The Dark Side of the Mind

by Kerry Daynes

  But Hogan hadn’t been expecting the last question the detective asked him, delivered almost as an afterthought as he was preparing to finish up. We had agreed beforehand that he would ask it in just this way, the so-called ‘silver bullet’ to catch Hogan unawares.

  ‘Did you pick Mr Johns up and look at yourself in the mirror when you were holding him?’

  I paid close attention as Hogan’s mouth stretched sideways, a fleeting expression of fear. His head bobbed as his whole body shifted. He pushed his chair back against the wall as if to physically distance himself from the question. Suddenly he was flustered. ‘What are you trying to say?’ he spat. Then, sucking air into his nostrils and closing his eyes, his voice dropped as he insisted: ‘Not me, not me.’ But his body had already contradicted his denial.

  When someone is lying, especially if the truth might land them in prison, their brain is working overtime to make sure that whatever comes out of their mouth is bulletproof. Ask a high-stakes liar a question, and they’ll need to make sure that what they say and do has the ring of absolute truth to it. But while their mind is conjuring up a plausible display, their body tends to instantaneously and unconsciously leak the truth. Sometimes even when they, like Hogan, are self-aware enough to take the time they need to reflect and choose a response.

  In the 1960s, US lie detection expert Dr Paul Ekman first conducted analyses on physical reactions like those Hogan could not control in that moment. Behavioural analysts at the UK Emotional Intelligence Academy have since identified the 3-2-7 rule: if a suspect has a cluster of three reactions (for example, nodding, flushing and voice dropping in pitch), across two or more of the six channels that communicate emotional information (interactional style, voice, verbal content, facial expression, body movements and physiological changes) within seven seconds of the question, it is a reliable indication of deception. We didn’t know about that then, only that Hogan’s words had told us something his body wasn’t agreeing with.

  Hogan composed himself after a few moments, more deep breaths, and the interview was concluded. But his unusual reaction to that question, together with his eagerness to garner reassurance that his weapons had been destroyed, was enough for Steve and the team to feel that taking another look at the imitation firearm from the storage unit robbery would be a useful allocation of resources.

  What they discovered was a game-changer. The replica had been forensically examined at the time of its discovery, and nothing of interest was found on it. In a rare display of efficiency, it had indeed been destroyed as ordered by the court. But as luck would have it, a large laundry bag belonging to Hogan that he had told us that his weapons had been wrapped in was still packaged up in storage along with some other unexamined possessions from the lock-up. The bag was analysed by forensics, who discovered the smallest amount of blood at the bottom of the lining – blood belonging to Malcolm Johns.

  Hogan had battered Malcolm Johns to death, possibly with the butt of his replica pistol, and a tiny speck of blood from the attack had been sitting in the bottom of the bag ever since. With that key bit of evidence the team was able to pursue the case to prosecution, getting a conviction that would ensure that Hogan remained in prison for many years.

  Answering Steve’s call that day became the first small step on a new path for me. It would lead to a new strand of consultancy work, forging relationships with a number of police forces that would become a small but rewarding part of my private practice.

  I will never know what triggered Hogan to kill Malcolm Johns. I suspect Johns challenged him in some way, said something to undermine Hogan’s belief in himself as effective in controlling others, powerful enough to intrude upon them and take what he wanted. I do know that Hogan continued to protest his innocence, right up until the first day of his trial for Malcolm Johns’ murder, changing his plea to ‘guilty’ at the last minute, holding on to the last bit of control he had.

  CHAPTER 7

  INSULTS AND INJURIES

  The human brain is unprepossessing to look at – a pinky-

  grey wrinkled lump with the consistency of congealed

  porridge – but appearances are, of course, deceptive.

  Professor Peter Kinderman, The New Laws of Psychology

  Gary had a Sainsbury’s bag for life that he carried with him wherever he went. It was bright orange plastic with a cartoon drawing of an elephant on it and a strapline that said ‘I’m Strong and Sturdy’. Sometimes he had things in it, but he was in prison so the shopping wasn’t great, and very often the bag was empty. It didn’t matter to Gary. It was a bag for life and that meant it was his, for life.

  I learned some time later that his mum would quietly replace his bag for life with a fresh one whenever the old one wore out or, as sometimes happened, other inmates stole or damaged it. He once smashed up his own cell after an inmate burned holes in the bag with a cigarette.

  I had been asked by Gary’s solicitor to review him; his family needed advice about how to help him move more effectively through the prison system, which seemed to them like a complex maze with no exits. Although he wasn’t a lifer he might as well have been one, because Gary was serving an imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentence – a jail term with no fixed end date.

  These now-defunct sentences were introduced by former Home Secretary David Blunkett, presumably on an especially act-first-think-second day. They were intended to protect the public from offenders whose crimes were serious but didn’t warrant a life sentence, and were applicable to 153 crimes, from affray to manslaughter. IPP sentences – abolished in 2012 yet many are still being served today – consisted of a minimum punitive term (known as a ‘tariff’) which offenders had to spend in prison, and bolted onto this was a further 99-year licence, meaning they could technically stay in prison for an extra 99 years – after the tariff has expired, they have to apply to and satisfy a parole board that they are fit for release.

  Some ideas are best left on paper. The IPP model was applied far more widely than intended, and used in the wrong way by many courts. Swathes of offenders received short tariffs but went on to spend many extra years in prison, effectively being punished for crimes that they might commit, because they couldn’t meet the demands of the parole board.

  A three-person panel led by a judge, the parole board decides who can and cannot go home based on whether or not they are judged to pose a continuing risk to the public. But as the prison psychologist Robert A. Forde points out in his book Bad Psychology, we can predict statistically whether a person is likely to reoffend seriously with only around 70 per cent accuracy. This leaves an alarming void that the system likes to fill by prescribing offending behaviour courses, and assessing prisoners by their abilities to complete them and to wax lyrical about their reformed character during an interview.

  I’d worked with Gary’s solicitor, James, before – he was one of the good guys. It was 2009, I had a well-established private practice by then. I had cemented a reputation for myself among solicitors on the northern circuit for writing no-nonsense, jargon-free reports. I was particularly well known for providing straight-talking insight on cases involving serious or sexual violence or anything else in the realm of the psychologically obscure. James once called to instruct me in the case of a man who had been, among other things, dressing up a donkey in women’s clothes stolen from his neighbour’s washing line. ‘I thought it sounded right up your street,’ he’d said, with no apparent irony.

  This was before austerity, when Legal Aid was available for those who needed it, and if a solicitor was concerned about the mental state of their client they’d ask you to prepare an independent report. Solicitors don’t have an easy task. They have no specialist training in the area, yet it often falls to them to flag up if someone has mental health issues. Or indeed any issues. A solicitor involved in a case such as Gary’s can find themselves being an agony aunt and confidante one minute and a surrogate parent and legal expert the next. I’ve known solicitors hold their c
lients’ hands during paternity tests, and deliver hot coffee to their clients on the street in the morning so they turn up at court on time and vaguely sober. One solicitor I knew swapped clothes with a man who had a job interview, his first in a very long time. You quickly learn to recognize the ones who are doing the job well; in many ways they become your colleagues.

  Although they always want the best outcome for their clients, whereas I am entirely independent, a good solicitor acknowledges and appreciates my non-partisan opinion. I had good professional relationships with a number of law practices across the north, but James – a beefy man without a hair on his head, whose entire scalp rippled when he smiled – always stood out as someone who gave his clients both realism and respect.

  James explained that Gary was unlikely to ever be judged as fit for release by a parole board due to impulsive behaviour that was getting him into regular scrapes with other prisoners. He’d stolen inmates’ food from their trays at meal times; sometimes he ate it and other times threw it across the landing – risky when your fellow diners like to enforce mealtime etiquette by punching you in the face. He had recently been in trouble for mooning, pulling his trousers down and showing his bare behind to anyone unfortunate enough to see it during wing association time (when all the inmates get to socialize).

  Gary’s popularity with the other prisoners was further reduced by what seemed to be the literal way he interpreted situations. Not only did he take his bag for life at its word, but when other inmates asked him what he was in prison for, he would tell them – a truth that was never well received.

  Gary was what’s known inside as a ‘nonce’. He had sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl, by touching her while on a bus. In the spurious hierarchy of prison honour, Gary was considered the worst kind of low-life there is (top of the pile are armed robbers – robbing a bank is considered to be a noble, Robin Hood-style redistribution of wealth). A wiser sex-offender would have kept their crime to themselves, or come up with a more crowd-pleasing cover story. But it seemed like Gary couldn’t do that – he was compelled to answer with the facts. Facts that, more often than not, were met with a verbal or physical attack.

  Gary was perpetually getting into fights with fellow inmates. I saw him twice with black eyes, and had a number of meetings cancelled at the last minute because he was ‘down the block’: in the segregated cells where inmates are sent as punishment. Loss of privileges and confinement is the default response to violation of the rules in prison, and for Gary it often meant being locked in a block cell for the majority of the day. In a block cell you are permitted to keep a book, if you own one, a prison issue toothbrush, plastic mug, plate, bowl and plastic cutlery. You have a towel, some toothpaste and half a bar of prison soap. There is no radio, no visitors, very little interaction with other inmates or staff and definitely no bag for life.

  To add to Gary’s problems, he hadn’t managed to complete any of the offending-behaviour programmes that the parole board expected him to. This was his second prison and the first hadn’t run any of the programmes specified in his sentence plan. He had been given a set of imaginary hoops to jump through – a familiar predicament for many IPP prisoners. At his current prison he had spent nearly a year on a waiting list to take part in the Enhanced Thinking Skills programme, a group that teaches problem-solving and reasoning skills, but had only managed to complete two sessions of it; he had urinated on the floor in the second session and then refused to get out of his cell for the rest. Not only had Gary failed quite spectacularly in being taught how to think by his offending behaviour programme, he hadn’t managed to attend any education or work programmes with any consistency either. So what had originally been a ten-month sentence had turned into nearly four years.

  James, and Gary’s family, wanted to know how they could help Gary turn a corner, one with at least a glimpse of an eventual release on the horizon.

  *

  My heart sank just thinking about it. Square-peg prisoners and the penal system don’t tend to find happy endings. I could make all kinds of suggestions in order to facilitate Gary’s more satisfactory behaviour, but in the end it would boil down to available resources – and they are critically thin on the ground in the majority of prisons. Gary was never going to be the model prisoner or develop the level of eloquence needed to endear himself to parole board assessors. But I hoped that I could at least provide some objective information about his level of dangerousness, and what sort of package might be needed to keep him out of trouble if released, which might then inform a discussion when his case was next up for review.

  James sent me the witness statements that were taken from the people involved in the incident on the bus. Depositions like this are difficult documents to make sense of at first. Police interviews are transcribed verbatim, without any punctuation; sheets of A4 with endless speech typed all in capital letters. It looks like an angry missive from an old relative who has just learned to use email. The unstructured layout somehow makes the facts of the story harder to find, hidden within an upper-case forest.

  What came across immediately was the utter mayhem that had unfolded on the bus that evening. It was 7pm and a group of four young teens – ages ranging from 12 to 15 – had been to the cinema (they’d seen a Pirates of the Caribbean film, prophetic, because it sounded like a kind of mutiny had unfolded) and were travelling home. They’d got bags of Haribo and cans of fizzy drink and were all sitting upstairs, dispersed across different seats, the way teenagers seem to do.

  The children’s statements described how Gary was also upstairs, was asleep and had an orange carrier bag on his lap. I gathered from their insensitive descriptions of him that, aside from his unconventional choice of sleeping arrangements, Gary also looked unusual. One of the girls had dared another of them to touch him on the face – a dare which had set in motion the series of events which would lead to Gary’s incarceration.

  Another girl’s statement said:

  RACHEL TOUCHED HIM ON THE FACE AND HE WOKE UP AND THEN DARREN SHOUTED FRAGGLE AT HIM AND THEN HE SAID TO RACHEL DO YOU FANCY ME OR SOMETHING? AND THEN WE WERE ALL RUNNING AWAY SAYING GET LOST YOU WEIRDO AND RACHEL STARTED SCREAMING AND HE GRABBED HER AND PUT HIS HAND UP HER SKIRT AND WAS SQUEEZING HER THERE AND THEN CARL RAN PAST HIM AND HE TOUCHED CARL’S BUM BUT CARL WAS JUST LAUGHING.

  All the statements described the same moment: how Gary had woken from his sleep and began to clamber over seats, grabbing chaotically at the children, in particular the girl called Rachel, who described how he cornered her before forcefully pinching her between her legs through her underwear. Seeing this more sinister turn in events, another passenger had pinned Gary into the nearest seat long enough for the bus to stop and the driver to call the police.

  Gary fitted the dirty old man on the bus stereotype, albeit one in his 30s. The oddball stranger we warn our children about, who women hope to protect themselves from by walking with their keys placed between their fingers, Wolverine-style. The latest Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) found that around 20 per cent of women and 4 per cent of men taking part reported being sexually assaulted in some way since the age of 16, estimating around 650,000 assaults in 2017 on this group of victims alone. Logic dictates that there must be a roughly equivalent number of perpetrators.

  They can’t all be peculiar characters on the back of a bus or dark figures in an alleyway. The idea of a sexual assault taking place at the hands of a stranger, and involving extreme violence or the threat of weapons, is, for the most part at least, a myth. The even less palatable truth is that in the majority of sexual assault and rape cases, whether adults or children are the target, the perpetrators are people who the victim knows: family members, partners, work colleagues or acquaintances. Sexual harassment – verbal abuse such as cat-calling and other forms of bullying – is rife in public spaces, but hands-on sexual crimes are most likely to take place in the victim’s own home.

  With the children’s statements fresh in my mind I went to meet Gary
in the prison where he was being held (a two-hour drive from his parents’ home in Bolton). I had arranged to meet with him on the prison’s VPU (vulnerable prisoner unit). Gary was ‘on the numbers’, what used to be known as Rule 43 but is now Prison Rule 45: Removal from Association. Inmates are separated when it is deemed necessary for their own protection. Sex offenders are often VPs, as are police informers, former police officers and those with large drug debts, but they are also often prisoners with learning disabilities or other discernible differences that might make them easy targets for predators. VPs are usually housed in a dedicated unit away from the main wing, or unlocked from their cells at different times of day from the other prisoners.

  I sat in the small, bare meeting room waiting for him, a square Perspex window making sure my time with Gary would be observable throughout by the guard who stood like a sentinel in the corridor. Seeing me temporarily unoccupied, the guard came in for a chat, the allure of a new face presumably being just too much to resist. Leaning casually against the wall, he explained that the demand for the VPU at this prison far exceeded the available space so they didn’t like to keep Gary there for long. But whenever he returned to the main wing, it would be a matter of days before he would have another bout of verbal incontinence, revealing his offence details to anyone who asked, and he’d find himself back to the VPU or the punishment cells. The guard told me this and rolled his eyes as if to say how incredibly stupid Gary was for telling the truth; the bittersweet contradiction of a prisoner being so honest it got him into trouble was obviously lost on him.

  When Gary eventually came in it was very slowly; he was a heavy mass, doughy and soft, and he lurched towards me with his arms out in front of him, like an elderly person who had lost their walking frame. I noticed his bag for life, scraggy and faded, folded in his left hand, together with a letter from James reminding him of my visit. I put my right hand out to shake his, but he surprised me by patting me on the head instead, ruffling my hair with his fingers as if I was a Labrador. He was tall – at least six foot – and at five foot three I was considerably shorter than him. In this job you get used to your personal space being invaded and to social conventions and politeness being on rations. By that stage in my career there were very few insults that hadn’t been thrown my way. So I didn’t say anything and held my hand out again, but once more he patted me on the head. So I took a step backwards and said breezily: ‘You can stop that now, please, Gary.’ He put his hand down by his side, as if I’d slapped the back of his hand. I felt conflicted. Being petted like a dog would usually be a guaranteed hackle-raiser for me, but I didn’t feel that he was being disrespectful or trying to intimidate me.