The Dark Side of the Mind Read online

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: Here Be Monsters

  Chapter 2: Big Boys Don’t Cry

  Chapter 3: The Blame Game

  Chapter 4: Faking It

  Chapter 5: Witchdoctors and Brainwashers

  Chapter 6: Power Plays

  Chapter 7: Insults and Injuries

  Chapter 8: A Man’s World

  Chapter 9: The Case of the Missing Finger

  Chapter 10: Safe and Sound

  Chapter 11: The Sum of Our Parts

  Epilogue

  Notes and Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  To Mum, Dad and Big Sis

  How to Use This Ebook

  Select one of the chapters from the main contents list and you will be taken straight to that chapter.

  Look out for linked text (which is blue) throughout the ebook that you can select to help you navigate between related sections.

  You can double tap images to increase their size. To return to the original view, just tap the cross in the top left-hand corner of the screen.

  Author’s Note

  The stories you read here are based on my recollections, experiences and life as a forensic psychologist. Names and certain identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the innocent, and the bang-to- rights guilty. And, moreover, to protect myself. I spend enough time in court as it is.

  If thou gaze long into an abyss,

  the abyss will also gaze into thee.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Prologue

  Sometimes you help your patients see things more clearly, sometimes they help you.

  Maurice was in his 80s, his long, thin frame so twisted with arthritis that from a distance he looked like a gnarled old hawthorn tree. One that was dressed up like Simon Cowell, all high-waisted trousers and tight white T-shirts. He had a glass eye too, giving him an off-centre gaze that added to his general asymmetry.

  He wasn’t on my caseload, but was one of the long-term residents at a hospital secure unit where I’d recently started a new job as a soon-to-be-qualified psychologist. The hospital was on the edge of a sprawling and impoverished council estate on the outskirts of a depressed northern town – you could say it was gritty.

  Unless you’ve personally been detained in a secure unit under the Mental Health Act, it can be hard to understand the difference between these places and plain old prison. The two settings treat their guests very differently. In the prison service the approach is ordered and dominated by the need to provide security and protection for the public. In secure hospitals, such as this one, the approach is to have as few restrictions as possible – to be more collaborative; not only containing, but actively caring. Like prisoners, the people here aren’t at liberty; they are considered to pose a danger to themselves or, more likely, to others. But because many of these environments are divided into smaller, almost homely, units with shared communal living areas, it’s not that unusual to find members of staff eating lunch alongside their patients.

  So it was that I would find myself on most Tuesdays and Thursdays popping over to the small annexe where Maurice lived, to spend my lunch break with the occupants of Milton Ward.

  Maurice’s psychiatric reports made repeated mention of his suffering from a ‘sexual sadism disorder’. The irony of the word ‘suffering’ wasn’t lost on me. Sexual sadists experience intense sexual thrills in response to the pain, humiliation, distress or general torment of another living thing. This is not to be confused with some experimental spanking or even the more toe-curlingly creative antics mutually entered into by latex-clad submissives and dominants. Sexual sadism is only considered a disorder – and there is a disorder for pretty much everything – if the individual acts on their urges with someone non-consenting. Which raises the question: who is really suffering here?

  For Maurice, this meant that he liked to lurk in isolated spots and whip out what should have been his private parts at unsuspecting girls and women. The shock and horror on their faces was a source of exquisite personal and sexual pleasure for him. His penchant for this cheapest of thrills had briefly landed him in prison as a young man, but unsurprisingly this didn’t curb him. After his release he graduated to the point at which two women were found dead in his home, each with multiple stab wounds of varying depths, predominantly centred around their breasts. The precise explorations of a torturer. Now an established resident at the secure unit, Maurice wasn’t going anywhere. Ever.

  One Tuesday, while I was having my lunch at the annexe – soup and a bread roll – Maurice approached me from behind and in the blink, quite literally, of an eye, popped his ocular prosthesis straight out of his face and into my Heinz Cream of Tomato. Before I could process what was happening, I was covered in blood-red spatters and my soup was gazing back at me.

  Still somewhat green around the edges at 24, I momentarily lost self-control and gave Maurice exactly the reaction he was hoping for. I shrieked, physically leapt out of my seat, my Celtic complexion turning an even whiter shade of pale. Who wouldn’t balk when faced with an eyeball in their soup?

  I’d been aware of Maurice’s glass eye beforehand, but it turns out that when you see one doing backstroke in your soup your brain instinctively tells you it’s an actual eyeball. A jellied part of someone else’s body. The rational explanation – that it’s really nothing more than a giant marble – kicks in a while later, once you’ve screamed the place down.

  I got a quick look at his face – a sunken crevice where his eyeball had been, the healthy eye looking intently at me, studying my reaction – and caught a hint of a smirk as he was ushered off by a male nurse. I began to kick myself. This old man had just got the better of me.

  This was an example of ‘offence paralleling’ – when a person behaves in a pattern that resembles or serves the same function as his criminal behaviour. For Maurice, the sense of mastery at producing fear and disgust on the face of the nearest woman, via the sudden exposure of this particular body part, was as good as it was going to get in the limiting confines of the hospital environment.

  I felt enormous embarrassment for walking into Maurice’s trap that day. But the encounter helped me understand a great deal about the profession I had chosen to enter. Because how do you solve a problem like Maurice? The conundrum of this man, and the way I reacted to him, is the challenge at the heart of the forensic psychology I practise every day.

  Dealing with Maurice might seem obvious to some – surely you just take away the false eyeball? But I’m not the sadist in this story. It’s not my remit or desire to punish or humiliate the people I work with. And simply taking it away wouldn’t address the root problem – his need to shock and the sexual gratification he took from it. If we removed the glass eyeball, his drives would find another way to manifest themselves. And let’s not forget that removing a person’s body parts, even prosthetic ones, tends to raise some pretty awkward human rights questions.

  There will be those who argue that eating lunch in the same room as Maurice was asking for trouble. Who in their right mind has lunch with a convicted sex offender and doesn’t expect to catch his eye, figuratively at least? But this puts the onus on the victim (in this case, me) to alter my behaviour – to find somewhere else to eat my lunch. And it’s my job to help men like Maurice change their behaviour. Besides, starving his problem of the oxygen it needs (for Maurice, simply access to women) doesn’t necessarily kill it. It can just make it more desperate to survive.

  Sticks or stones may break my bones, but an eye in my lunch is, at worst, nothing more than a choking hazard. As I was reminded the hard way on that day, an
effective approach to extinguishing any kind of unpleasant behaviour in this environment, where it is safe to do so, is simply to ignore it. Any parent of toddlers can verify this – it’s the most basic of behaviourist techniques. (Behaviourists are firmly on one side of the nature vs. nurture debate. They assert that we’re all born blank slates and only do anything because we have learned it from other people, and then persist with this behaviour depending upon the degree to which it is rewarded or punished.) And as any parent of toddlers will also confirm, not providing the sought-after reaction to a behaviour is often one of the hardest approaches to implement.

  As Maurice shuffled off and my heart began to beat a little slower, I realized that if I was going to make it in this career – if I was ever going to find the best solutions to the problems that my patients present – I needed to learn to override my own emotional responses. I needed to manage my own healthy, automatic revulsion at such disturbing behaviour and carry on regardless.

  I’d have to push the eyeball to one side, and keep drinking the soup.

  *

  Lunch with Maurice was only one of the many extraordinary experiences I’ve had in my 20 years as a forensic psychologist. I’ve worked with some of society’s most troubled and troubling offenders, in prisons, hospitals, courts and police stations, in neighbourhoods and communities just like yours. Experiences which have changed me and the way I see the world indelibly.

  I’m sometimes referred to as a criminal psychologist, which sounds like I’m on the Mafia payroll. In truth I have very little to do with criminology (the study of crime trends and crime prevention). Some other things I don’t do include detective work (no wrestling suspects to the ground) and pathology (no chopping up dead bodies – although a serial killer once showed me how to dismember a turkey).

  All crimes are committed by – and happen to – people. Forensic psychology is about them.

  A large part of my job is trying to reduce reoffending among those who have committed crimes, with the ultimate aim of making society a safer place. To do this, I apply the scientific methods of psychology to try to understand the mental processes behind the criminal act. The challenge for psychologists is then to attempt to take steps to help the person change their behaviour, and begin their new life as a fully reformed, law-abiding citizen. This is the holy grail. More frequently, however, I advise others on the safe and appropriate response to a kaleidoscope of extreme behaviour, anything from fire setting to child killing. My evaluations, assessments and testimonies help inform the decisions of judges and juries, parole boards, police and mental health teams. Decisions that have the power to profoundly affect people’s lives.

  It’s a role that’s wedged awkwardly between the criminal justice and mental health systems. These overburdened and innately flawed institutions make a curmudgeonly couple, both of them old and confused, like the grandparents in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, forced to share a bed they are too slow and seized up to get out of.

  I prefer to call the people I work with ‘clients’. It might sound irritatingly politically correct, more like I am a nail technician than a forensic psychologist, but I use this term as a respectful umbrella for the wide variety of people I come into contact with. It’s an inescapable fact that most of my clients are men, but they are also occasionally women. I work with victims as well as offenders. Often it transpires that my clients have, at some point in their lives, been both.

  *

  People have always been morbidly enthralled by crime and criminals – from Jack the Ripper theories to the controversial conviction of Steven Avery – especially those who go against the most sacred values of society and commit the brutally violent and sexual crimes that are so incomprehensible to us all. For those of us who play by the rule book, few things are more fascinating, and more rankling, than those who choose to tear it apart. It’s perhaps no surprise then that our news and entertainment channels brim with stories from the wrong side of the law – it’s hard to imagine our thirst for it ever being slaked.

  But so often these stories focus on what is really only a small chapter in the bigger tale. They tell us about the crime that’s been committed, the subsequent investigation through to the trial, the conviction and the sentencing of the guilty person. What happens afterwards is rarely talked about, as if the criminal, and all the consequences of their actions, have disappeared in a puff of smoke. But life doesn’t end for that person, or their families or their victims. They have to learn to live with it, forever. A psychologist can join the story at any stage, but it is very often at the point at which the court proceedings have concluded, after the media and public interest wanes, that we become key characters in the narrative.

  The stories I’ve chosen to tell here are the ones you probably won’t read about in the papers. They focus on the everyday work of being a forensic psychologist, in all its frustrating, conflicting and just occasionally life-affirming reality.

  I’ve included these particular stories for many reasons – some are heartbreaking, others are enraging, some are just plain weird. What connects them is my personal sense of having been affected by them. That, and the insight they give us into the extremes of our shared human condition.

  The question I am asked perhaps more than any other, whether it’s by a taxi driver with whom I’m passing the time of day or a judge who wants my professional opinion, is: What the hell is wrong with these people? The words may be more or less formal, but everyone really wants to know the same thing. What is so wrong with someone that he or she commits a serious crime? Because once we know what’s wrong with someone, we can fix them, right? Or confine them, out of harm’s way. It took me a long time – too long – to realize that we’re all asking the wrong question.

  CHAPTER 1

  HERE BE MONSTERS

  The degree of civilization in a society

  can be judged by entering its prisons.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  When I tell people I’m a forensic psychologist they usually express surprise and start mentally fumbling around for the least offensive way to tell me that I don’t look how a forensic psychologist should (for most people the acceptable archetype still seems to be Cracker, the world-weary alcoholic and gambling-addicted loose cannon, played by Robbie Coltrane in the 1990s TV series). They’ll often say I’m too petite or delicate. Sometimes they do a sort of awkward hourglass movement with their hands. What they are keenly observing, but terribly articulating, is that I am a woman.

  In fact, most of the forensic psychologists I know are women. Women make up 73 per cent of the British Psychological Society (the professional body for practising psychologists in the United Kingdom), and a whopping 80 per cent of its forensic division. Why so many X chromosomes? I can’t speak for the other 2,035 of us, but psychology appealed to me because it promised a way of making sense of things, models and theories for understanding an otherwise overwhelming world. There seemed a promise of safety and security in having that user manual. That, and the fact that it is endlessly fascinating; your own glimpse into the private events of someone else’s mind. It was seductive to the young me.

  If I am honest with myself, I was also swayed by a law student whose name I’ll never forget: Stephen P English. My decision to also take a law option as part of my psychology degree at Sheffield University was made – as all the best freshers’ week decisions are – under the influence of hormones and cheap cider. I took the law subsidiary purely and simply so that I could gaze at his beautiful head from the back of the lecture hall, imagining what the P stood for. Perfection? Pectorals? Perhaps.

  It was pure accident that I found myself enjoying law. So forensic psychology – forensic is Latin for of the forum, or law courts – seemed like a sensible career choice. Happy endings being the stuff of fairy tales, I never actually plucked up the courage to talk to Stephen P English and ended up dating an older PhD student throughout my university years instead. He had long dark hair, chain smoked roll-u
ps and wore a full-length Driza-Bone waxed coat. When it was raining, which in Sheffield was always, he wore a matching wide-brimmed hat. He’d stride into the student union bar like Clint Eastwood into a saloon. When he was drunk, or stoned – which was also always – he would get maudlin and declare ‘there’s no justice, it’s just us’. I had no idea what he was talking about and, I suspect, neither did he.

  *

  As a young girl I often spent Saturday nights at my gran’s house, watching spaghetti westerns on her black and white television. She was a classic Irish-Catholic matriarch, who somehow always managed to look at least 50 years older than she was: tight perm, blue rinse, crimplene dresses and a plastic rain cap. She worked in a yoghurt factory in Manchester, and part of the uniform was green wellies, so the whole family had green yoghurt-factory wellies. We’d sit and watch cowboy films or anything with John Wayne in. Gran’s favourite was The Quiet Man. I liked it too because Maureen O’Hara was the only film star I’d ever seen with red hair, and this was long before being ginger was fashionable. It would just be my gran and me and Joey, my Great-Uncle John’s yellow canary. People who did bad things – the ‘badjuns’ as my gran called them when they came on screen – seemed reassuringly different to me, from another planet even.

  The films I watched with my gran instilled in me a clear-cut notion of good versus evil, assuming the inevitable triumph of the virtuous, which the otherwise sheer uneventfulness of my childhood reinforced. I was fortunate to have a comfortable and unremarkable upbringing, crime simply didn’t affect me, my family or anyone I knew at that time. In my early teens the closest I came to real-life badjuns were the warnings of flashers in the park I heard from girls at school, or the occasional news of a neighbour being burgled. It was only the late-night, slurred conversations about law and order I had at university that prompted a growing awareness of and interest in the big crime stories of the day.