt nothing from them. Now part of the reason for that course.. ..is we put all murderers into a single category.. ..in fact that they're murderers. But they do differ very considerably. There's no single type, the murderer. One thing I did learn, though this can hardly be called a lesson.. ..is that while we generally think of murder as the worst crime.. ..murderers are not the worst criminals.. ..not necessarily the worst criminals. Indeed inside prison they generally enjoy a certain prestige.. ..so long as it is not a child that they have killed.. ..and so long as sex was not involved in the murder. Because that puts them beyond the pale. In general, if it's just what I might call.. ..and what policemen in England call an ordinary domestic murder.. ..a man accused of cruelty to a dog.. ..can expect more disapprobation from other prisoners than a murderer. And perhaps this is because most prisoners can envisage.. ..wanting to kill someone.. ..but they can't envisage wanting to harm a dog. Well, I remember meeting what I hope you were not mind me.. ..calling my first murderer when I was a very young doctor. I thought then that he was a very old man. He was in his 50s. And he strangled his wife after many years of marriage. And I remember feeling distinctly honoured.. ..to meet so unusual a man and to shake his hand. After all, murderers in those days.. ..were fewer than members of parliament.. ..and I suppose a lot more interesting. Well, the murderer had been sent to prison.. ..to hospital because his crime was statistically very unusual. And it was thought that he might be suffering.. ..from some kind of medical condition.. ..that could possibly explain it. And here I should perhaps tell you that common crime.. ..violent crime and burglary, for example, property crime.. ..is a young man's game. Very few criminals start their criminal career.. ..as this man did in his 50s. And when I examined the statistics for the age.. ..at which people are sent to prison in Britain.. ..I found that about 98% of them are under the age of 39.. ..when they are sent to prison. In other words, criminality of the common kind.. ..remins, if you like, spontaneously after the age of 39.. ..even among people who have committed many, many crimes. And this fact has suggested to many commentators.. ..that there's a biological determination of criminality. I think this is mistaken as a major theory of crime.. ..because that cannot really explain the enormous fluctuations.. ..in the rate of crime in any given society. And at most, biological or medical factors influence criminality.. ..and in a few individual cases may explain it, but that's all. Anyway, be that as it may, my first murderer was sent to the hospital to be examined.. ..and after extensive investigation, nothing was found.. ..that would supply a medical explanation of his action.. ..which was, incidentally, completely out of character. Well, he explained it himself to me. I remember this very well. He said that for many years he'd come home from work.. ..and he was tired and he wanted peace and quiet. On his way home, he always bought the evening newspaper. And what he wanted was to sit in his armchair and read it. His wife, however, had been at home all day and had seen no one. So, she was waiting for him to talk to him. And this, of course, for many years had interfered with his reading of the newspaper. And unbeknown to her, this frustrated him enormously. Unfortunately, his wife wore little golden drop earrings.. ..in the form of a cross. And they jiggled as she spoke. And he said, I just couldn't stand his anymore, doctor. He kept on jiggling. And so they drove him to fury one day and he strangled her. Needless to say this was not regarded as an adequate legal excuse for his action. And he was a man of limited imagination and it had not occurred to him to ask his wife.. ..it's where other types of earrings. Well, the law in England in most countries recognizes provocation.. ..but in order that it should not become an excuse in advance for killing.. ..it's a rather narrow definition and perhaps it's psychologically not very realistic. At any rate, I remember one day the police brought a young Ghanaian man.. ..covered in human blood. He was still covered in the blood of the person he'd killed. An illegal immigrant to my office in the hospital.. ..and he just stabbed his girlfriend to death. And the police wanted to know whether he was fit to be interviewed. I had a medical student with me and like most medical students at that stage of his development.. ..he was rather naive and had no contact with any kind of story that he was about to hear. Well, the young Ghanaian was a very nice young man actually.. ..not at all the kind of man that you would expect to kill. And as soon as he had arrived in the country.. ..he'd managed with some difficulty to find a job for himself and somewhere to live. And neither of these things, of course, is easy for an illegal immigrant. And then he met a girl from the city in which I was working.. ..who casually invited him to come and live with her. And they were lovers before long. But she tired of him. And she used to provoke him by telephoning another former lover of hers in front of him.. ..and asking him to come and make love to her.. ..as he, the Ghanaian, was not nearly as good a lover. And on the morning of her death, she told him to move the flat immediately.. ..because she was fed up with him, she was tired of him. Now, he had nowhere to go. He begged her, he had no job now. He begged her to allow her to stay until he had found somewhere to live.. ..somewhere to go. In other words, she was just proposing to put him out on the street. But she refused and started throwing his few belongings out onto the street. And he was desperate. But she laughed at him and she insisted. And he thought that she was playing with him.. ..and the humiliation was terrible. And he took a knife and stabbed her. And the medical student was very shaken by what he heard. And I think he saw in that one instance.. ..the possible depths of human humiliation and despair.. ..and what it can actually sometimes lead to. In another case involving an illegal immigrant.. ..this time Chinese, I appeared in the court for the defence. He spoke not a word of English.. ..and he had arrived in our city from somewhere else.. ..where he had some minor difficulties. I don't know what they were exactly.. ..but he had some minor difficulties. And in the streets of our city, he met a young Chinese student.. ..and they started talking. He had nowhere to live and out of some kind of national solidarity.. ..the student who had a spare room, he lived with his wife, invited him to come and live with him because he had nowhere to go. Unfortunately, he was mad and suffering from a paranoid psychosis. He thought that people were talking about him in a menacing manner. And this is of course a very easy thing to think.. ..when you're slightly mad anyway.. ..and when you're walking around in a place where you understand.. ..not a word of the language. And he eventually came to believe that his benefactor.. ..was plotting to kill him because he heard hallucinatory voices.. ..that told him so. An early one morning, not very long after his arrival.. ..in the benefactor's flat, he ran out into the street.. ..and he stopped a passing police car to tell the police.. ..that his landlord was trying to kill him. But of course he didn't speak any English.. ..and the police didn't speak any Chinese.. ..so they couldn't make out what he was saying.. ..and they just drove on. He returned to the flat where a short time later.. ..he stabbed his landlord dead in front of his wife. I met him in prison.. ..and through interpreters and his Chinese speaking lawyer.. ..it became clear to me that he was mad.. ..and I gave him some treatment.. ..and to my surprise, within two weeks.. ..he became completely normal. He was actually a pleasant young man of peasant origin.. ..who probably had been sent by his family.. ..who had saved money for him to come to earn some money. And once he was better, he started to work in the prison.. ..and he gave us no trouble at all.. ..and he was that fabled figure of a model prisoner. But his case gave us an interesting insight.. ..into the summary nature of current Chinese justice. Shortly after he'd recovered, he appeared in court.. ..for a preliminary hearing. And it was all over very quickly.. ..he was just remanded back into prison. And the whole hearing lasted only a few minutes at the most.. ..and as he left the dock, he took off his shirt.. ..and he was asked why he was doing that. And his reply was very revealing. He said, will you're going to take me around the corner and shoot me? So that is a revealing insight.. ..into the nature of current Chinese justice.. ..at least amongst his class. No doubt some of you read detective novels.. ..and may even be aficionados of the golden age.. ..of English crime novels. People like Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers.. ..incidentally it's always said that Agatha Christie.. ..has sold more books than any other author.. ..other than the Bible, whose authorship I won't go into. Now these crime novels are very reassuring.. ..and they're more fairy stories of course than social realism. The murders which are never described in gruesome detail.. ..that nowadays is extremely fashionable.. ..and that is supposed to make us face up to reality.. ..but in my view is just salaciousness and prurience. The murders in Agatha Christie take place.. ..in circumstances and locations.. ..where murders are least likely ever to occur.. ..such as the libraries of great country houses. And in the end everything is restored.. ..peace, tranquility, justice is done and all the rest of it.. ..and all is right once more with the world. And if you can call a murder cosy.. ..these are nice cosy murders. Well I don't suppose I need to tell you.. ..that most murders are not very cosy.. ..and they are sorted in the extreme.. ..and are not done with any cunning or refinement. I mean of course a complaint in British writing.. ..for a very long time in about 1820.. ..the Quincy wrote a famous essay called.. ..Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.. ..and George Orwell wrote about the decline of the English murder. But they're very sorted.. ..and they usually occur at the heat of a moment.. ..after a sordid, foolish, trivial quarrel.. ..often drunken.. ..and require no detective skills to solve. But they do tell us quite a lot.. ..about the lower depths of our society. I was once asked to examine a 17-year-old girl.. ..who had stabbed her 15-year-old lesbian lover to death. When I went to the prison in which she was being held.. ..I expected to find a very unpleasant, aggressive.. ..and possibly rather stupid young woman.. ..whom I thought I would detest. But on the contrary, I found a decent person.. ..and I came away feeling very sorrowful.. ..and it's a sorrow that I can recapture.. ..when I think about the case. She was born of a white mother and a Jamaican father.. ..who, in what I'm afraid, has now become almost a normal fashion.. ..abandoned them both soon after her birth. Her mother then took up with a Jamaican cocaine dealer.. ..who was violent towards her and was always in and out of prison. She herself was an alcoholic who took drugs. She would repeatedly throw the cocaine dealer out of the house.. ..but she would always allow him back in again. He was violent towards her again.. ..but she was always in some kind of drunken or drug induced stupa. In the meantime, she did not notice that her son.. ..who was a few years older than her daughter.. ..was having full intercourse with her.. ..between the age of 9 or 10 or 14. This was the daughter. When her daughter told her about it when she was about 14.. ..she did what most mothers do in this situation.. ..at least in my experience of cases like this.. ..and that is to say she called the daughter a lying slut.. ..and threw her out onto the street. There she was obliged to go to the social services.. ..who put her in her children's home. Having reached the age of personal autonomy, which is 16.. ..the social services found her a flat of her own.. ..and gave her some money to live in it. There she started to live with a 15-year-old girl.. ..from not very different circumstances. They spent most of the money on alcohol and cannabis.. ..and one day in the course of a drug.. ..an alcohol-fuelled quarrel.. ..she chased her lover from the flat with two carving knives.. ..and everything in England is now videoed.. ..so you see her running through the flats.. ..with two carving knives like this.. ..like a kind of mad operatic murderous. She caught up with her lover and stabbed her to death. Now in English law, quite rightly in my opinion.. ..intoxication is not an excuse or even a mitigation.. ..so long as the intoxication is voluntary, which it always is. And therefore this young girl or woman was found guilty of murder. But when I examined her, I found her to be a very nice young woman.. ..remorseful and her behaviour in the prison had been very, very good. And indeed, and this is startling to me, she said she was happier in prison.. ..than anywhere she had ever been in her life. Because for the first time she was treated with reasonable consistency.. ..and also strangely with some kind of respect. And anyone who has been to a women's prison in Britain.. ..will understand what light this throws on her previous life. And I had little doubt that she would do very well in prison.. ..and she would receive an education that would fit her for a decent life afterwards. And it says something about contemporary Britain.. ..that not only would she receive an education in prison.. ..but it was the only place she would receive an education. Well just before I left her I asked her whether she had any questions to ask me.. ..because I'd asked her a lot of questions of course. And she said, will they be nasty to me in court? And this is a question whose innocence and unworldliness.. ..was completely in variance with her previous conduct. And she'd been really a child forced by circumstances.. ..to live without guidance in a completely pitiless and psychopathic world. Well out of the behalves of murderers.. ..sometimes come the most astonishing statements. And I apologise if I've mentioned this before.. ..and I'm reaching the age of repetition. But one murderer said to me just after he had killed his girlfriend.. ..I had to kill a doctor where I don't know what I would have done. And here we see the reductio.. ..ad absurdum of the idea that unexpressed or unacted upon.. ..desires or emotions lead to real harm unlike murder. As William Blake put it, sooner strangle an infant in its cradle.. ..than nurse unacted desires. And one of the things that murder.. ..and I am sure I've spoken about this before to this meeting.. ..one of the things that the murderers used to say.. ..was that people who had stabbed someone to death.. ..used to say, which made me think about a lot of things.. ..was when they described what happened.. ..they always said the knife went in. Almost always. Which meant that of course the knife was the active partner.. ..in the transaction. And when you think about it.. ..this is how people often present their lives. And they have, when they think there are advantages to doing so.. ..they know that it's not true.. ..but with repetition it becomes true in their minds. Another murderer asked to describe himself.. ..after he had killed, decapitated and dismembered.. ..his best friend for bizarre sexual practices.. ..which I will not describe. Said after some reflection to describe himself.. ..he said, well I'm laid back.. ..and fun to be with. One of the last murders.. ..in which I was involved as an expert witness.. ..was that of an old alcoholic.. ..who was visited by four other alcoholics.. ..they spent their whole life together.. ..and the four alcoholics claimed that.. ..the old alcoholic owed them £20, that's about $30.. ..which in these circumstances is a lot of money.. ..'cause it allows you to be drunk for quite a long time. They drink a kind of cider which is 9% alcohol.. ..and has obviously never seen an apple or anything like that. And you can be drunk on it very, very cheaply. Well in an attempt to extract this money from him.. ..they tied him to his armchair.. ..and tortured him for two hours. They banged his legs with hammers.. ..they stabbed him.. ..and they poured boiling water over him. And they treated him as I said in this fashion.. ..for about two hours.. ..and then they left when they were convinced.. ..that he didn't in fact have £20. And he was still alive when they left.. ..and died shortly afterwards. And I was asked to examine one of the culprits.. ..the presumed culprits.. ..and a woman who said that she didn't do it.. ..she only watched. Well as part of my examination I had to test her memory.. ..and one of the things you do is ask whether people couldn't remember.. ..what was in the news. And it so happened the day before.. ..there had been a story about a woman.. ..who was rather aggressive and extremely nasty woman.. ..who had viciously stabbed.. ..had been found guilty of viciously stabbing.. ..three men to death. And she remembered that. She said there were those women she said.. ..who killed three men. And then she said very memorably.. ..I don't know what this world is coming to. Man's curious ability to fail.. ..to make the most obvious connections.. ..was also obvious to me when I met.. ..perhaps the most notorious murderer I met. But this time not in England but in Liberia. It was during the Civil War there.. ..and the name of the murderer was Brigadier General Field Marshal.. ..Prince Wy Johnson. And I went to interview him in the morning.. ..because it was said to be very dangerous.. ..to interview him afterwards. Because he took a lot of cannabis.. ..and he took a lot of drink. And he went around shooting people. And he was the man who captured the former president.. ..of Liberia, Samuel Doe during the war. And I had seen the video of Johnson.. ..beer in hand interrogating Doe.. ..who was trust up like a chicken naked in front of him. And Johnson was very proud of this interview. It showed him trying to extract from Doe.. ..the numbers of his bank accounts in London. Doe denied any such numbers.. ..saying Prince I don't have any accounts. After being asked once or twice.. ..again Johnson orders one of his people around him.. ..to cut off Doe's ears, which he does. And the torture continues until Doe dies of exanguination. Johnson, of course, killed many, many people personally. He didn't just order people to kill others. I asked Johnson what his ambition was. First we were talking about democracy first. I'm bringing freedom and democracy to Liberia. Then he said I'm not ambitious myself. I said what's your ambition? He said he wanted to be a pastor of a church.. ..and sure enough that is exactly what he became in neighbouring Nigeria. However, once the civil war was over.. ..he returned to Liberia where he is now a senator.. ..of the Liberian Senate and was a presidential candidate. I'm often asked who was the worst person I've ever met. People of all types often ask me who was the worst person I've ever met. It's quite interesting because no one's ever asked me who was the best person I've ever met. Which suggests that evil has an attraction which virtue does not have. Of course it's very difficult to distinguish between.. ..for example a man who impaled three children while he was their babysitter.. ..because they were interrupting his viewing of the television.. ..or a man and his wife who abducted young women.. ..and raped and tortured them to death. They did so incidentally also to their own children.. ..and buried them in their house. Well, I think that's enough prurience and salaciousness for you. Although what I've said has no real lesson to be learned.. ..there's nothing to learn from all this I suppose.. ..I can't help recall Alexander Pope's lines on his essay on man. No then myself presume not God to scan. The proper study of mankind is man. But I adapt it slightly. No then myself seek no further. The proper study of mankind is murder.