Trials of Passion (52 page)

Called in to assess Ellis, psychiatrists for both defence and Crown found no evidence of insanity, even though she was clearly confused in the way Marie Biere had initially been, and all but mute. When, after the trial, the judge Mr Justice Havers wrote to the Home Secretary stating that Ellis's was definitely a
crime passionnel
and recommended a reprieve, it was refused. Nor did a petition signed by some fifty thousand people help. The public outcry over Ruth Ellis's hanging – undoubtedly in part also a recognition of the extra-legal elements that had played into the trial – eventually contributed to the abolition of the death penalty in 1964.

Harry Thaw, it could be said, ‘got away with murder' because of his wealth and because his crime, however mad, played into his time's ideals of heroic masculinity riding to the rescue of dishonoured child-maidens. His brutal perversions were largely ignored and interpreted as such only by a few of the trial's psychiatrists. It took a second trial – and further testimony concerning his sadistic acts – to convince a jury of just how dangerous Thaw was. The American prostitute and so-called ‘serial killer' Aileen Wuornos had none of Thaw's cultural or financial capital on her side: working-class, lesbian, her pleas that she had been defending herself against the violent aggression of (middle-class) men didn't sway the jury, while the press preferred to think of her as a transgressive monster. Her sentence was harsher than those meted out to far more sadistic male serial killers. Bar such extreme cases, however, ‘criminal' women are
still more routinely committed to psychiatric hospitals than men and verdicts of diminished responsibility more liberally given to women. This may be a reflection of the fact that women more rarely appear before the courts in homicide cases. The ratio in the UK is 9:1.

As for the mind doctors, many of the hopes of the 1926 ‘Credo' that William A. White so approved have largely been realized. Since the early shaping cases described in this book, the forensic psychiatrist has become a familiar and often indispensible figure in courts of law, in carrying out assessments of mental states both behind the scenes and, as an expert witness, on the public stage of the trial itself. Indeed, in our risk-averse present, so alert to ‘dangerous individuals', forensic psychiatry is one of the growth areas in the mental health profession: with the closing of the asylums through the 1970s and 1980s in many Western countries, high-security psychiatric establishments or correctional facilities are now the largest ‘asylums' left. Doubling as the policeman who patrols the borders of sanity as well as chief physician to the psychotic is an uneasy role, and one that has been open to criticism from too many sides to detail here. But in our anxious age, protecting society from potentially dangerous individuals has become one of the key disciplinary tasks of the forensic psychiatrist – even though cars kill far more people than do the mad.

On the more doctorly side, the mind medics now also engage with the courts in what has become known since 1996, particularly in the US, as therapeutic jurisprudence – a term coined by David Wexler and Bruce Winick to denote ways in which ‘the knowledge, theories and insights of the mental health and related disciplines can help shape the development of the law'. In the European social democracies such a partnership has been in place longer: Holland, Sweden, Norway and Germany have strong traditions of therapeutic jurisprudence, though its effectiveness is ever related to the kinds of programmes (and finances) that are put in place.

Collaborative thinking between mental health and legal professionals grew out of the family courts, where antagonistic legal
procedures made victims of the children of divorcing couples. Anna Freud was a pioneer in this area. Working ‘in the best interests of the child', she joined forces in the last decade of her life with two Yale-based American lawyers, Albert Solnit and Joseph Goldstein, to develop ideas about child custody and protection which have since fed into jurisprudence. Now, in various jurisdictions, specialized courts which recognize therapeutic issues (for both perpetrators and victims) also exist for drug offences, domestic violence and sex crimes: judges can order (or offer) treatment as part of a community or custodial sentence. The recognition that many offenders need help beyond what any prison term can offer, if their crime is not to be repeated on release, is hardly new to the twenty-first century. But via the swings and roundabouts that mark the relationship between the law and the mental health professionals, we seem – now that prisons are full to bursting – to have entered a moment when therapeutic hopes for offenders are once again high. As this book goes to press, the UK government has announced a pilot scheme which will place mental health professionals in police stations as well as courts – an attempt to cut reoffending rates by intervening early with those whose many ‘crimes' are triggered by mental problems. Even psychoanalytically-informed therapeutic work, which demands more than short-term behavioural adjustments, is undertaken in centres such as London's Portman Clinic.

The Shapes of (Criminal) Passion

We think of passion as a powerful natural force. Like a volcano, it erupts. Like a flood, it washes away reason and language. It produces an irresistible impulse that can't be countered. The murderous passions described in this book overwhelmed their subjects. They were powerless against them – or so it seemed to them. Christiana Edmunds propelled a poison chocolate into the mouth of the wife of ‘Caro Mio'. In a Clytemnestra-style settling of scores, Marie Biere took aim at the man she blamed for killing her daughter. Like a heroic
Tosca bent on saving her loved one, Madame Caillaux riddled her husband's enemy with bullets in a newspaper office in full daylight.

In fact, as these cases illustrate, murderous passion is often also accompanied by a morbid obsessional quality. It is stealthy, practical and mimics rationality. It knows how to find poisons and weapons and opportunities. It has a strange Martian logic that parades as (self-justification. Harry Thaw is convinced he's rescuing the woman he's enamoured of from the clutches of a Beast and avenging her despoliation. He pursues his rival indefatigably. Madame Caillaux is certain that killing Calmette will restore her husband's reputation and her own. The madness seems to lie in the certainty as much as in the deluded logic: the act will make the world better. Then, too, only if the act takes place will the obsession with the other, which fills the mind and intrudes on all other thoughts, go away. In that sense the murderer is possessed: hypnotized. The possession can stop only with the murderous act. In this respect, enacting the bloody deed does, at least momentarily, make the world better for the passionate killer.

The obsessional quality of
crime passionnel
was underlined by two crimes and their attendant courtroom and psychiatric dramas in the second half of the twentieth century. Each has a particular resonance in our own time. A troubled sexuality, a tension about masculine and feminine identities, suffuses these cases. The preoccupation they demonstrate with possessing a distant other, accompanied by vigilant surveillance, forefronts what has become one of this century's more characteristic love crimes: stalking.

In 1969 the Tarasoff case raised issues of dangerousness and medical confidentiality that still resonate. Prosenjit Poddar, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, where he had arrived in 1967, met Tatiana Tarasoff at folk-dancing classes during the autumn of '68. From the caste of India's untouchables, Poddar had overcome a great many odds to arrive at Berkeley as an architecture student. When Tatiana Tarasoff kissed him at a New Year's Eve party, he was smitten. He was used to rather more circumspect behaviour in
women. He interpreted her friendly kiss as a sign of love, marking the start of an intimate relationship.

Tatiana Tarasoff certainly hadn't intended that, and made it very plain to him. There were other men in her life. Poddar didn't, or couldn't, understand her ‘no'. He began to follow her obsessionally. He grew depressed, felt humiliated and resentful, neglected his health and his studies. He failed exams. He told a friend he was going to blow up Tatiana's room. He wept and talked to himself. On the occasions when Tatiana agreed to meet with him, he taped their conversations, scouring them for explanations of why she didn't love him. He was a spurned lover whose thoughts had gone wild.

In the summer of 1969, while Tarasoff was in South America, a friend recommended Poddar get some help. He began to see a psychologist at Berkeley, Dr Lawrence Moore. In August, during the ninth session, he told Moore he intended to kill Tarasoff. Moore was convinced Poddar wasn't simply fantasizing or talking out his rage. He assessed his condition as acute and diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenia. He considered him so dangerous he asked the campus police to have him committed involuntarily. The police picked Poddar up, but like Moore's supervisor on examining Poddar a short while later, found him ‘rational' and had him released. On 27 October, when Tatiana Tarasoff was back and Poddar had stopped seeing his psychologist, he stabbed and killed her with a kitchen knife.

Tried, Poddar was convicted of second-degree murder, served four years and was then released on appeal, on the condition that he return to India.

This tragic case, with its evident clash of values in the domains of sex, love and gender roles, contains some of the terrible cultural misunderstandings that have been implicated in ‘honour killings' around the world, of which there are estimated to be some five thousand a year. In these, fathers or male relatives from traditional or tribal societies and now living in the West take vengeance on their daughters' independent choice of love object, which has impugned their ‘honour' – though the brutality of the killings seems scarcely to impinge on that same honour.

The film
Banaz
, based on the murder, with parental approval, of a young Kurdish woman in London in 2006 by members of her extended family, makes vivid the plight of these girls. ‘Why love should be so hated' as one of the women in the film exclaims, is a mystery, though it is also clear that the challenge to traditional masculinity is what brings this hatred in train. (In a hideous perversion of the romantic idea that two can make one, children here have no autonomous existence outside or inside the family unit. Since children are parental ‘flesh', by some mental slippage they have no separate identity or individual will: masculine honour becomes more important than their lives.) One of the difficulties in preventing these honour killings bears a relation to the Tarasoff case: the police, even when alerted, don't know quite how to intervene in situations involving immigrants from traditional societies where ‘domestic' problems, love or madness are in question.

When the Tarasoff family brought a case against the campus police, the health service employees and the regents of the University of California for failing to warn them that their daughter was in danger, the repercussions were felt throughout the Western therapeutic professions.

The trial and appeals courts at first dismissed the case: a doctor's first duty was to a patient, not to a third party – hence the protective privilege ceded to medical confidentiality. But then, in the California Supreme Court, that decision was reversed. Patient confidentiality had to be breached in situations of danger. The Supreme Court determined that a doctor or therapist has a duty to use reasonable care to give threatened persons such warnings as are essential to avert foreseeable danger arising from a patient's condition. After this ruling, the court was instructed to retry the Tarasoff parents' suit against the university.

Meanwhile, there was uproar in the profession and a second Supreme Court hearing ensued in 1976. Amici briefs through the American Psychiatric Association contended that psychiatrists were unable to predict violence accurately. But the court said that certainty
wasn't required, only ‘a reasonable degree of skilled care'. Only one judge out of three held out for the importance of confidentiality as a feature of treatment and refused what became the oft-quoted summing-up: The protective privilege ends where the public peril begins.'

The hegemony of the courts over medical treatment, including the psychotherapies, stirred indignation in the professions. But the private sphere would soon become even more porous to vigilance – not only that of the law and the state, but also of those cyber-networks that were still only dreams in the seventies.

Obsessional Pursuit

The Tarasoff case was a signpost to the love crimes to come, in one further way. It involved obsessional following, or what by the 1990s had become enshrined in law, first of all again in California, as the ‘stalking' of the ‘beloved'.

When the French psychiatrist G. G. de Clerambault in the 1920s wrote full clinical descriptions of the various arcs of erotomania in what have since become classic studies in the field, most of his cases were of women. He traced portraits of troubled characters, sometimes obsessional followers, in whom romantic illusions had toppled into delusions; proud women who were convinced that men of higher status were in love with them and sent them coded signs of their love in odd, secret ways, on occasion even sent imagined funds. Other erotic delusions were sparked by a vigilant jealousy after a (perhaps) imagined betrayal by a real or romantic lover or acquaintance, or a rejection that couldn't be accepted. Projected outwards, hostility and rage catapulted into delusions of persecution and an act of violence, which the patient deemed to be in self-defence and just.

We could speculate that the higher percentage of women in Clerambault's erotomanic cohort was due to the changing status of women at the time: there was a new class fluidity (downwards as well
as upwards), particularly for servants, who felt ‘entitled' to turn against upper-class lovers or masters – as the notorious maids, the Papin sisters, did in France in 1933. There was also a greater sexual openness as well as new opportunities. Change, of course, means uncertainty, a difficulty in reading social and sexual cues and that greater psychic strain which can sometimes result in breakdown. Signs of this were already present in the case of Christiana Edmunds, arguably a case of erotomania, certainly a woman who didn't recognize a ‘no' and who wove a split-off, imaginary life around it in which her beloved maintained his perfections, as she did hers, and continued to adore her.