The decline of the English criminal

The Guardian, August 1990

The decline of the English criminal was most obvious in the violent end of Colin Grindley.

Right up to the moment that he was handcuffed and shot through the back of the head, he had led an entirely unremarkable life. He was aged 33 and worked for British Rail. Much earlier that day in the spring of last year, he had left his wife and two young sons with his mother-in-law in Croydon for a short holiday and set off in his Vauxhall Astra Estate on the long drive northwards to his home in Warrington, Cheshire.

It was three o’clock in the morning when he decided to stop for a rest in a lonely lay-by on the A6 west of Derby. As he sat there peacefully, two men drew up beside him, crossed to his car with guns in their hands, ordered him out, cuffed his hands behind his back, made him lie down on the grass verge and then shot away the back of his brain with two bullets from a high-powered rifle. They stole £15 from his pocket and drove away.

The two men – Ronald Bull and Colin Wardle – were sent to prison for life last month. Like Grindley, they were in their early 30s, though unlike him, they had a history of petty crime; and Wardle, in particular, had just finished a five-year sentence for tying up the landlady of a pub in the Lake District and stealing £500 from her till. At their trial, the prosecution explained that they had been driving around looking for someone to rob and their choice of Colin Grindley was merely ‘an accident of fate’. Which is what makes his death remarkable.

Colin Grindley had not insulted his killers or attacked them or obstructed them or cheated them of their money or their lover or become embroiled in any of the emotional tangles through which the victims of murder normally stumble to their fate. These two men had no reason to attack him as opposed to anyone else and, having attacked him, they had no reason to kill him as opposed to simply robbing him. He was the victim of a motiveless murder.

It is tempting to suggest that, in this respect, he is part of significant new trend – that life has become so cheap and people have become so nasty that strangers have a new willingness to destroy each other at random, like wanton boys with flies. On the face of it, there is plenty of evidence to support the idea.

In the last few years in this country, an American businessman was stabbed to death in Picadilly because “he looked rich and successful”; a 20-year-old engineer was shot to death, apparently at random, as he walked through Wandsworth one night; a pregnant mother was abducted from a motorway hard shoulder and killed by a motorist who happened to notice her as he drove by; Michael Ryan snuffed out the lives of sixteen strangers in Hungerford and was then emulated by several others who liked his style.

In the United States, random killing has broken out in Los Angeles, where teenaged gangs expect new members to prove themselves by committing ‘drive-by’ killings of strangers, and in New York, where the rape of a jogger in Central Park disclosed the pastime of ‘wilding’ in which packs of youths roam in search of victims to rape, rob or murder. Indeed, this kind of crime has become so commonplace that Charles Manson’s fickle slaughter of the rich in California has been set to music and is currently being staged in Manhattan under the title Serious Fun.

The idea that this is the age of the motiveless murder has been given intellectual momentum by the author Colin Wilson who has become a sort of philosopher of killing. In his view, murderers express the frustration of their era: for centuries, people killed for economic reasons because their greatest unfulfilled need was for food; in more affluent modern times, they murdered for sex because they were, in Wilson’s words, ‘sexually underprivileged’. Now, he argues, there is a new kind of killer who murders without any personal motive to express a profound frustration of the spirit.

“You have to look at the motivation,” Wilson said at his home in Cornwall. “These kind of killers invariably come from dull, working class backgrounds, and they believe they are not getting their dues, not getting what they deserve out of life. They choose killing as a means of expressing themselves. They have this resentment, a very powerful resentment and they set out to help themselves to what they want. It does seem to be a fairly new thing.”

Wilson dates this new era in murder from the notorious ‘serial killers’ of the 1960s: Ian Brady and Myra Hindley prowling around Manchester in search of a victim, any victim; the adolescent Mary Bell who strangled two boys ‘for fun’; the American ‘Zodiac’ killer who picked off seven Californians and wrote to the local newspaper to explain “I have become very upset with the people of the San Francisco Bay area”. Wilson quotes one of Charles Manson’s followers, Susan Atkins, dismissing her victims as mere objects – “I didn’t relate to Sharon Tate as being anything but a store mannequin. She sounded like an IBM machine. She kept begging and pleading and begging and pleading and I got sick of listening to her, so I stabbed her.”

The theory has the added attraction of providing an all-purpose stick with which to beat various contemporary targets. According to taste, you can pick on pornography, black people, unemployment, white people, rap music, drugs, video nasties, the rise in population, the decline of education, the rise in homelessness, the decline of civilisation and you can blame any of them for the new wave of slaughter among strangers – if, that is, the theory is right.

The weak point in the theory is not so much the suggestion that strangers are killing each other without reason, but the idea that this is new. Looking at it historically, the facts vary according to the different kinds of random killer.

First of all, there is the mentally disordered serial killer, randomly and repeatedly striking at his chosen type of victim. There are plenty of recent examples to support the theory: Denis Nilsen strangling runaway boys behind the lace curtains of his red-brick terraced house; Peter Sutcliffe obsessively smashing women; ‘Son of Sam’ picking off courting couples in New York; the Zodiac killer; the Boston Strangler; the Atlanta child-murderer. All of them went out and selected strangers at random with the sole purpose of ending their lives. But all of them were merely following in the footsteps of equally deranged predecessors, the kind of killers that nightmares are made of.

Some, like Jack the Ripper, have survived in myth. Others are well known to criminologists: like Peter Kurten, who stabbed, strangled and burned his way round Dusseldorf in the 1920s; and the elderly Albert Fish, a murderer and cannibal who preyed on children in New York in the 1930s and whose masochism drove him to insert so many needles into his groin that the electric chair reportedly short-circuited when they finally executed him in Sing Sing in 1936. But many have slipped into oblivion in the archives.

The Axe Man of New Orleans, for example, at the turn of the century used to chisel his way through the back doors of private houses at night and then chop his sleeping victims to death. He never stole nor raped. He had no prior link with any of the twelve households he attacked. He killed men, women and babies with equal vigour. The effect was to turn every citizen of New Orleans into a potential victim, as was noisily demonstrated after the Axe Man wrote to the New Orleans Picayune newspaper to announce the date of his next attack together with the assurance that he would steer clear of any house which was playing loud jazz music.

John Williams killed two housefuls of strangers in 1811 and became a legend of fear in London before being caught and buried with a stake through his heart. The Butcher of Kingsbury Run left ten victims variously beheaded and castrated in Cleveland, Ohio in the 1930s. Bella Kiss vanished on the battlefields of the first world war leaving the brutalised corpses of 24 women to be discovered in the attic and the garden of his Hungarian village home.

History has no shortage of random serial killers. Even the ‘Michael Ryan’ type, who suddenly runs amok killing everyone in sight, has his forerunners: Herbie Glasson who went wild with an axe in a bank in New South Wales in 1893; Sadamichi Hirasawa who did the same thing in the Imperial Bank in Tokyo in 1948, killing 12 people; Howard Unruh who shot 13 dead in a small town in America in 1949 before being arrested and explaining “I’d have killed a thousand if I’d had bullets enough”. They were all just as random, just as vicious as their contemporary equivalents.

Colin Wilson focuses his theory of the motiveless murderer on a particular type of serial killer: the cool assassin, a strong-willed, complex individual who feels out of step with his society, who might have become a poet or an artist if he were not, in Wilson’s words, ‘a romantic in an age of defeat’. He kills to express his scorn for mankind.

But just as there are contemporary examples of this type of killer – Charles Manson, Ian Brady – so, too, there are also historical ones, like Leopold and Loeb who killed a wealthy fourteen-year-old in 1924 simply to prove that they could commit a perfect crime; or Pierre Lacenaire, a poet and failed revolutionary who declared “society will have my blood but I, in turn, will have the blood of society” and who was guillotined in 1835 for a series of squalid murders.

The most interesting random killers have neither the madness of the Ripper nor the philosophical baggage of Wilson’s frustrated outsiders. They are rationally motivated criminals in search of profit but who work with a breath-taking indifference to the lives of their victims. This is the model of the American mugger, shooting holes in strangers to steal their wallet or their shoes or their radio. This is the killing of Colin Grindley. And here there is a clear change over the last hundred years.

Compare, for example, the two thieves who killed Colin Grindley with the criminals who are catalogued by Henry Mayhew, the great Victorian sociologist, in his masterpiece, London Labour and the London Poor. Their crimes, he noticed, were “regular crafts, requiring almost the same apprenticeship as any other mode of life, arts to which no man without some previous training can take”.

In nineteenth century London, Mayhew found dozens of criminal specialists: ‘star glazers’ who cut the panes out of shop windows; ‘shoful men’ who forged coins and wills; ‘drummers’ who used chloroform to stupefy their victims; ‘snoozers’ who feigned sleep in railway hotels and decamped with other people’s luggage; ‘bug hunters’ who stole from drunks in pubs; ‘buzzers’ who picked the pockets of gentlemen and ‘wires’ who specialised in ladies; ‘cadgers’ who wrote begging letters for a living; ‘Charley Pitchers’ who cheated at pavement games; and numerous other varieties of cracksmen, mobsmen, sneaksmen and bludgers.

Now, these are dead skills. When the East End of London and the old working class areas of other Victorian cities were torn down and replaced by tower blocks, the culture that had bred the skills was torn down, too. They are no longer passed from one generation to the next, with the result that in the 1990s street crime is no longer a skilled profession. The men who killed Colin Grindley were dumb amateurs, unskilled, untrained, unable to use anything other than brute force to secure their profit.

This is not to say that professional criminals historically did not kill at random. But compare the violence of the dull-witted mugger of 1990 with the ingenuity and panache of H.H. Holmes, a professional swindler who designed his own home in a refined suburb of Chicago so that the entire building was a Heath-Robinson death trap. There were hidden rooms and secret passages, a network of gas pipes through which he could release toxic gas into any room, and two greased chutes which led from the upper floors down to the basement where he had installed a cremating kiln. During the 1893 Chicago World Fair, the house was packed with guests, many of whom were never seen again. Holmes was hanged in 1896 after confessing to 27 murders.

All the most notorious criminal mass murderers married their ruthlessness to flair and imagination. Like H.H. Holmes, Marcel Petiot adapted his house into a killing machine into which he fed 63 innocent Parisians who believed he was helping them to escape the Nazis. Some played out elaborate charades, like Henri Landru and Johann Hoch who posed as lonely widowers and advertised for prospective wives whom they then robbed and murdered with extraordinary frequency. Thomas Cream, known to Victorian London as The Lambeth Poisoner, posed as a doctor and, despite his severe squint, succeeded in persuading a procession of young women to swallow his pills which were supposed to improve their skin but were in fact pure strychnine.

Murder to these criminals was, for all its twisted morality, an act of skill, just as the removal of wallets and watches was a craft for their contemporaries on the streets. Now, however, the pickpocket has been shoved aside by the mugger; the cat burglar has given away to the blagger with his sawn-off shotgun. For those without skill, murder is easy.

It was the complexity and subtlety of Victorian criminal behaviour which challenged and attracted Sherlock Holmes, who sat by his hearth in Baker Street in A Case of Identity and shared with the loyal Watson his vision of a London teeming with criminal finesse. “Life is infinitely stranger than anything that the mind of man could invent. If we could fly out of the window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange co-incidences, the planning, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chain of events, working through generations and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”

Holmes, of course, did not live to witness the decline of the English criminal.