Beyond Emlyn

PERSONAL COLUMN GILES PLAYFAIR

A horribly artificial occasion I found it, the Moors Murder trial, and I questioned whether any of the promised books about the case would actually be written. But they have been, and the last of them is now with us—or are there yet more to come? It prob- ably makes no difference. This is the one that the reviewers—the majority of them, anyhow —regard as the definitive work.

According to Emlyn Williams himself, there were people, 'mostly women,' who just couldn't understand why he, 'a self-respecting writer,' should want to spend 'over a year writing a book about such a ghastly case.' Presumably, they're now persuaded that he was right, after all, in his refusal to 'avert the head' and 'shovel the whole thing under the carpet.' But why? Apart from the literary merits of the book — and I'm not concerned with them—I suspect the reason is this: Beyond Belief is fairly painlessly cathartic; in a sense it does precisely what the author thinks oughtn't to be done — shovels the whole thing under the carpet, and without leaving any nasty-looking lumps.

Not that Mr Williams has sugared the facts; far from it. But most of the facts relate to what the murderers did; a book to be better than a rehash of the press reports had to delve into the mystery of why. That is a nagging mystery, for we must know, if we are honest with ourselves, that unless and until it is unravelled, there can be no safeguard against the repetition of such atrocities as Brady and Hindley were guilty of.

Mr Williams hasn't funked the job; that's the trouble. Since he has been unable to obtain first-hand information from the mur- derers themselves, he has had to speculate. His psychological surmises happen to strike me as simplistic. That doesn't matter. The danger is that though they are just surmises, and though he's perfectly above board about this, his book ends up in being as tidily conclusive as some Victorian melodrama—and just as reassuring.

The guilty couple, we learn, were not insane, but merely facinorous. Brady was born bad, and 'Nothing could have changed him. Nothing.' Hindley inevitably became this monster's slave and disciple when she met him, though she might not otherwise have gone to the bad. Now, since they are spiritually tied to each other for ever yet physically separated, and both of them are petrified in vileness yet denied the opportunity in their respective prison tombs of doing vile things, we have the satisfaction of knowing that they're at once dead and buried alive.

In short, to borrow one of Mr Williams's own favoured colloquialisms, not to worry. The questions have all been answered : there are no more questions to be asked. Not even the problem that has so exercised Miss Pamela Hansford Johnson's mind—the problem of whether we are permitting too wide a circu- lation of potentially corruptive literature— need trouble us any longer. We as a society may rest content that it was through no conceivable fault of ours that the murders happened.

But I wonder. With the notable exception of Judge Sparrow (whose challenging book Satan's Children significantly 'seems to have re- ceived little attention), the other Moors Case authors, Pamela Hansford Johnson included, take the view that both Brady and Hindley were sane and fully responsible. In law very likely they were. But legal insanity and medical insanity (a loose term) are, of course, two very different things. With this in mind, I made it my business at the time of the trial to talk to a number of psychiatrists, all of them with practical experience in the penal field, though representative of varying schools.

Admittedly, they could only speak hypotheti- cally. But they none of them voiced the slightest doubt that both defendants, assuming their conviction and sentence to life imprisoment, would be certifiable as psychopaths under the Mental Health Act. That means that the Home Secretary could, if he chose, transfer them to Broadmoor. But there's another inference to be drawn from it.

Though psychiatrists are a quarrelsome lot, and only a minority of them consider aggres- sive psychopathy a curable condition, they are, I assume, agreed that it is a worsening con- dition. It is self-evidently so. The so-called monster murderers almost invariably start off as petty criminals; Brady did. Now the cen- tral fact that Emlyn Williams relies on for his psychological appraisal of Brady is the latter's obsession with Hitlerism from early youth. But, unless I've been misled, there's nothing unique about that. For instance, a psychiatrist attached to a Scottish borstal, whom I con- sulted, has over the past few years diagnosed aggressive and dangerously sadistic tendencies in several of the delinquent adolescents whom he has treated. The Hitlerite fantasy was common to all of them.

Presumably, this and other symptoms of psychopathy still went undetected and un- treated in Brady's case after he was sent to borstal by a Manchester court. And presum- ably this was because there was no psychiatrist or psychologist to examine him at either of the two institutions where he served his sentence. Which may make one at least suspect that a chance to prevent the Moors Murders was missed as a result of the inadequacy of our social services. It is anyway undeniable that for all the talk of the battle against crime, and the horror expressed at atrocious murder, neither our borstals nor our prisons are any- where near well enough provided with diag- nostic or treatment resources to make a serious impact on the problem of the mentally abnormal criminal.

This, to my mind, is one, not the only, dis- turbing question that should have been raised as a result of the Moors Murders and that urgently needs to be faced. Mr Williams temptingly invites us to ignore it. I don't mean, of course, that he's conscious of doing this. But I question the social desirability of any literary excursion into the field of True Horror Crime Story, if the writer permits himself the luxury of positive conclusions that Ere largely based on surmise. For the surmise, and hence the conclusions (which we are asked to accept as fact), can hardly help being subjective—pre- conditioned by the writer's emotional reaction to the abominable nature of the crimes com- mitted. To give an example of this from Beyond Belief: Mr Williams emphasises that the photo- graphs of the little girl victim were not as grossly indecent as he had been led to believe , they were, and he does this, he says, in order to stress rather than minimise 'the vileness of the act.' He goes on to explain: 'If in these photographs the utmost bestialities had been committed, involving one or both adults . . . their uncontrollable psychopathic madness would have moved the crime straight into the clinical field. And in these times, the two could have pleaded insanity.'

This statement reveals such a remarkable ignorance of both forensic psychiatry and the law that it may momentarily seem to invalidate the author's qualifications for writing about the case at all. But it is also a backhanded means of banishing the last, lingering doubts any of us may have concerning the couple's mental competence. And the pure emotional- ism to which the author has succumbed becomes transparent a few pages further on, when he conjectures that a bestial act was very probably committed against the little girl, yet entirely forgets that, if so, he cannot, by his own logic, stick to it that the perpetrators of such an outrage were sane.

Beyond Belief has inevitably been compared with In Cold Blood, but apart from the fact that both books are the works of creative writers, and both are concerned with atrocities, I can see little resemblance between the two. In Cold Blood opens questions rather than closes them. Its outstanding quality, it seems to me, is the very thing that Beyond• Belief lacks: namely, objectivity. And clearly this is achieved because Mr Truman Capote did not have to rely on surmise. The first-hand information that he needed for his study of the why of murder he was able to get from the murderers themselves.

Mr Williams might have written a truly en- lightening book if he had had a similar advantage. He simply says himself that Brady and Hindley were 'unwilling to cooperate.' But this, I suspect, is just another of his conclusions drawn from surmise, for, unless I am very much mistaken, they neither of them can ever have been asked to cooperate with him. There is an inflexible Home Office rule against per- mitting interviews with prisoners and against divulging any information about individual prisoners and their treatment.

The question of Brady's and Hindley's treat- ment in prison isn't one to enter Mr Williams's head, nor will it enter ours if we accept his findings. But I should think it the most im- portant question of all. It seems certain that Brady at least, isolated in the Durham prison security wing, isn't receiving any psychiatric attention. Yet, surely, the one chance of reap- ing some eventual good from the evil is to keep them both under intensive psychiatric care. Not so much because of what can or should be done for them, but because of what may be learned from them. When we hanged mentally abnormal murderers we destroyed our primary sources of research into the causes of atrocious crime, and so left ourselves without opportunity of discovering the means of pre- vention. Oughtn't we to be insisting that these sources should not now be wasted?

'In this battle,' says the Bishop of Exeter in his foreword to Judge Sparrow's book, 'Church and Science are allies.' But the sound of battle remains muted; and best-sellers of the Beyond Belief kind can only serve to make it more muted still.