Derek and Jean Robinson were a kindly couple who lived in a neat house in Heslington, York. He was a doctor and she worked for Christian Aid. It was the early 1970s; I was a student at the university, and my father, who knew them, had urged me to make contact. I spent a pleasant hour in their kitchen, chatting over coffee, and then took my leave, promising, as one does, to see them again soon. I never did. The next I heard, more than 30 years later, was that they had been murdered by a man with a psychopathic personality disorder who told police he wanted to become Britain’s most prolific serial killer.
Daniel Gonzalez was sent to Broadmoor for the murders in 2006. He attacked six people in 48 hours, killing four of them. He is thought to have broken into the Robinson’s house early in the morning – they had moved to Highgate, north London by this time – and stabbed both of them to death in the hallway. It was a pointless, motiveless, random killing. Could anyone make sense of it? Could Gonzalez?
In Gwen Adshead’s view, killers like Gonzalez must be helped to try. As a consultant forensic psychotherapist – a rare breed in medicine – she spends her working life in the company of men at Broadmoor whom others would dismiss with a single word – evil. Her aim is to make them safer – safe enough, ultimately, to be released from Britain’s highest security institution for mentally disordered offenders – and to achieve that they must understand the full import of the crime they have committed.
“My job is to help a man become more articulate about what he has done, about his illness and about why that might be important for his future. Even if a cure is not possible, recovery of some identity is possible. My work involves talking to them and getting them to become more self-reflective. Violence is more likely to occur when people are not thinking straight.”
Admission to Broadmoor is granted only to members of an exclusive club: the violent insane. The Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, is here, convicted in 1981 of murdering 13 prostitutes; Kenneth Erskine, the Stockwell strangler who murdered seven elderly people in 1986; and London nail bomber David Copeland who targeted blacks, Bangladeshis and gays, killing three people and injuring 129, of whom four lost limbs. But what does “insane” mean? How different are they from the rest of us?
Adshead, who is 50, is wearing a dark jersey top, a long olive skirt with a string of pearls at her neck and around one wrist. She could pass for an art college lecturer or a rural GP but for one detail – the leather pouch on a belt around her waist carrying a jangling bunch of keys.
Her tiny office is strewn with papers – she has to move some to make space for my mug of tea – and the filing cabinet next door contains folders marked “Evil and moral reasoning”, “Toxic attachments”, “Hope and hate”. She was brought up in New Zealand – her parents were both academics – and she is writing a book on the nature of evil to be published by Jessica Kingsley next year.
“I have always been interested in how other people’s minds work. I was an internalist – on the spectrum I was towards the introspective end. If you are interested in how the mind goes awry and how organisations should respond, then you are going to gravitate to a place like Broadmoor,” she says.
It was her appearance on Desert Island Discs earlier in the summer that brought Adshead – and Broadmoor – some unexpectedly positive and welcome attention.
She described the patients – “our people” is a favourite phrase – as not mad or bad but sad. She quoted Shakespeare’s phrase from King Lear – “ruined pieces of nature” – and explained that her job had become harder when she had her two sons, who are now school age.
“Their arrival changed my view. I imagined these men as the beautiful babies they must have been – or as round-headed eight-year-olds. All that promise… how sad it is,” she says.
The impression was of a humane, empathetic doctor with liberal instincts trying to do her best for people who are more often regarded as depraved monsters, fit only to be locked away for life.
Some of them, unavoidably, will be. But for the rest, if they can be made safer in themselves, then those around them will be safer – and they may be able to move on.
“Our people have been really dangerous and there is a risk they will be again and the Government is entitled to take steps to protect the safety of the public. Slaughter-ing your family is, we can agree, an undesirable thing.
In ordinary psychiatry there is a lot of debate about paternalism. Psychiatrists have the power to detain people against their will and there is debate about when that power should be used. The issues are much starker here – there is no grey area over whether they have done something horrible or mad. Ordinary psychiatry is much woollier than that.”
She likens what she does to providing palliative care for cancer – not trying to cure, but trying to ease the symptoms so that the patient is more comfortable, more serene and more secure.
“They may be mentally ill or they may not be, but have very disorganised ways of thinking. They may not have lost touch with reality but they may have talked themselves into an alternative reality. Like the Royal Marsden [the hospital in London which provides specialist cancer care], we deliver highly specialised long-term care to very disabled people at Broadmoor.”
She never got a chance to help Gonzalez. Once he arrived at Broadmoor he set about attacking his seventh victim – himself. He attempted suicide by opening the veins in his wrists with his teeth – one psychiatrist said he had never seen anyone bite himself with such ferocity. He was placed on heavy doses of anti-psychotic and tranquillising drugs and he put on four stone in weight in a year – a side effect of the drugs. But he never lost his desire for self-destruction. In 2007, three years after his admission, he finally succeeded in ending his life, slashing his wrists with the plastic edge of a CD case.
drive from www.independent.co.uk