The Mind of a Murderer: A glimpse into the darkest corners of the human psyche, from a leading forensic psychiatrist

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The debate about Stella forced me to re-think my simplistic ‘mental illness’ model of infanticide. It gave me an uncomfortable thought, too. My cousin Louisa had been an unplanned arrival. She was also a difficult baby who didn’t settle. Although there was no doubt that Georgina had been affected by her grossly disturbed mental state, had she possessed a degree of murderousness towards Louisa? At this point, I’d not heard Georgina’s account of the smothering, which I now know had been a response to incessant crying, albeit in a highly disturbed mental state. Stella’s was the first case of infanticide I had seen professionally, and that must have been when I began reflecting properly on Georgina’s story, which in turn set me on the journey of enquiry that ultimately led me to my work at Holloway. Neurobiological studies have improved our understanding of the origins of psychotic distortions of the sort experienced by Seb. But using only the language of brain chemicals and neuronal pathways is not sufficient. We have to retain the subjective perspective to truly understand human experience and behaviour. To explain violence, we must contextualise the physiology with psychological abstractions, such as impulses, urges and motives. With cases like this, of course, we don't really know fully what happened. We have his account, which was clearly distorted. We have also the post-mortem obviously tells a story. And without going into all the details, this was a rage-based homicide, essentially a sort of opportunistic, I think probably an attempted…it may have started off as an attempted sexual assault, but it became all about the rage in terms of his self-esteem and the misogyny. And, as often happens, there doesn't seem to have been any actual overt sort of attempt at sexual intercourse. And often the libido essentially is communicated through the homicidal violence.

Richard trained in psychiatry at the Bethlem and Maudsley Hospitals and was inspired to specialise in forensic psychiatry after meeting his first patient charged with murder. Since that first case Richard has dealt with over 150 murder cases of all types as expert witness or as treating psychiatrist including those with multiple victims and a group of terrorists charged with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction. Examining brain scans of more than 800 incarcerated men, new research co-authored by a leading University of Chicago neuroscientist found that individuals who had committed or attempted homicide had reduced gray matter when compared to those involved in other offenses. Those reductions were especially apparent in regions of the brain associated with emotional processing, behavioral control and social cognition. Even before Seb had arrived at the prison, five weeks before my first visit, the staff had received a notification that he ought to be subject to close monitoring. While still in police custody, an out-of-hours forensic psychiatric assessment had been requested. In Amelia’s case, her neglect of James was hidden from health professionals. This concealment of negligence or abusive behaviour towards children is not uncommon and can take many forms, as I discovered early in my medical career. By chance, while working on the chest medicine team at theWhere to watch The Mind of a Murderer Buy Seasons 1-2 Buy Seasons 1-2 Subscription Seasons 1-2 Buy Seasons 1-2

Sana Qadar: Another kind of killing Dr Taylor explores in his book are sexually motivated murders, like the one carried out by a man he's called Lee Watson. who had been transferred to secure hospital facing a charge of murder of her newborn baby. When I joined the team, she was halfway through a three- memory, and noted that Stella seemed to be detached from the killing and from her dead baby. The discussion went on to consider not just her disturbed mental state but also her murderousness to her unwanted baby. Stella had concealed her aggression by seemingly separating herself from her Richard Taylor: I only really fully learned the story whilst writing this book and family members were opening up about it. And obviously, I got their permission to say as much as I have said in the book, that this was a psychosis, this was a postpartum psychosis where she essentially lost touch with reality, although, like the case of Stella North that we talked about, it wasn't totally straightforward, but she ended up initially in prison custody at a women's prison, Holloway, where I later ended up working. And I think my decision to take up the post at Holloway may have been influenced by this family story, a sort of curiosity. Again, it wasn't something I was consciously thinking about when I took up that job. But she ended up in psychiatric hospital and had a range of treatments. She ended up having psychosurgery, which is pretty extreme and no longer used. And so her story helps illustrate the whole issue of infanticide, but it also tells us a little bit about the history of psychiatry and how treatments have changed.

Sana Qadar: In Australia, a national study by the Institute of Criminology on filicide (that's the killing of a child by a parent) found factors associated with mothers who kill children are mental illness, being a victim of domestic violence, and parental separation. Fathers who kill are more likely to have perpetrated domestic violence, have a history of drug abuse, a criminal record and parental separation. You can imagine the outrage of the police officers who’d conducted this search, believing it to be abduction, only to find that the mother had disposed of the baby herself. She was not psychotic, but the pregnancy had been unplanned and unwanted – she was immature and isolated and suffering

The brains of murderers look different from those of people convicted of other crimes—differences that could be linked to how they process empathy and morality. Seb spoke of a jump from this early feeling of ambiguity and nebulous threat to the arrival of certainty. An idea came to him that helped resolve his confusion about the reality of the world around him (including his mother’s identity) and to him it was consistent with his conspiratorial feelings. But while this idea – that his mother had been replaced by an imposter – matched his reality, it was out of kilter with everyone else’s. And so, instead of rejecting the idea, Seb interpreted others’ actions in a way that supported this idea. The belief that his mother’s replacement was part of a wider plot gave meaning to his experiences and he selected evidence consistent with that meaning. In reaction to a loss of the sense of familiarity that had previously accompanied the visual image of his mother, Seb accepted a coherent yet false narrative.Richard Taylor: There was one particular case where a young man came in with a six-inch nail in his head, right down the middle of his forehead. Research has shown that harsh discipline doesn't actually work as a child-rearing strategy, especially with the most anti-social kids. Fledgling psychopaths with callous-emotional traits often make excellent bullies, choosing skilfully how best to hurt their victims without caring about the impact, and they are notably impervious to punishment. In addition to Decety and Kiehl, other researchers on the study include first author Ashly Sajous-Turner, a University of New Mexico post-baccalaureate scholar; and Michael Koenigs of the University of Wisconsin.

condition). Tamara clearly had a significant personality disturbance, and she would have to go to court and face her accusers after all.a consultant in most medical specialities, which I think is about right. Over time, I found my forensic anxiety had diminished. I’d also learned to manage my stress levels by not accepting every referral or teaching invitation, trying not to be omnipotent in preventing every psychotic crime in my patch, and protecting my time at weekends with a ban on report-writing on Saturdays. Fascinating. Different from several of the other forensic science memoirs I have read in that the author takes a more academic and low-key look at a number of cases in which he has been involved as a forensic psychiatrist, most of which are less well-known cases which haven’t caught public attention quite as much as the headline cases of some books I have read. Which isn’t to say they are any less interesting as a consequence, in fact the tone and content makes for some very well argued points and a thorough introduction to the work determining whether criminals are responsible for their actions and to what extent (mad, sad or bad).