Like Thaw’s, Hinckley’s lawyers filed repeatedly for conditional release and then more. Rejected at first, Hinckley did win permission by 1986 to spend time at the family home. But when twenty photos of Jodie Foster were found in his room along with evidence that he had been communicating with other killers, the pleas for release were scuppered and delayed. By the turn of the century, when he was permitted unsupervised furloughs to see his mother – to whom, like Thaw, he was deeply attached – there was still material related to Jodie Foster found in his hospital room. His obsession with her didn’t cease. In 2012 his lawyers, reminiscent again of Thaw’s, stated they had not been fully paid. Then in January 2013 there were rumours that Hinckley, on a visit home, had been involved in some unreported violence. Despite this, the fight to have him returned to his now eighty-six-year-old mother continued.
For all Hinckley’s obsessional stalking of her, Jodie Foster never remembered meeting him.
By the 1990s, stalking – the ‘willful, malicious and repeated following and harassing of another person that threatens his or her safety’ – had become a statutorily defined criminal act in many American states. It now seemed that many people suffered from the unwanted pursuit by a sometimes jealous and always vigilant other. If stranger and celebrity stalking account for some 16 per cent of most samples, the rest know their stalker, while some 30 per cent have also once been their intimate.
This latter problem has grown with women’s ability to step out of relationships, marriages or cohabitations that have become abusive or unhappy: husbands or partners refuse to accept that their partners have really gone, so pursue them mercilessly, sometimes to the point of extreme violence. Claire Waxman, whose case sparked the setting up of the British Paladin National Stalking Advocacy Service, was the victim of a ten-year campaign of harassment and relentless pursuit – what she calls ‘mental rape’; she had a miscarriage and moved house five times before her pursuer was arrested, only to be released on probation to carry on his obsessive campaign.
The British Crime Survey estimates that 120,000 people are stalked every year; the US Bureau of Crime Statistics estimated 3.4 million victims between 2005–2006, while a source for 2011 puts the figure as high as 6.6 million. Exact numbers are difficult to come by, but their increase everywhere in the West points to a recalibration of what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour in that broad domain of love – courtship, sex, marriage, separation. Women are now readier to go to the police and lodge complaints based on unwanted pursuit and menace, where once they might have suffered in silence. Since stalking often enough emerges out of a background of domestic violence, it is one more form of violence against women – one in which the stalker can carry on the semblance of a relationship while maintaining a predatory control.
Unquestionably, the cyber-world has made this form of malign and abusively possessive love far too easy. GPS tracking systems work for pursuers. Social media have blurred the line between private and public and make harassment simple for those so inclined. Email and texting have provided a ready and easy form of communication/pursuit; the love-deluded, like lovers themselves, have ever been prone to letter writing, an activity that engages the imagination as well as the other person’s attention. The difference is that now there is no need to step into the reality of the street to pursue one’s fantasies. Perhaps in a society increasingly based on surveillance, where we are watched and incessantly watch others – on screens inside the intimacy of our own homes, and out – this growing need to pursue and fully possess the desired other should come as no surprise. Nor, in a world where compliant porn images often serve as an early introduction to sex, is a ‘No’ always part of the emotional lexicon a rejected partner can understand or tolerate. Frustration is rarely understood as a step towards character building at a time when happiness is seen as an entitlement.
Women, of course, also stalk in the contemporary world. In his gripping memoir, Give Me Everything You Have, the writer and sometime teacher James Lasdun recounts the gruelling experience of being stalked both online and by email by a former student whose work he had encouraged. Lasdun’s odyssey takes a well documented course. The young woman moves from infatuation with her teacher, to jealousy and perceived betrayal, to hatred and revenge. The form this latter takes is persecutory mail violently attacking Lasdun as a Jew; letters to his publishers, journals, places of work and on various websites ‘exposing’ Lasdun as a thief of others’ ideas, a sexual predator on students, and so on. It’s not clear whether publication of the memoir has stopped the stalking or not.
In 1999 Dr Paul E. Mullen, Professor of Forensic Psychiatry at Monash University in Australia, elaborated the most frequently used typology of stalking. It moves beyond an earlier American classification that had named three groups of stalkers – the erotomanic delusional type, the love obsessionals whose love delusions were part of a more extensive psychotic condition, and the simple obsessionals who had had prior involvement with their objects. Mullen’s typology, instead, is based on motivational factors: it divides stalkers into the rejected, the intimacy seekers, the incompetent suitors, the resentful, and the predatory. He argues that this isn’t a way of ‘medicalizing deviancy’, but of dealing with a persistent problem.
Recognized mental conditions – such as psychosis and personality disorder – can underlie the sustained harassment that stalking is. Although women make up only a small proportion of stalkers and, despite the portrayal in the film Fatal Attraction, less often engage in physical violence, they have a slightly higher incidence of mental illness than male stalkers – or perhaps, as has often been the case with women, it’s simply that more illness is diagnosed. Deluded beliefs and uncorrectable assumptions about the thoughts and emotions of their object prevail in stalkers’ minds. Evidence that their pursuit isn’t welcome is discounted in the persistent hope of intimacy or reconciliation. Women tend to target former professional contacts, including doctors, colleagues or lovers, rather than strangers. They are motivated by ‘intimacy seeking’.
Having had a prior relationship with the object of their pursuit significantly increases the risk of violence. For men who just can’t let their former wives or lovers go, violence often ensues when the illusion that their love is really returned – a love which also armours their own sense of specialness – is threatened or shattered. Thus, the wrong kind of intervention from the police can actually trigger as yet unperformed violence.
Being the object of prolonged pursuit, even short of violence, can induce acute stress and leave psychological scars. Being spied on, being forced to move repeatedly, receiving thousands of emails, having to change mobile and other numbers and addresses, living in fear of violence every time you step out of the house or even when you stay in, being deprived of a social life or new relationships – are a form of intolerable harassment that too often leads to lasting psychological damage.
In Britain an Independent Parliamentary Inquiry into Stalking was set up in 2012 following the murder of Lorna Smith by her former boyfriend. The inquiry set out recommendations for change to the inadequate 1997 protection-from-harassment laws. These came to fruition in the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012, which named a specific offence of stalking. This was a signal for police to take mounting levels of complaint seriously and understand that even when victims of stalkers don’t suffer physical abuse or assault, they undergo psychic damage – or psychological GBH. In March 2013, protection from harassment or gender-based violence granted in one EU country was extended to cover the entire European Union.
In north London, a National Stalking Clinic led by the forensic psychiatrist Dr Frank Farnham has been established. Working hand in hand with the courts, the clinic assesses perpetrators and the risk they pose as well as offering treatment programmes, often as part of the offender’s probation. Farnham thinks of stalking as a behavioural problem – not a mental illness. It can be modified and changed with an appropriate treatment plan. The short prison terms meted out to stalkers
by the courts often lead only to a repeat of the criminal activity as soon as release comes. Farnham would like to see the criminal justice system, from the police to judges and to probation officers, re-engage with psychological concepts so that stalkers, sexual offenders, angry and violent men, can be ‘cured’ of reoffending. Though he doesn’t use the term, he is talking about therapeutic jurisprudence: crime, viewed like this, is as much an issue for the health services as it is for the courts.
On the ground, the victims of stalking, like the newsreader Alexis Bowater, head of the Network for Surviving Stalking, talk of making treatment mandatory for offenders. We may be ‘socialised through romantic films to think that the guy will always eventually get the girl, but stalking is not a romcom gone wrong – it is serious and pathological ... Stalkers will repeat-offend until they are treated. So there needs to be mandatory treatment, and there needs to be better support for victims.’
Mandatory treatment for offenders may be a good in many instances. However, if like Harry Thaw the offender fails to recognize the wrong in his criminal act, or experiences no despondency or shame – the very sign of his understanding that he is a member of a larger social group – then it is unlikely that therapeutic procedures will have any lasting effect.
Passionate Transgressions
In one of the very few essays in which he tackles the idea of criminality, Freud engages with Shakespeare’s murderous, megalomaniacal ‘crookback’, Richard III. He notes that, like Richard, those who have experienced some illness in earliest childhood, or some form of suffering for which they bear no guilt, often determine that they live at an unjust disadvantage. This can be the case even when they don’t altogether know or can’t recall the cause of their ills. Such individuals may later claim specialness or seek compensation in reparation for their wrongs. Some may turn to crime. Others may be loath to give up forbidden pleasures and gratifications. The search for reparation can also take a rebellious social or political form, such as revolution or the feminist movement. (Writing in 1916, Freud notes laconically that women, because of their secondary status, all nurture a grievance.) Like Richard III, such individuals claim a confident exceptionality:
... since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain ...
Perhaps our interest in criminals, in crime and detective stories has something to do with the imaginative recognition that criminals and revolutionaries mirror each other in their search for justice. The legal scholar Donald Black argues that the most common motives for homicides are moralistic. Citing him, Steven Pinker in his book on violence, The Better Angels of Our Nature, names as instances: retaliation after an insult, escalation of a domestic quarrel, punishing an unfaithful romantic lover ... From the point of view of the killer, such murders are ‘really instances of capital punishment with a private citizen as the judge, jury and executioner’.
With far less dramatic self-awareness than Richard El, a Christiana Edmunds, a Marie Bière, a Madame Caillaux, a Harry Thaw, share their sense of ‘specialness’ with Shakespeare’s villain. Massed across a population, their inner grievance might have become of the kind that leads to revolution. Instead, their passionate crimes were a contorted attempt to seek what they saw as justice or honour. In the case of Bière and Caillaux, their sense of specialness and outrage evoked a kindred emotion in the jury, and they were acquitted. Nor did they ever commit fresh crimes.
Somewhere in the early hidden history of these criminals, the love of those nearest to them may have failed. Freud conjectures that it is through such early childhood love – which he calls the great educator – that ‘the incomplete human being is induced to respect the decrees of necessity and to spare himself the punishment that follows any infringement of them’. The relatively law-abiding, we might say, have good early attachments. If they don’t, if they become ‘criminal’, it is sometimes possible for the doctor to engage in what Freud here calls an ‘after-education’ and guide the patient to ‘make the advance from the pleasure principle to the reality principle by which the mature human being is distinguished from the child’. Freud’s language is no longer popular in the profession, but his idea of therapy as an ‘after-education’ is a resonant one in the forensic setting. Ever pessimistic about the powers of analysis, however, he worried that perverse gratifications might be difficult to give up. Contemporary therapists are more bullish in their confidence.
Looking back, it’s clear that over the course of the last two centuries, the mind doctors have grown their power arm in arm with the state, while also tempering the law. Where possible, they have prevented the state from carrying out too many judicial murders. Their own ‘correctional’ methods were certainly sometimes punitive, but on the whole their Hippocratic pledge mediated some of their ability to harm. By recognizing the disordered emotions and confused reason to which the law in its disciplinary strictness can be blind, they did a little to humanize their times and ours.
That said, there are no easy solutions to the terrible difficulties posed by love gone awry. It is a good that the legal system, this entity that carries great symbolic weight, sends us signals of the behaviour it expects of us – even in ‘love’ and its many malign semblances. It is right that our courts of justice carry on the tug of war between what constitutes madness and what badness. It might be better still if the law were more modest in its view of the human ability to control acts by reason alone, or to transform the punishment of prison into a functioning ‘reasonable’ morality. If our prisons initiated programmes that led, at least for some, to an ability to live without delusional structures, that would certainly be a boon.
However, it is hardly likely that the whole messy, mad and rapturous terrain of humans engaged in (criminal) passion will suddenly transform itself into a tranquil, bucolic and reasonable landscape – one that both the law and psychiatry approve and in which trials of the metaphorical or legal kind never take place. What we would hope from our mind doctors is that, given how far their forensic reach now stretches, they remember that their profession is also an art – an art of understanding the human, which goes beyond the classificatory schema of their ever expanding diagnostic manuals. Maintaining a sense of their patients’ inner experience – not only as a wild landscape to be contained by controlling agents (such as antipsychotics) or tamed through a course of mental workouts – will keep them distinct from the law enforcers. The latter must inevitably implement the rigours of the law – though, one hopes, with a better understanding of gender and with a penal system that prevents reoffending by offering treatment and emotional education where that is palpably necessary.
If, as our media and literature make manifest, we continue to be fascinated by trials of passion, it may well be because we recognize how akin we are to those whom passion drives into transgression, whether it’s the transgression of reason which is madness or the transgression of ethics which is crime. And like the juries who deliberated on the fates of the subjects of these pages – Christiana Edmunds, Marie Bière, Gabrielle Bompard, Madame Caillaux, Harry K. Thaw and Evelyn Nesbit – we want to be part of the process that distinguishes guilt from innocence.
Notes
PASSION GOES TO COURT
p. 2 the norm today: On some of the important general ideas at play here, see Michel Foucault, trans. Alain Baudot and Jane Couchman, ‘About the Concept of the “Dangerous Individual” in 19th-Century Legal Psychiatry’, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, vol. 1 (1978), pp. 1–18
p. 4 be their due: Robert Henly, A Memoir of the Life of Robert Heneley, Earl of Northington (London: John Murray, 1821), p. 42. Available at http://books.google.co.uk/books
p. 5 attack themselves: Anna Motz in The Psychology of Female Violence (London: Routledge, 2008) and Estela Welldon in Mother, Madonna, Whore (London: Karnac, 2004) have written brilliantly about female perversion and the babies that become its object
PART ONE
p. 14 arsenic-tinted paper: For widespread use of arsenic, see George Robb, ‘Circe in Crinoline: Domestic Poisonings in Victorian England’, Journal of Family History, vol. 2, no. 2 (April 1997), p. 182
p. 16 find it out: Daily News, 26 August 1871
p. 19 Obscene Publications Act: See Kate Summerscale, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), pp. 186–7
p. 22 either of them: Brighton Gazette, 24 August 1871
p. 22 poisoned myself: Manchester Times, 26 August 1871
p. 24 Christmas: Brighton Gazette, 8 June 1871
p. 25 monstrous:Robb, ‘Circe in Crinoline’, p. 177, citing the judge in the trial of Anne Merritt in 1850; The Times, 9 March 1850
p. 28 in the scene: Daily News, 25 August 1871
p. 28 the poisons: The Times, 1 September 1871
p. 28 stalkers: See, for example, Give Me Everything You Have (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013), James Lasdun’s memoir of his years as the subject of a stalker who sends him cascades of emails
p. 32 identified: The Times, 9 September 1871
p. 35 tampering with sweets: The Times, 8 September 1871
p. 35 frequently wept: The Times, 9 September 1871
p. 35 between them: Ibid.
p. 38 the Muse: I am grateful to Andrew O’Hagan for this elaboration of Burns’s passage
p. 39 your wife: The Times, 6 July 1857
p. 40 witness box: ‘Science in the Witness Box’, The Times, 23 January 1856 p. 40 1829: The Times, 1 September 1829
p. 41 fashionable visitors: Anthony Lee, ‘The Sad Tale of the Margate Architect and the Brighton Poisoner’, http://www.margatelocalhistory.co.uk/Articles/Edmunds%20tale. Lee provides fascinating material on William Edmunds and his architectural projects, as well as on his sister Mary, tried on a charge of libel in 1815
Trials of Passion Page 41
