Myra Hindley, the popular personification of evil, is dead. Her body, thanks to the services of Cambridge crematorium, will tonight be reduced to a pile of ashes. It stands to reason, does it not, that if the tabloid high priestess of wickedness is no more then the world must be slightly purer for her passing?
It is unlikely that many people believe this, in the literal sense. For the past 36 years Hindley has been less equipped than the average person to inflict harm on the community and has existed more as a peroxide blonde icon of amorality and malevolence.
Yet Hindley’s crimes were so heinous, so beyond our realms of comprehension, that when she died she managed once again to leave us linguistically impotent. The only way to describe her destructibility was to reach, as always, for the language of hellfire and brimstone.
The Sun declared that Hindley was “The Devil”, no less, its report confidently asserting that she was at last “rotting in Hell”. The Daily Mirror simply called her “A Woman of Evil”. In a different approach, the Daily Mail published a transcript of the tape-recorded last words of the murder victim Lesley Anne Downey, arguing that “only by reading them can we begin to understand the nature of true evil”.
Can we? Do we? By hearing a little girl begging not to be stripped while a flat-voiced Hindley orders her to put the gag back in her mouth so that Ian Brady can molest her, what do we learn about evil’s make-up? And does the fact that something so terrible happened mean that the perpetrators are automatically evil or must they by definition be mentally ill?
A person well placed to answer such questions is Dr Gwen Adshead. For half of her week she works as a consultant psychiatrist at a London trauma clinic, treating victims of violence and torture; for the other she works at Broadmoor maximum security hospital, where the likes of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, are held, and where she has qualified as a consultant psychotherapist.
She sees both sides of extreme cruelty — victims and perpetrators.
A popular modern view is that neurophysics and psychiatry have neutered traditional interpretations of good and evil via the “abuse excuse”, the idea that maltreatment in a person’s past is to blame for their violence in the present.
But Adshead believes that many human actions can indeed be termed evil — and that all of us are capable of committing them. Neither, she says, must the perpetrators be ill, psychopathic or serial offenders. They can briefly enter a psychopathic state of mind then go back to living perfectly normal lives, as did the Bosnian soldiers who raped women then returned home to become model citizens.
“I prefer to use the word (evil) as an adjective, not a noun,” Adshead says. “Rather than an entity out there, it is a state of mind . . . and everybody has the capacity to get into an evil state of mind. There are people in evil states of mind up and down the country, all day, every day. As we speak now somebody is getting it together to smash his wife in the face. Somebody will be getting into a state of mind that may end up in rape. I see people who have been fantastically cruel to their children but they aren’t mentally ill at all.”
Despite its prevalence, though, evil continues to elude definition. It is not, Adshead stresses, a medical term, and certainly not a psychiatric one. It is less a diagnosis and more a term of incomprehension. Morality and theology are required to complete the picture. Even the Oxford English Dictionary gives the spectacularly unhelpful definition of evil as “bad, harmful”, something that could equally apply to speeding.
What most people understand as evil is a particular type of cruel, humiliating, pointless and destructive crime that someone commits against another person when they could just as easily have chosen not to. Unlike a crime of passion or revenge, the victim is almost an irrelevance because the deed is all about the doer.
It follows that psychopaths, people who fail to empathise with others, are more at risk of crossing this threshold and getting into an evil state of mind. Hindley was psychopathic when she remained unmoved by a tortured child pleading for her life. So too was the mass murderer Dennis Nilsen when he wondered why there was such a fuss about the way he dismembered his victims. One of Adshead’s Broadmoor patients, a murderer, told her that he knew he was doing wrong but said: “I was deaf to my own restraints.”
But it does not have to be so. The residents of Jedwabne, in occupied Poland, who herded their Jewish neighbours into a barn and burned them alive, were not acting under Nazi orders and could not possibly all be psychopaths. Yet they chose to do it.
Ian Rankin, the best-selling crime author, has spent the past nine months exploring the meaning of evil for a Channel 4 documentary series. He has not reached a firm conclusion.
“What we mean by evil is very complex,” he says. “It is a protective device. We prefer to demonise certain people, put evil in a world of monsters because it prevents us confronting the fact that these people are just like us, the people next door. It lets us off the hook.”
The image of the Devil as a monstrosity with cloven hooves and horns is rooted in early pictures of pagan gods. In order to make evil something alien to humankind we made it ugly, non-Christian and not of this world. When the World Trade Centre was hit, some people claimed to be able to see the face of Satan in the billowing smoke, perhaps deriving comfort from the belief that a metaphysical force and not a human being was ultimately responsible for such a dreadful act.
Not only is evil a powerful word but we seem to believe that it can pollute us. Rankin admits that he turned down the chance of meeting Brady during the making of the programme. “Brady is as close as I get to my idea of evil. Once you meet him you cannot unmeet him and I didn’t want him inside my head.”
But psychologists argue that evil behaviour is an inherent possibility in everybody, a theme that underpins the American psychiatrist Dr Robert I Simon’s book, Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream. Rankin adds: “I believe there is such a thing as an evil act, but not an evil person. We are all capable of wicked things. Most of us have very bad thoughts, road rage for example, when you find yourself putting your fingers into the shape of a gun. Some people happen to take it a step further.”
Opinion differs wildly over what constitutes evil, or even if it exists at all. Clergymen argue that it is a void, a total absence of good, and that we can choose the path of righteousnes instead. Yet Professor Benjamin Libet, who conducted neurological tests in 1958, questioned the entire notion of personal responsibility. His work concluded that our brain controls us, not vice versa, suggesting that the sense of free will may be illusory. Darwinists, meanwhile, will argue that, by the laws of natural selection, humans must have an innate ruthless streak to have triumphed as the superior species.
Certainly humans seem more capable of cruelty if the victim does not “belong” to their tribe or race. To illustrate this, researchers at Lancaster University hired an actor to wear a Liverpool FC shirt and writhe in agony on the ground as Manchester United fans filed past. Almost all failed to go to his aid. When he switched to a United shirt, 80 per cent ran to help him.
Jedwabne shows us how, when people act in groups rather than as individuals, evil actions come more easily because the sense of responsibility is diluted. At Auschwitz, guards who were friends in the outside world were deliberately made to work together to “normalise” what they were doing. The coupling of Brady and Hindley, Rose and Fred West, produced an alchemy, a catalyst for evil deeds.
Hindley’s supporters argue that had she never met Brady she would have got married, had children and enjoyed a normal life. But Adshead questions this. Given her capacity for psychopathy, she may well have one day battered her own children. Adshead says: “I get very worried about that type of argument. How do we know that if Brady had not met Hindley, but a different woman who was appalled at the idea of killing and who said: ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’, he wouldn’t have stopped? What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I see enough women who get into evil states of mind on their own.”
She asserts that by looking to places such as Broadmoor, whose inhabitants are statistically a rarity, we learn less than at standard prisons where people have committed terrible crimes but are neither mentally ill nor particularly repentant. “There are a lot of cruel states of mind out there and if you only look at the places like Broadmoor you miss all the ‘normal’ stuff.”
She cites the example of Carl Manning and Marie Therese Kauao, who beat, burned and starved Victoria Climbié to death after keeping her trussed up in a bath for weeks. “No one is suggesting they are mentally ill,” Adshead says. “Are they evil? They clearly got themselves into a state of mind where they convinced themselves this child was not real, she was just a thing they enjoyed having control over.
“What they did was just as cruel as what the Moors Murderers did. There are foster carers, mothers and fathers, out there who do this and they never get a tenth of the attention that Myra Hindley and Ian Brady got.” What people who commit such acts do have in common, however, is a sense of disconnection from the world. “What I often think about the people I work with, who have clearly been in an evil state of mind to do what they did, is how disconnected they are from the rest of the social and moral universe. Something has become lost; they are what used to be called ‘lost souls’ in theological circles.”
She cites a female patient who severely battered her child. When asked why, she replied: “There’s something between us that isn’t there.” “I think she was talking about a type of disconnection,” Adshead says. “At that moment that baby wasn’t real to her and it’s a moot point whether you want to call that illness or not.”
The vital question, of course, is what causes some people to cross the threshold and hurt others, and some not. Adshead says there is no absolute answer although an existential view of the world can be a trigger.
“If you feel that nothing matters and there is only despair then the moral walls that connect us to each other fall down,” she says. “Briefly, in a moment of cruelty, such people triumph over the pointlessness. But it is brief.”
The vast majority of people who carry out evil acts are not mentally ill, nor are they psychopaths. But circumstance can sometimes stop psychopaths turning to violence. “If someone’s psychopathic tendencies are buttressed by intelligence and wealth they may not need to carry out acts of physical cruelty to get satisfaction,” Adshead explains. “They may wish instead to invade small countries, to take over companies, to strip a pension fund and salt it away in the Caymans. If what you are interested in is treating people like dirt and yourself as special, then for those people who get into evil states of mind this creates a moment of exhilaration.”
Adshead believes that what defines evil may always be unanswerable. By their very nature, evil acts are without meaning. “It is a huge, complex question that psychiatrists can contribute to, but we by no means have the last word,” she says.
Primo Levi recalled an example of random cruelty when he first arrived at Auschwitz. A guard raised his hand and casually struck a prisoner in the face for no reason. “Why did you did that?” a shocked bystander asked. The guard replied simply: “Here there is no ‘Why?’”
That, perhaps, is as close to a definition of evil as we will ever get.
