Trials of Passion (53 page)

The impact of social factors can also be seen in the case of Marie Bière – an independent woman who over-invested in her child and in the idealized maternal image of the times and sought justice in the form of vengeance on an out-of-date lover who treated her as a disposable courtesan. As for Madame Caillaux, the new freedoms of the press, with their ability publicly to expose even the secrets one kept from oneself, thrust her into the role of a warlike Amazon bent on retrieving her reputation from slander and washing clean her own sexualized past. In Harry Thaw's case, Clérambault's love object of higher status migrated into the idealization of a whore he could rescue and transform into a Madonna.

Today, where psychiatrists do talk of erotomania in women, which generally accounts for only 1 to 4 per cent of psychiatric admissions, it tends to be in countries where change – in gender roles and sexuality – has been recent and very quick: Ireland is often cited. But the gender balance in passionate love crimes these days has shifted towards the male.

We live in times of anxious masculinity in which women's independence can destabilize fragile men. An aura of humiliation attends many love crimes and ignites them. Courtship codes misunderstood, as in the Tarasoff case; fantasies of total possession or of merger and union with the other, ruptured in reality but kept alive in fantasy, what some psychiatrists call a regressed confusion between self and other of the kind that made up the earliest mother-and-child love affair; delusional rescue scenarios in which the beloved will be
grateful and shed all other courtiers – all these can play into the male love disorders characterized by stalking. Three out of four stalkers who engage in violence are male. Since men outnumber women ten to one in most other violent crimes, the 3:1 ratio means that women still commit more ‘violence' in this intimately troubled domain than in others.

It was the case of John Hinckley Jr that cast stalking – and most emphatically celebrity-stalking – so prominently into the late twentieth century's imagination. The case also shifted the legal map in some states in America which had brought the ‘irresistible impulse' rule into their jurisdictions and thus enlarged the scope of potential insanity rulings. After Hinckley, many returned to stricter M'Naghten definitions.

On 30 March 1981, John Hinckley Jr attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, instead wounding him and three members of his entourage – all in an attempt to woo the celebrity he was in love with, Jodie Foster. Hinckley shares certain features with Thaw. Like the Pittsburgh millionaire, he came from money. His family were in oil in Texas, and generous supporters of the George Bush Sr presidential campaign. During Hinckley's trial, the papers talked of ‘Dementia Suburbia', a direct reference back to Thaw's ‘Dementia Americana'. Both men had an inflated sense of themselves, and unsteady boundaries, and were embroiled in fantasies of rescuing the ‘soiled' innocent woman from her undeserved fate. Virginity was important to Hinckley: as in so many ‘rescuers', good and bad, the pure and the impure can't be allowed to coexist in one person. Freud's conception of the oedipal infant's need to keep the mother unsullied by father seems uncomfortably close to hand here.

After repeatedly watching Jodie Foster in the film
Taxi Driver,
where she played a child prostitute under the sway of a pimp-assassin, Hinckley developed an obsession with the actress. He followed her to Yale, enrolled in a writing class, and began bombarding her with poems, messages and telephone calls. When she failed to respond, he
decided that assassinating a president of the United States would impress her. He bought guns and tried to access President Carter. When he failed, he decided to target the new President, Ronald Reagan. He sent Foster a postcard of Reagan and his wife Nancy with the message: ‘Dear Jodie, Don't they make a darling couple. Nancy is downright sexy. One day you and I will occupy the White House and the peasants will drool with envy. Until then, please do your best to remain a virgin. You are a virgin, aren't you? Love, John.'

According to the prosecution psychiatrist's 628-page report, which follows
DSM
classification and language, Hinckley suffered from three types of personality disorder: schizoid, narcissistic and mixed, with both borderline and passive-aggressive features – none of which, the lead doctor contended, amounted to legal irresponsibility. What the press seemed to understand as the ‘suburban' part of his dementia were features he shared with many rich teenagers: resistance to parental demands, chronic feelings of emptiness or boredom, problems with his self-image, a desire for fame without any equivalent desire to work, and drugs. The opinion of Dr Park Dietz was that despite his mental disease or defect, ‘[Hinckley] did not lack substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct.' But Hinckley, like Thaw before him, viewed his assassination attempt as an accomplishment – one on a grand scale, which he had carried out on behalf of the woman he loved.

Dr David Bear and the defence psychiatrists painted a different picture – again one not dissimilar to Thaw's, though this time built around the category of schizophrenia (which began its psychiatric life only around 1911, after the Thaw trials, and was always linked to adolescent onset) alongside clinical depression. Hinckley, Dr Bear stated, was definitely psychotic on the day of the assassination attempt, suffering from the delusion that he had to ‘rescue' Foster, who was ‘a prisoner at Yale'. Bear wanted to introduce into court a CAT scan of Hinckley's brain as evidence: he testified that there was consensus amongst experts that the brains of one third of schizophrenics as well as those suffering from bipolar disorder had ‘widened sulci' –
furrows or depressions on the surface of the brain. The judge first refused what was then a wholly novel form of expert testimony, but eventually agreed to allow it.

It may have been the very presence of the CAT scan – hard medical technology that translates psychological conditions into biological fact, rather than the less than convincing imagery it produces – that finally decided the jury. More recently, neuro-imaging, with its impressively bright pictures of the brain, has been used in a persuasive way in the courts, both to signal ‘biological' disorder and to offer scope for therapy. Though neuro-images are as open to interpretation as any other kind, the newest breed of neuro-criminologists is adamant that neuroevidence displays the link between certain kinds of brain formation (or deformation) and crime. Though they may concede that early environmental influences can reshape what nature has put in place, today's neuroscientists often enough contend, as the phrenologists did of yore, that certain brain deficiencies can predict crime: for example, poor functioning of the anterior cingulate, a small-volume amygdala, significant reduced development of the prefrontal cortex – all these may, it is asserted, be more evident in the brains of criminals.

But if crime is committed because of brain abnormalities, then responsibility is not within the individual's control and guilt is not an issue. As a defence in court, this argument can take the same shape as that relating to mental illness. Whether in Hinckley's case it was the early version of brain imaging, or the defence's description of his delusional state – which argued that his ‘relationship to reality in the true meaningful sense has been severed', ‘his inner world is all built upon false premises, false assumptions, false ideas' – that decided the jury is unclear. In any event, Hinckley was finally and unexpectedly pronounced ‘not guilty by reason of insanity' on all thirteen counts against him.

Commentators pointed out that since the burden lay on the prosecution to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Hinckley was sane, the jury had come to the only appropriate decision. Reagan himself quipped, ‘if you start thinking about a lot of your friends, you would have to say, “Gee, if I had to prove they were sane, I would have a hard job.'” Many
thought the insanity defence should be abolished, since it provided a loophole in the law through which murderers escaped justice.

The Hinckley verdict caused thirty-nine states to rewrite their insanity legislation and put the burden of proof on the defence, others to narrow the range of expert witness, and still others to abolish the insanity defence altogether.

The old
‘mens rea
' test, however, could no longer altogether withstand the version of the human mind and emotions that psychiatry had put in place. Clearly, John Hinckley had an intention to assassinate the President and knew what he was doing and that it was wrong. Clearly, too, by any late-twentieth-century understanding, he was a deranged stalker, his obsession with Jodie Foster triggering a violent psychosis. Admitted to hospital, Hinckley's reports concluded that ‘his defective reality testing and impaired judgement combined with his capacity for planned and impulsive behaviors make him an unpre- dictably dangerous person'.

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.