Trials of Passion (2 page)

The law's tug of war with the psychiatrists on the question of a defendant's ‘insanity' intensified with the ambitions of the mind-doctoring professions. The latter expanded the span of their diagnoses and took on the legitimating mantle of scientific medicine. This gradually resulted in a shrinking of what could be considered the area of ‘sanity' or ‘normality': bad could often be (re)labelled mad, and partial madness could act as mitigation. From early on, the mind doctors had questioned the very basics of criminal responsibility, the meaning and underpinning of ‘
mens rea
', or a fully conceived conscious intention. They argued about what constituted delusion and volition, about when an impulse could not be resisted and might overwhelm (free) will to become that kind of modern, ‘irresistible impulse' that Lorena Bobbit's attorney claimed in 1994 had impelled her to cut off her husband's penis, though she wasn't insane in any long-term cognitive sense.

The mind doctors talked of erotomania, in which passion tipped into madness; or moral insanity in which the person could not recognize wrong, certainly not the wrong that society indicated. In the 1880s
they talked of the weak individual being unable to resist hypnotic influences and suggestions towards crime. They cited ‘automatisms', or altered states in which the Jekyll and Hyde individual had no awareness of him or herself. At the beginning of the twentieth century they grew more sophisticated and complicated, describing personality disorders, schizophrenia, manic depression, perversions, paranoia and much more. They sometimes thought they could predict danger and calculate the risk of an eruption of violence. Their diagnoses were often gendered, though not absolutely so: erotomania started as largely a woman's diagnosis; more recently, with the rising incidence of stalking, it often crosses the gender divide.

With the Freudian era and a set of mind doctors who moved beyond classificatory descriptions and explanations rooted in heredity onto a terrain where a welter of hidden desires, repressed forces from childhood and murderous impulses propelled the individual, establishing the exact truth in court about guilt and innocence, free will and determinisms, became even more difficult.

Meanwhile, debate in the symbolically charged arena of the court educated the public in new ways of being human.

Trials of Passion
is a complement to my last two books. In certain ways, it's the final part of a loose trilogy which began with
Mad, Bad and Sad–
a book that traced the rise of the mind-doctoring professions over the last two hundred years in their interplay with women. In that history, I found that love gone wrong emerged as one of the earliest causes of madness to be cited by the mind doctors. Love appeared high on William Black's table of 1810 listing the factors that had precipitated people into Bethlem. As erotomania it featured prominently in the madness classifications of one of the founding fathers of psychiatry, the French alienist J.-E. D. Esquirol. Contorted desire also wove its way into many of history's female maladies, from hysteria to nymphomania and beyond. For Freud, this was the propulsive force for any number of so-called functional disorders.

In
All About Love
, my anatomy of the unruly emotion that love is, I
tried to tease out some of love's malignant as well as what I guess we could call its beneficent trajectories. Over these last decades, we have become singularly aware of the complexities of the emotion inside the family: from sexual abuse to emotional neglect, the too much or too little of ‘love', and its attendant consoling or disruptive fantasies, shape the kind of human the child will become. The child's history within the family and its attachments, scientists now generally agree, affects the neurology of the mind, as well as any later so-called personality disorders the adult may suffer from.

Excess lies in the very nature of passion. In love, we become obsessional: only what relates to the beloved and our emotions preoccupies us. Fantasies and daydreams pile in. Thoughts that are inappropriate to a given situation or don't even feel like our own flood our minds. We grow akin to stalkers and pursue the object of our passions. Inflated by love, the pursuer feels grandiose, omnipotent, larger than him/herself. There is an assumption that the other is responsive to our passion. Love (and sex) has made us permeable, so that we can no longer feel our own borders, determine where we end and the other begins – just like when we were babes at breast. If rejected, we grow smaller than Alice through her looking-glass. Jealousy can then leap up and derail. So can hatred, passion's frequent shadow – particularly if the beloved then leaves us for good and we are cast into despair, become less than ourselves. Accepting the reality of loss can be a slow, painful and dismantling experience. Grief lies in wait for many loves, and the mourning over separation – just like that for the ultimate separation that death is – can tumble into melancholy.

Exactly where all of this too common experience shades into madness – or a score of more recent, itemized, psychiatric diagnoses – is a moveable feast. Romantic love, with its underlying carnal core in the notion that two beings will fuse and
merge
into one, can be a dangerous pursuit, even if for centuries it was backed up by the domestic fact of Christian marriage which annihilated a wife's independent legal identity. When two fuse into one, any later attempt at separation can entail a perilous tearing-away from the merged identity: the ‘betrayed' lover
feels dismantled, literally torn apart. She or he may be filled with disbelief and refuse the separating-out, or feel attacked and seek revenge. Murder of the other can sometimes, to the perpetrator, feel like a killing-off of a hated part of oneself, so closely have two become one.

Where the tipping or breaking point comes that precipitates a crime or triggers an existing psychosis (or set of delusions) into violence is hardly an exact and generalizable science. Individuals, including those that break and go mad and bad, are all different. So are definitions of crime: the horror of domestic violence has only become a crime late in the last century in the West. We have made the oddly named paedophilia – or love of children – a crime, while extending the legal period of childhood well beyond the moment when most young people have experiences they themselves call sexual.

Romantic love with its passionate core, its excess of longing, its necessary illusions, its idolization of the beloved, also slips easily into versions of erotomania: in the 1920s Gaetan Gatian de Clerambault's erotomaniacs dreamt of distant, high-status affairs paralleling all phases of a ‘real' romance, until illusion tumbled into delusion and a delirium of violence. Others, like intimate stalkers, misread cues, fell in love, imagined betrayal and sought revenge. Where the ‘madness' of love erupts into crime and whether medico-legal definitions of insanity can then prevail are what this book investigates.

Because comparisons between societies, their legal and medical systems and understandings of justice help to illuminate what goes on in each, the following pages take us first to Britain, then to France and America. In each I have chosen a widely reported trial of passion – not in any way simply to do with sexual predation or perversion – to focus on, though other trials important to the doctors and for the cultural shifts they helped to provoke, cluster round. The first two major trials are of women who murdered, or attempted to. The third is that of a man. It seemed to me that since men and women are not deranged by love in altogether parallel ways, it would be interesting to chart some of the different paths each have taken.

The principal histories I've chosen are not the all too common
domestic crimes in which violent husbands murder long-abused and allegedly straying wives, or even the more occasional crimes in which the downtrodden wife strikes out and back: violence of this sort was as sadly prevalent in the early history of the mind-doctoring professions as it is now. I have concentrated instead on the less usual crimes: the ones that captured the imagination of their time, provoked a social furore and necessitated the presence of the psychiatrists at some stage. They produced trials through which the mind doctors extended their influence. These were public events that elaborated and broadcast understandings of passion and ‘insanity' in its many forms both in and outside the law.

Such uncommon and sensational trials had a marked impact on social debates and arguably on relations between the sexes. In them, women left conventional middle-class passivity behind to become actors: their crimes were calls to freedom in which they became agents of their own fate. In turn, the trials both reflected and generated anxieties about gender. They instigated greater scrutiny of women's condition and interrogated where social restrictions, sexual attitudes, unequal status and sheer injustice propelled crime. One could say these were trials that educated: they probed buried emotions, hidden sexual relations, and sometimes a larger, more generalized injustice that had erupted into crime.

At the time this book begins, in 1870, the divisions between the public and the private, to say nothing of the secret sphere, were far more rigid than they are today. Outside fiction and poetry, the emotions and the inner life of the individual, let alone sex, were rarely discussed. Criminal trials – in which lawyers pleaded on behalf of deranged lovers, while mind doctors gave an opinion on insanity and extreme emotion and journalists engaged in commentary and elaboration - dared people to think the unthinkable. They marked one of the new public arenas where the passions, the perversions, the sexually permissible and the attributes of the feminine were examined.

Between my first case and my last, the mind doctors had grown their influence and understanding and had become regular assessors of
mental states, as well as expert witnesses. In many countries, the earliest being Germany, Austria and France, they worked as forensic psychiatrists within the apparatus of the law. A modern era of collaboration had been ushered in.

PART ONE: BRITAIN

THE UNSPOKEN

‘A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.'

Angela Carter

I

Christiana Edmunds and the
Chocolate Cream Murders

1.
The Borgia of Brighton

On Wednesday 16 August 1871, a notice was posted by order of the Chief Constable of the Brighton police:

BOROUGH OF BRIGHTON
£20 REWARD

Whereas some evil-disposed person has lately sent
to different families in Brighton, parcels of fruit cakes and sweets,
which have been found to contain poison, the particulars of two
of which cases are stated at the foot hereof, notice is hereby given
that whoever will give such information to the undersigned as
shall lead to the apprehension and conviction of the
offender will be paid a reward of twenty pounds.

The bottom of the notice, printed in full in the
Brighton and Hove Gazette
the following Thursday, gave detailed descriptions of the boxes of ‘white deal' (pine) in which the poisoned delicacies had been sent, carriage fully paid from London Victoria rail station to ‘different persons in Brighton'. Each of the boxes contained a variety of preserved
fruits, nuts, sweetmeats and cakes, some of which were separately wrapped. The outer wrapping paper carried a message: ‘A few homemade cakes for the children, those done up are flavoured on purpose for yourself to enjoy. You will guess who this is from, I can't mystify you I fear. I hope this will arrive in time for you to-night while the eatables are fresh.' Another note, the police stated, was much the same, except it was signed ‘G.M.'.

The message-wrapped delicacies contained the poison.

As rumour spread, something akin to panic gripped the city. Just two months back, on 12 June, a small boy, Sidney Albert Barker, aged four and two months, had died after eating a poisoned chocolate purchased from the well-known confectioner, Maynard of West Street. Everyone, it seemed, knew someone who knew someone who in those spring and summer months had been affected by chocolate creams and sweets. Left in bags in sundry places or purchased direct from Maynard's, these chocolates had produced stinging throats, nausea, diarrhoea and high temperature – all signs of ‘irritant poison'.