by Kerry Daynes
Patrick – in his late 50s, not an especially tall man but wide, almost square, with stocky limbs and a chubby neck – had worked as a night-time security guard at an agricultural warehouse in the middle of the countryside where he lived. He’d grown up in this rural region, where the landscape was wide open and life happened quietly in the villages, people connected by lanes and fields. In his job, Patrick spent his nights in a small office attached to the side of the warehouse, guarding the big farming machinery that made the community tick. It wasn’t anyone’s dream job, but there was certainly purpose in his work.
One night the warehouse owner, Patrick’s employer, started a fire at the building in an attempt to cash in on his insurance. He had switched off the fire alarms, so the first Patrick knew about the blaze raging through the place was the smell of smoke as it crept under his office door. He described how he had leaped into action, rushing from his desk to open the door to the main storage, but a violent backdraft lifted him off his feet in a blast of hot ash and flames, and threw him across the room. Patrick had suffered severe injuries: burns to his face and his right arm, and three fingers lost on his right hand. He was, everyone agreed, lucky to have survived.
The warehouse owner spent a short time in prison for his crime and Patrick spent a long time in and out of hospital, having a series of painful plastic surgery operations and skin grafts. Unable to even talk properly because of the surgery to his face, he had literally been muted. Over this drawn-out and difficult period, his wife left him. She moved out of their home while he was in hospital.
A few months after returning home to his new reality, he tried to kill himself with his own shotgun (it was legally held, quite usual in farming communities). He put the gun in his mouth hoping for a clean end, but without an index finger to pull the trigger he had, miraculously, managed not to kill himself. Instead, he had blown off part of his face – mostly the part that hadn’t already been damaged in the fire. More painful surgery and weeks of silent agony in hospital followed for him – all the time knowing he had no one to go home to.
Patrick, heavily disfigured, unemployed and alone, decided he was going to have it out with his former employer. He went to the man’s house, after a few too many drinks one night, with the intention of settling the score. But it had gone further than that. He’d picked up a log from a woodpile by the front door and hit him repeatedly with it. Then he’d given him a kicking while he was on the ground. He admitted that at one point it had stopped being a person he was hitting, it was just his own pain. Patrick said that, for a brief moment, he had felt better. But then he looked at the near-dead man on the floor and understood what he had done. He used the man’s phone to call the ambulance.
This wasn’t an impulsive, recklessly angry man, the type that goes around punching everyone he meets. Patrick was the opposite. He was over-controlled, emotionally contained. Anger can be adaptive and healthy, if it is handled well, but he bottled his up and let it grow into a poison tree, until he had erupted into a cathartic rage – cathartic for a short time, anyway. It’s usually the case that this type of person commits infrequent acts of violence – maybe even just once in a lifetime – but is more likely to seriously hurt, maybe kill, a victim when they do.
Now Patrick was on remand, awaiting what was undoubtedly going to be a long sentence for causing grievous bodily harm. Hopelessness was alive and well in him.
*
Telling our personal stories, naming and acknowledging our experiences, is fundamentally how human beings make sense of our world. For most of us that means talking with our friends or family. For others it’s therapy or counselling – the premise is the same: through the simple act of talking we process and understand ourselves, and others. When we don’t or can’t tell our stories, they manifest in other ways. Emotions need a voice. Without it they seep out eventually.
But the art of talking comes easier to some of us than others. For boys and men, so many of them still socialized in a myriad of destructive ways to hide weakness and tough out their difficulties, the idea of sharing deep emotional pain with anyone is still often unthinkable, even in the 21st century. When you are punished or mocked if you dare to express, or even have, feelings, you typically put a lot of effort into appearing strong and stoic. Except for anger. Male conditioning is more accepting of anger, an emotion that is usually more about ‘doing’ than ‘feeling’. Men are, generally speaking, more likely to deal with distress by doing something: overworking, sex, drinking, drugs, aggression, violence, suicide. What is suicide if not the most decisive of actions, after all. Small wonder then that the ultra-macho prison environment, where having emotions is seen as a sign of weakness, is full of men acting out their distress in harmful ways.
*
Patrick Thompson didn’t know how to tell his story, with all its trauma and tragedy. He just couldn’t have found the moment, even if he’d been given the chance to, which he hadn’t, not before he’d committed a serious crime, and certainly not after. Listen hard enough and even the quietest prisons are booming with the deafening sound of men not talking.
There was something of my own that I wasn’t talking about at that time, keeping under wraps, unacknowledged even to myself. But my unspoken story was beginning to manifest itself in a physical way – I’d started to have attacks of dizziness. One evening at Sheffield railway station I collapsed out of nowhere. People assumed I was drunk. It felt like I was drunk, or had the mother of all hangovers, just without any of the fun or cocktails. I was on the platform, waiting to board a train home to Manchester. Suddenly the train in front of me seemed to move backwards, and before I had time to think about why it would be doing that, the whole platform started to spin and I fell over. I was trying to grip the floor, holding on to it because it felt like a cyclone had struck platform 14. I was momentarily transported back to the waltzer at the Red Rec in Stockport, where we went as teenagers when the fair came to town. I could hear voices around me but couldn’t speak because it was taking all my mental effort to breathe through the panic and nausea, trying to grasp a sense of balance. Attacks like this were starting to become more frequent.
I was grateful to Patrick for the laughter that day. I realized I had needed that release of tension just as much as he had. For a moment I worried that I had kicked a man while he was down, and maybe even made him more likely to want to end his life. But as we gathered up the melting plastic pouch and what was left of his art, he thanked me. I asked him if I needed to be more concerned about him. He smiled his one-sided smile and said, ‘No, not today. It won’t be today.’
He wanted to stay alive that day and, sometimes, in this job, just helping a person hang on until the next moment is good enough. I never saw Patrick again. I hope he found a way to keep on talking, and made it to the end of his sentence.
CHAPTER 3
THE BLAME GAME
The just-world hypothesis: The widespread but false
belief that the world is essentially fair, so that the good are
rewarded and the bad punished. One consequence of this
belief is that people who suffer misfortunes are assumed to
deserve their fates…even the victims often blame themselves.
Oxford Dictionary of Psychology
I’ll always remember Alison because she is the only person I’ve seen walk out of Crown Court a free woman after being convicted of killing her husband.
It was 2003 and the first time I’d been asked to act as an expert witness in a homicide case (although it sounds American, ‘homicide’ is a generic term that when used in the UK covers murder, manslaughter and infanticide). Because we assess people and not the objects pertinent to a case, psychologists are among a small number of professionals who are permitted to give their two penn’orth in court, rather than just report on the facts of a matter. I was 29, and I’d reached a level of experience and professional standing that meant I was now being trusted to provide opinions that had huge ramifications not only f
or the people on trial, but for the family of the victim and the public.
I had always assumed this milestone case for me would involve a male defendant. No gender stereotyping intended, it’s just an indisputable fact that 95 per cent of our killers are male, regardless of relationship, if any, between victim and perpetrator. Men are overwhelmingly killed by other men, and women are also overwhelmingly killed by men. So when the file came through from the Crown Prosecution Service with the request to accept instructions, I was surprised to see I’d been asked to assess a female defendant.
Alison was currently charged with murder, having admitted to killing her husband, Paul, at their home. What the CPS wanted to know was what kind of mental state Alison was in at the time and, specifically, did she have an ‘abnormality of mental functioning’ on the day she killed him that had ‘caused, or significantly contributed to her conduct’. This question, posed in legal-speak, made it clear that Alison’s team were putting forward a defence of diminished responsibility, and would be hoping to get her charge reduced to manslaughter.
We are still a civilized society, so the foundation for criminal law is that a person is guilty only if proved to be blameworthy in both their conduct (known as actus reus: the guilty act) and their intention, or appreciation of the act being wrong (their ability to form the necessary mens rea: guilty mind). An insufficient mens rea is the general difference between murder and manslaughter. But to establish what the state of Alison’s mind was in the exact moments that she killed Paul, we needed to make a retrospective evaluation, a difficult thing to do with the degree of certainty required in law. Being able to travel back in time is one of the many additional skills a forensic psychologist needs on their CV.
I immediately put in a request for her medical records and booked out several hours of visiting sessions with her at the women’s prison where she was being held on remand. While preparing to take my first look at the prosecution evidence and plan my assessment of Alison, I took a moment to reflect on what I knew about ‘intimate partner homicide’.
Paul was in the approximately 10 per cent of all victims who are men killed by the women in their life. Just 1 per cent of victims are women killed by other women. Research also tells us over and over that when men kill their female partners or ex-partners, it usually follows months or years of them abusing her. On the other hand, when women kill their husbands or exes, it’s usually after months or years of having been abused by the man they have killed.
This is usually the point at which someone pops up, like Cato Fong out of a cupboard in The Pink Panther, to attack my apparent misandry and point out that men are also victims of domestic abuse. Of course there are male victims, and every case must be taken seriously. Nevertheless, domestic abuse is a gendered crime in that it disproportionately happens to women and is mostly perpetrated by men. It is women who are more likely to experience the more severe forms of emotional abuse and control, and be subject to repeated and long-term victimization. And women are far more likely to be seriously hurt, or worse, by someone who once professed to love them. Violent men put a woman in hospital in Britain every three hours. These are the ugly but irrefutable facts.
I knew there was a strong probability that Alison had been abused by Paul, possibly over a long period of time. However, I can’t make an assessment or form any kind of opinion based on probabilities. So I set aside statistics as I opened the first of three blue folders of crime scene evidence and began to immerse myself in Alison and Paul’s case.
*
Looking at crime scene pictures is always a strange thing, intruding on something so personal as someone’s death, albeit through the lens of your professional curiosity. They are usually images of intense dissonance: you have the common, everyday banality of the setting – in this case Paul and Alison’s red-brick semi, with shrubs in the driveway and stained glass in the uPVC front door – contrasted with the horror of the crime that has taken place there. For Paul it turned out that meant being killed by blunt-force trauma to the head and then stabbed in the chest while he lay on the sofa.
My first thoughts, as I looked through these pictures, were that I wasn’t seeing anything like an organized or premeditated crime scene. It was a vision of chaos. In the living room, where he had been killed, Paul’s body lay on the floor, his bare lower legs and feet sticking out from the duvet – or was it two duvets? – he had been messily bundled up in. In the background stood a Christmas tree, a festive symbol of evergreen life and familial bliss, covered in swathes of silver tinsel, behind it shelves with picture frames and the odd figurine.
The pictures took me on a tour of the events that had unfolded. His face and a large part of his head were caked in blood and the left eye was heavily swollen, a plum-coloured contrast to the rest of his skin. There was an unmistakable expression of shock on his face. He had obviously had a split second to register what was about to happen to him. His hand, locked into a claw shape, was by his face, as though it had shot up in that moment to protect himself. I took in the stab wounds on his chest but they were small, colourless slits, like fingernail marks in the skin of an apple. There was no blood, they were just entry wounds, indicating they’d happened after he had died. Pictures of his torso showed where she’d apparently tried, not very effectively, to cut him in half at the waist – again no sign of bleeding just the carved flesh, standing proud. There were bin bags and cleaning sponges in some pictures and a toilet roll on the carpet. In the kitchen, what looked like human excrement. A washing-up bowl in the sink with a wrench in it, the water reddish brown.
This wasn’t so much a cover-up job as a clean-up job – a futile one at that. I’ve seen plenty of homicide scenes over the years and I’ve learned that the body of someone who has met a premature death is a difficult, laborious thing to clean up after, even for the most methodical, scientific of killers. The person who had sponged the sofa and tried to lift the blood splatters off the carpet with toilet roll clearly didn’t have the kind of strength or calculated thinking required to disguise their actions. Having made an abortive attempt to move and cut into Paul’s body, Alison had wrapped him up in duvets, no longer able to bear looking at what she had done. And there he remained on the light floral carpet.
Other pictures in the house showed an entirely average, if unusually neat and clean, home. The children’s bedrooms bore none of the mess and chaos of most kids’ rooms. Dolls were lined up in uniform rows on shelves, more for display than playing with. In the main bedroom an ironing board was up and shirts hung up on wardrobe doors. The bed, with full pelmet and more dolls, was immaculately made. I was struck by the perfection of the front drive – no leaves, no plant pots or any of the usual disarray of family life, like someone had vacuumed the asphalt. Next to the house was a garage full of all the usual garage miscellanies: tools and paint, a workbench. Underneath a shelf of household products, bleach and disinfectants, was a shelf full of alcohol – five or six big bottles of vodka and other spirits.
And then the note. She’d torn pages from a child’s flowered notebook, and written on both sides, although not in the lines. The writing looked sketchy, with thin spidery letters, written by a hand that was obviously shaking. It said: ‘It can’t go on like this, I can’t cope any more. I’m sorry. Please look after the children, tell them I love them. They are with my mum, please let them stay with my mum.’ It said the same thing over all four pages: sorry and I couldn’t cope any more. There was no linear thought process or considered structure here. It was a stream of consciousness that had burst out of her, there and then. She lay down next to Paul’s body on the floor and stayed there until her mum came round the next morning with the children.
The prison she was being held in was the same, in essence, as the other women’s prisons I’d been to. There are only 12 dedicated women’s prisons in England (women make up just 10 per cent of the UK prison population). They are absolutely nothing like the sassy world portrayed in American TV shows like Orange Is the New Black
. For one thing there are no boiler suits and women wear their own clothes in British jails – if there is a uniform it’s denim and T-shirts, comfort over style. The rooms where I’ve spent time with female prisoners are largely similar to those in men’s prisons, but there are also sometimes more pleasant rooms in women’s prisons, with bright pictures on the walls and boxes of toys, like a dentist’s waiting room. Only those rooms are where mothers wait to see their children.
I met Alison in this kind of family room. It had a little kitchenette area with a sink and a cluster of low, padded chairs. I remember the lights were on a movement sensor, and because we were sat so low down I had to flap my arms around every 15 minutes to stop them going out, an irritating necessity that felt inappropriately slapstick given the gravity of what I was here to discuss with her.
She was thin, average height, her hair was scraped back in a harsh ponytail, with slender features and wide-set brown eyes. I noticed flecks of grey and thinned-out patches around her temples, and little dents on her ears where the earrings had long-since been taken out. As she talked her eyes were glossy with tears, which fell slowly and steadily throughout our conversation.
She told me that the first time Paul had hurt her was when she told him she was pregnant, ten years ago. They were sitting in their car, him in the passenger seat, and he smashed her face into the steering wheel. It had happened so quickly that at first she thought that another car had hit them from behind. When she told her mother, she asked what Alison had done to provoke him and told her that, if she was pregnant, she had made her bed and had better lie in it. She later lost the baby when Paul pushed her down the stairs, although he told her it was her imagination, she would have lost the baby anyway. This is a tactic known as ‘gaslighting’ – when an abuser manipulates their victim into doubting their own perceptions and sanity.
