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HIDDEN PATTERNS OF VIOLENCE
During the summer of 1959, my study was piled with books on violent crime and with copies of True
Detective magazine. The aim was to compile an Encyclopaedia of Murder that might be of use to crime
writers. But I was also moved by an obscure but urgent conviction that underneath these piles of unrelated
facts about violence there must be undiscovered patterns, certain basic laws, and that uncovering these
might provide clues to the steadily rising crime rate.

I had noted, for example, that types of murder vary from country to country. The French and Italians are
inclined to crime passionel, the Germans to sadistic murder, the English to the carefully-planned murder -
often of a spouse or lover - the Americans to the rather casual and unpremeditated murder. Types of crime
change from century to century, even from decade to decade. In England and America, the most typical
crimes of the 1940s and ‘50s had been for gain or for sex: in England, the sadist Neville Heath, the ‘acid
bath murderer’ Haigh; in America, the red-light bandit Caryl Chessman, (he multiple sex-killer Harvey
Glatman.

As I leafed my way through True Detective, I became aware of the emergence of a disturbing new trend:
the completely pointless or ‘motiveless’ murder. As long ago as 1912, André Gide had coined the term
‘gratuitous act’ to describe this type of crime; the hero of his novel Les Caves du Vatican (which was
translated as Lafcadio’s Adventure} suddenly has the impulse to kill a total stranger on a train. ‘Who
would know? A crime without a motive - what a puzzle for the police.’ So he opens the door and pushes
the man to his death. Gide’s novel was a black comedy; the ‘motiveless murder’ was intended as a joke in
the spirit of Oscar Wilde’s essay about the loiter who murdered his sister-in-law because she had thick
ankles. Neither philosophers nor policemen seriously believed that such things were possible. Yet by 1959
it was happening. In 1952, a nineteen-year-old clerk named Herbert Mills sat next to a forty-eight-year-
old housewife in a Nottingham cinema and decided she would make a suitable victim for an attempt at the
‘perfect murder’; he met her by arrangement the next day, took her for a walk, and strangled her under a
tree. It was only because he felt the compulsion to boast about his ‘perfect crime’ that he was caught and
hanged. In July 1958, a man named Norman Foose stopped his jeep in the town of Cuba, New Mexico,
raised his hunting rifle and shot dead two Mexican children; pursued and arrested, he said he was trying to
do something about the population explosion. In February 1959, a pretty blonde named Penny Bjorkland
accepted a lift from a married man in California and, without provocation, killed him with a dozen shots.
After her arrest she explained that she wanted to see if she could kill ‘and not worry about it afterwards’.
Psychiatrists found her sane. In April 1959, a man named Norman Smith took a pistol and shot a woman
(who was watching television) through an open window. He did not know her; the impulse had simply
come over him as he watched a television programme called ‘The Sniper’.

The Encyclopaedia of Murder appeared in 1961, with a section on ‘motiveless murder’; by 1970 it was
clear that this was, in fact, a steadily increasing trend. In many cases, oddly enough, it seemed to be linked
to a slightly higher-than-average IQ. Herbert Mills wrote poetry, and read some of it above the body of his
victim. The ‘Moors murderer’ Ian Brady justified himself by quoting de Sade, and took pains in court - by
the use of long words - to show that he was an ‘intellectual’. Charles Manson evolved an elaborate