The Dark Side of the Mind

by Kerry Daynes

  He readily admitted that he planned how he would do it. He described arranging to meet Raymond before going into a hardware shop and stealing a knife. A series of rational acts within an irrational story. He was quite right when he said: ‘I knew I was killing him.’

  *

  I hadn’t realized it at the time, but Marcus accusing us of being ‘brainwashers and witchdoctors’ was the beginning of his recovery.

  ‘Social rank theory’ argues that our feelings and emotions are notably influenced by how we see ourselves fitting into the social pecking order – particularly the extent to which we feel inferior to, and looked down on by, other people. This can result in believing and doing ‘what we’re told’, even when the voices telling us what to do are inside our own heads. When Marcus killed Raymond, he was at rock bottom, seeing himself as the lowest of the low. Maybe this was why he was particularly susceptible to obeying, rather than questioning, challenging and resisting, the commands from the voices.

  Refusing to accept his diagnostic label showed that he was beginning to challenge the credibility of what he was hearing from authority figures (albeit real ones, in this case), rather than just going along with what he was instructed to believe. A much safer way for Marcus to be, in my opinion. Yet there was more to it than that. By refusing to accept that he had an illness, he was also facing up to the choice he had made to kill Raymond.

  I worked with Marcus for over a year but moved on from the hospital before he did. I bumped into him again many years later, when I was visiting a low-secure hospital. He worked in its small on-site cafe. He had put on a bit of weight and I almost didn’t recognize him until he waved and shouted, ‘It’s the witchdoctor!’, and I was left in no doubt. He told me that he was starting to take small steps towards rebuilding relationships with his mother and daughter, who visited him there. And he had taken on an unofficial role as patient-mentor, running mindfulness groups. In fact, he had become something of a mindfulness maestro. He still heard voices, he explained, but he could ignore them now, even ‘shush them up’ if he wanted to.

  If Marcus had learned to challenge his voices, I had also begun to think differently about the way I approached my patients, and to open up new conversations around mental health. Conversations that go beyond the usual ‘illness’ script and respect the person’s own construction of their history and experience, whatever words they use to describe it. Working with him made me wonder: if we could see people who act in strange or hard to understand ways, as Marcus had that day in Mental Health Awareness Group, as simply others in pain, rather than paint them with the stigma of a disorder, would we all be more willing and able to reach out to them? And would tragedies like Raymond’s death be more easily avoided?

  CHAPTER 6

  POWER PLAYS

  The quest to understand violence has led me

  to view a criminal’s actions as the shadows cast

  by his own inner narratives.

  Professor David Canter, Criminal Shadows

  The day I took the call from the police asking for my help with an investigation, a double-height mesh fence was being put up right outside my office and the noise had given me a headache.

  I was working in a secure hospital at the time, and the fence was going up because of a patient who had escaped a few weeks earlier and become the subject of what must have been the slowest police chase of 2003, if not in history. He’d managed to walk straight out of the grounds and had stolen a tractor that somehow still had the keys in it. Police didn’t actually need to chase him at all, they just parked their car at the gate to the field and probably had time to complete a crossword as they waited for him to get to them.

  Despite this event being the opposite of dramatic, the local press had gone large with fear-mongering headlines about an escaped madman on the loose. So the hospital spent thousands on ramping up some of the more visible security, reassuring our genteel neighbours in this well-to-do rural area that all was under control. They put in an electric barrier, so that every car had to stop on its way in, and employed a former nursing assistant, ‘Big Nathan’, as a security guard. He seized this new power with both hands, and wouldn’t let you in without correct ID even if he knew you. Even the therapy dog, a shih-tzu called Larry, didn’t make it in to work one morning because he didn’t have photo ID.

  The patient who had briefly escaped had learning disabilities and had been convicted of several arson attacks. He had a habit of climbing over the dark green fence that separated the outside courtyard of his ward from the main grounds. He would usually return to the front of the ward and wave at the intercom camera to get back in. He once buzzed through asking for a plaster, because he’d cut his finger on the chain-link fence during his climb.

  He acted this way because he wanted us to know that he could. And sometimes because he had a problem that he felt he couldn’t solve. It was a plea for help – he wanted us to know that he needed help figuring out what to do.

  *

  I’ve never considered myself to be a ‘profiler’ – for one thing, it’s not a real job – but people seem to like calling me a profiler. And I’ll take it, because it makes me sound far more exotic than the tea-drinking northerner that I am, as if I possess magical powers. Thanks to TV’s depiction of forensic psychologists (in particular Criminal Minds and Wire In The Blood), the criminal profiler has acquired a status in the collective consciousness as someone who is brilliant but eccentric, someone able to divine the exact identity of a hitherto unknown killer from a few cryptic clues, a quick cigarette at a crime scene and a lot of thin air.

  But it’s not like that in real life. So-called profilers are in fact ordinary human beings, who do not possess any wizarding genes whatsoever. What they can do is bring a fresh eye, and apply some psychological knowledge, to the existing evidence and/or suspects in a case. Profilers are brought in as consultants by the police when they need a different perspective on an investigation, or a new way to access information they know they haven’t yet discovered. They might help link a series of crimes, plan interviews, perhaps help the police understand how personality and mental state could drive an offender’s behaviour or affect a victim’s recollection of events. Only rarely is a psychologist brought in to determine a ‘profile’, a list of the likely personality, history and lifestyle characteristics of an unknown offender, inferred from an examination of the crime and where it took place. And the notion of a lone clinical Columbo tracking serial killers really only exists in the imagination of filmmakers. Not least because UK criminologists estimate that a maximum of four serial killers are operating in this country at any given time (which is fairly good news or utterly terrifying, depending on your point of view).

  The whole area of applying psychology to the process of catching criminals and bringing them to justice is now known as ‘investigative psychology’ and during my career it has blossomed into its own distinct discipline, with dedicated university courses, specially trained police officers and sophisticated databases of information and software. The discipline has broadened into a whole range of investigative areas, contributing to everything from detecting tax evasion to interpreting terrorist threats. Perhaps the question I get asked most by students is: how do I become a profiler? I tell them to study and become an academic, or join the police force and do the training in investigative psychology. Then privately I think that if they haven’t managed to investigate that for themselves, they might have to up their game.

  *

  I also sometimes give them a dose of realism about profiling, using an analogy about the time I skived off school with my first boyfriend, Jamie Rabourn. In our 16-year-old wisdom we decided our time that sunny day would be much better spent lazing around in the long grass behind our school than it would in a boring classroom.

  I got home later on and Mum asked me how my day had been. Leaning breezily into my deception I replied, ‘Oh OK, a bit boring, just the usual.’

  Without even raising an eyebrow she rep
lied, ‘That’s funny, because it looks to me a lot like you spent the afternoon lazing in the long grass with Jamie Rabourn.’

  How could she possibly know that? I demanded to know. She said, victorious: ‘Because I’m your mother.’ In that moment I felt sure she was not only my mother, but a woman with super-human powers of perception and deduction.

  Actually, she’d received a phone call from school telling her I had disappeared after morning roll-call, and coincidentally so had Jamie Rabourn. I noticed later that evening that I also had lots of long grass still lodged in my hair. Marvellous as she is, my mum doesn’t possess precognitive skills. She had narrowed down the options based on the evidence, the most likely probabilities and her hard-won understanding of teenage behaviour and motivations.

  *

  I had been part of the well-established psychology team at this secure hospital for a year but I did a three-day week now, while beginning to build my private practice part-time, teaching post-grads applied forensic psychology at Manchester University and acting as an expert witness in court.

  I didn’t usually spend much time in my office anyway, but I’d been purposefully avoiding it because of the noise of the heavy-duty power tools on full blast. It was lucky that I was even at my desk when the phone rang that day.

  Keen to escape the din, I snatched up the receiver. It was Detective Sergeant Steve Allbright, an interview coordinator from the Serious Crime Review Team. He was looking for a psychologist to help with a murder investigation: he had a crime and a prime suspect but not enough evidence to charge him. A first round of interviews hadn’t borne any fruit and they’d like some help with the next round. Could I help?

  I explained that I didn’t have any hands-on experience in this kind of exercise, but he said it didn’t matter, he just needed a psychologist’s view. There was unlikely to be any pay in it, but could I be tempted? It turns out that when a police officer calls and asks for your help in a murder investigation, even if it is pro bono and you’ve never done it before, you say yes.

  *

  At the police station, Steve showed me to the office he shared with the rest of the team. There was a familiar feeling of organized chaos, with piles of paperwork everywhere and the air ripe with coffee and microwaved lunches. I had powdered milk in my tea and it looked like rusty water.

  Steve presented the facts of the story: a 62-year-old man, Malcolm Johns, had been murdered in his home seven years ago – killed in his bed, while his wife slept next door in the second bedroom. Police had never found his killer.

  Around the same time, there had been a spate of burglaries in the area where Johns had lived – a sprawling post-war council estate of mainly terraced houses, each with a small front and back garden. All the burglaries had a similar modus operandi, with nothing too unusual about it: entry was made through a back door and the usual household small electrics, jewellery and other valuables had been taken. But, more unusually, the burglar had entered the house in the middle of the night.

  If you believe TV and film writers, burglaries take place when everyone is sound asleep as the burglar plans to sneak through a window undetected. In reality, most burglars don’t want to come into contact with other people (in convict slang, those who do burgle by night are known as ‘creepers’) – the majority of breakins to homes take place during the day while people are at work and their houses are empty. Burglary traffic hits its peak in the late afternoons of early winter, when it is dark enough to provide intruders with cover, but still not time for most people to be home from work.

  A young data analyst, Jo, joined us. She was new to the force and had a special interest in crime scene analysis and geographical profiling – analysis of the location(s) connected to a crime that can help identify where the offender is likely to live and narrow down a pool of suspects. She had been recruited in anticipation of the roll-out of HOLMES2, an information technology system that holds masses of information about major crime incidents and allows cross referencing from every force in the country, which is now used by all UK police forces. But hi-tech HOLMES2 hadn’t quite arrived yet, so she had been doing things the old-fashioned way. She had spent days overlaying a map with acetate and putting fine felt-tip dots where night-time burglaries had taken place over a one-year period either side of the murder. But her labours amounted to an indecipherable mass of tiny red dots, far too condensed and numerous to reveal any pattern.

  A number of burglary victims in this group had reported not only the theft of items from their homes, but also waking up to see a man wearing a balaclava standing at the end of their bed. If they were unfortunate enough to wake up to this terrifying spectre, the man had barked the same order at them to turn over, face down, and put their hands behind their head. He had then stood silently watching them for a while – some said moments, for others it was minutes – before he eventually disappeared. None of the victims could identify any of the man’s facial features; recall of faces is poor at the best of times, and pretty much impossible in a dark room when a balaclava is involved. Other physical characteristics they reported were variable; his accent was possibly local, nondescript. But all the witnesses told police the same thing – there was silence in the room, save for the sound of their own heavy breathing. He didn’t seem to do anything. He just watched them for a while and left.

  Jo had put these specific incidents onto a separate sheet of acetate and they were much easier to see – about 19 little red dots that formed a thin corridor, roughly half a mile by four miles. The burglar had gone on a shopping spree and this red corridor was his high street. There were just a couple of outliers, burglaries that had taken place around the time of Malcolm Johns’ murder, but in locations slightly further afield than the burglar’s preferred area. If the cases were linked – and that was still an assumption – it looked like the old man’s death had rattled the perpetrator enough to drive him temporarily from his usual beat.

  Another crime that had taken place in the area, at a storage facility on an industrial estate that backed onto the residential neighbourhood, had played out very differently. As Steve told me about this crime, Jo carefully added a blue dot to one end of the existing passage of red.

  Eight months after Malcolm Johns had been killed, two teenage boys and their parents were in one of the lock-ups on a Saturday afternoon, sorting through boxes full of their recently deceased grandmother’s belongings. As the four of them were busy rummaging and boxing up, a man wearing a balaclava and holding what looked like a gun (it turned out to be an imitation Browning MK2 pistol – police will still treat it as a real firearm if you start waving one around) stepped calmly inside the unit and ushered them all to stand facing the wall and put their hands behind their heads, firing-squad style. As Steve and Jo told me this, I raised an eyebrow at the audacity of it: keeping four people under control in an unpredictable, semi-public space is no mean undertaking. Even with a convincing-looking weapon, you still have the threat of someone deciding to challenge you.

  The robber kept the four of them facing the wall, with their hands behind their heads. They described how he rifled casually through their belongings and loaded his bag. Then, still very much at his leisure, he walked up behind the mother, who was standing at the far end of the line, and ran his hands over her breasts. Still standing behind her, he then put his hand down the front of her trousers. A sexual assault. He took his hand away and stood behind the family for a few moments longer, then slipped out of the lock-up.

  Nothing on the storage warehouse CCTV showed the robber leaving the facility. But police were eventually able to identify and arrest a local man, Ian Hogan, a former member of staff at the storage unit, who still rented his own lock-up there. He hadn’t been seen leaving the place because he hadn’t left it. He’d gone straight into his own lock-up and stayed there for some time, knowing exactly where the CCTV cameras were positioned, when staff rotated and how he could emerge without drawing attention to himself.

  Hogan – in his 30s, n
ow unemployed and married with two young sons – lived just outside the residential estate. Jo dabbed a second blue dot on the acetate, and the red line was now perfectly sandwiched between the two blue markers: Hogan’s home at one end and the storage facility at the other. It wasn’t a geographical profiler’s dream – serial offences more typically fall within a rough circle, around the central point of an offender’s home – but it was a significant pattern.

  Hogan was convicted of aggravated robbery for the storage warehouse offence but, for reasons best known to the Crown Prosecution Service, he had not been separately charged with the sexual assault. He had served nearly half his seven-year sentence and would soon be on his way back home. He had also been linked to some of the night-time burglaries, the number of which had plummeted in the area since his move to prison. Linked, because it wasn’t possible to conclusively prove that he was the creeper, even though many of the stolen items were now living happily in his storage unit. In fact, the unit was heaving with valuable goods: televisions and electricals, jewellery, tools, replica and antique weapons. There were also plenty of seemingly worthless, mundane things: calendars, hairbrushes, draught excluders. Hogan admitted nothing, claiming that he acquired much of the lock-up’s contents from men he traded with in the pub.

  Of particular significance among the jumble of items found at Hogan’s lock-up was a watch belonging to Malcolm Johns – a 1970s watch with a gold face and a worn-in brown leather strap. It was the kind of watch that might have had sentimental value, but wasn’t worth much money. Like all the other items, Hogan insisted he’d bought it from a stranger in the pub and no one could prove otherwise.

  *

  The serial offender’s habit of keeping ‘trophies’ has long been a favourite with novelists and scriptwriters; the more gruesome the trinket or in some cases body part, the better. But they don’t only exist in crime fiction. In 2006 the so-called ‘shoe rapist’ James Lloyd from Rotherham was found to have kept over a hundred pairs of shoes behind a trap door at his office, all of them taken from his victims after he had attacked them.