MURDERERS' MINDS

Evening Star, Issue 20061, 29 December 1928, Page 7

MURDERERS' MINDS

The first session of the British Royal Commission on Police Powers elicited the curious fact that criminals, when arrested, olteu make voluntary confessions of their crimes to the' police—* the instance before the Commission being that of murder. The fact provoked the comment of the chairman {Lord Lee) that “it seems .5 little odd there should be so many criminals anxious to hang themselves.” Why do so many murderers act in this “ odd ”* way? The answer given to the Commission was that by such voluntary; confessions the prisoner hoped to secure a mitigation ul the charge fram murder, say, to manslaughter. But is this always so? asks Dr Aveling, render in psychology at the University 'o£ London. Or are there reasons other, than the calculating cunning of tha criminal which drive Jim to confess when driver, to bay ? What of the confessions of those who give themselves up to the police with never ’/me nor cry against them? There are at least three other explanations. The really criminal mind is a peculiar thing, not always entirely abnormal, but usually abnormal in kinks, emphasising almost out of recognition some one or other of the perfectly normal tendencies of every, one of us. in the first place, there is egoism, a sentiment rever absent from. 1 the hitman make-up. In his own secret mind the murderer is generally a very fine fellow indeed. Holms asserted himself against the social order even to the taking of life, and in his inner being he is proud of it. His confession in this case is a vainglorious boast, an act of supreme self-assertion, raising him above llm common herd.' Notoriety is more to him than life, and he risks his life to attain it. There are people who have “confessed” to murders they have never committed in order to satisfy their insatiable egoism. But the criminal mind, more than any other except that of the insane, is also soaked in fantasy. It rnoves in a, land of unreal dreams, grotesque distortions of the day-dreaming of the ordinary man and woman. These dreams are far more real for it than the rear world itself. Tho sense of proportion is altogether lacking; the real and tho dream arc inextricably woven together.' The fantasy confession is a tissue of truth and falsehood, of fact and dream elaboration. These are the confessions often supposed to he in mitigation of the capita! charge. Driven by egoism l or by the intolerable secret to confess, such criminals distort and invent as they relate the spurious history of their, crime.

Lastly, and as a rule this enters into all confessions as a fundamental inn pulse—there is the cathartic longing.' Unconscious though it may be, there is the drive to purge the soul, to clennso the stuffed bosom of the perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart ” Jhy .communicating it tn others, and so, by ;V process of magic, to destroy it. _ This instinctive drive is woll-uign universal in the human race. What wonder that the criminal, in a hurst of fantastic egoism and mock humility, should lay, his conscience hare —as nil do—to authority, even if the authority he chooses to confess to weaves the strands of tho rdpe that will hang him!