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.
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’.
Trials of Passion Page 40