Chapter 1 Murder Most Foul

Chapter 1

Murder Most Foul

Jon Venables; Robert Thompson; Mary Bell

For those people who want to understand what exactly it is that turns a human being into a murderer, one must first learn exactly what a human being is, how a human being functions and the ways that human beings think. Unfortunately very few people throughout history have thoroughly studied and thereby fully comprehended the entire human system of thought. As a result, the entirety of human thought processes has not yet been exposed.

Reams of information has been written and recorded on the subjects of human physiology, biology and psychology, and reams of information has been written with suggestions on how to fix, repair and ameliorate those faulty human beings around us who commit acts of mayhem and murder, but the essentiality of linking all of our current information together seems to have escaped the minds of the learned experts of our time.

Disputes are rampant among the scholars, criminologists, psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists who gainfully struggle on trying to understand the causes and also find the cures for murderers who use murder, rape and torture as a tool, in order to satisfy some known or unknown need within their own psyches.

There are now, and have been, experts who have contributed greatly to the wealth of human knowledge that has accrued over the centuries, and the market proliferates with carefully, well-penned books and articles covering a wide range of topics that are closely related to the physiology, biology and psychology of the human race, but the big picture is missing. The reason the big picture is missing is that in order to understand others, a person must first learn to understand his or her own self and not many people, even if they are motivated to help others, want to set aside some of their own precious time in order to make a concerted effort and to try to understand their own selves.

Most of us are vaguely aware of some underlying deficiencies in our ability to navigate through life and get what we want out of life, but basically we all believe that we’re okay and if it wasn’t for this person and if it wasn’t for that person, and if only we had more money, a better job, a better spouse or our relatives weren’t so troublesome, life would get a whole lot easier for us. We rarely take ownership of our own failings and we rarely see that the things we hate in our partners, children and co-workers are merely reflecting our own faults back to us. Our partners, children and co-workers are mirror images of our own selves; these are mirror images of our own failings. We hate what we see in other people because it is so familiar to us. The offending behavior resides deep within our personal, inner psyche and we will not own up to having the same deficiencies as those people who irritate us, those people whom we dislike or even those people whom we hate.

Even when apprehended, most murderers refuse to own their own crimes. A murderer may confess to his or her crimes but that doesn’t necessarily mean that he or she is willing to take ownership of these crimes. Nine times out of ten when asked the big question, why? a murderer will often respond with excuses. It was self-defense, or I don’t know why, or I had an abusive childhood, or something comes over me and I’m not in my right mind when these things happen. I plead innocent by reason of insanity. Murdering in the name of God has been happening for untold centuries; as if any genuine “God type of being” would ever need help from a comparatively puny human being, to murder anyone at all. 

In actual fact those who commit murder do know why they do it. The answer to the question why, always resides deep inside the murderer’s own brain. The reasons for committing only one murder or having several killing sprees are usually the same. The reasons are overwhelming rage, lust or greed. Jealousy, envy, malice, fear or pure hatred, it doesn’t really matter to the murderer what caused his or her evil action, the murderer did it, the murderer wanted to do it and the murderer really didn’t care about the suffering of his or her victim.

The simple truth of the matter is that we all desire to have the power of life and death over other people. Murderers want to play God and who among us doesn’t want to play God? We are all guilty of wanting to play God but most of us do not stoop to committing murder. Instead we sit on our exalted, personal thrones wanting everyone around us to march to our own particular drumbeat.    

We all cling to a false image of ourselves whether it is good, I’m a good person, look how much I contribute to charity; bad, it’s not my fault, I was a damaged child; or indifferent, I’m just a normal, okay kind of person and I don’t have a lot of faults. We cling to these false images because those are the crutches we lean on in order to navigate through life. Life is difficult. Life can be horribly difficult especially if you are, or have been an abused child, therefore having a mental crutch to lean on makes sense. But by the time a child has matured into adulthood, some kind of self analysis is in order.

The art of self-analysis needs to be taught by qualified therapists, as a bona fide subject in schools. Children are a lot smarter than we think and early self-analysis together with some kind of therapeutic intervention could possibly keep a child on the straight and narrow path through life. Instead we leave troubled children to forge their own way in this difficult-to-navigate world having no idea that their in-born genetic temperament is on auto pilot. In fact most adults navigate through this world not knowing that they are on auto pilot and unaware that their own inherent genetic type makes them who they are.

This genetically inherited temperament is the force that dictates who we are, what we will do and what we will become. Our temperament is influenced by the circumstances and people that surround us and interact with us from birth until death. We humans are more or less like puppets on a string and will remain like puppets on a string if we don’t endeavor to cut the strings that bind us. Like it or not, history will keep on repeating itself in our own personal lives as well as in the world at large, until we explore and finally accept that both our behavior and thought processes are dictated to us by our genetic makeup.

Leaving the analysis in the hands of a competent therapist can be problematic, because it is impossible for even the best therapist in the world to know all the facts about a person and see the whole picture surrounding that person. Only the person who needs therapy has the ability to dig deep enough in order to find out the truth about their own self and we all need some kind of therapy because we are all faulty human beings.

Many therapists merely function as paid friends to those who go to them for help, and not many therapists take the time to study the temperament types of their patients because the large majority of therapists either disregard this information and brush it aside as unimportant, or they don’t even know about the existence of various temperament types in the first place.

An interesting theory exists in the realms of human psychology (albeit this theory is not held by many professional psychoanalysts), that it takes three or more generations to produce the first schizophrenic child in a family and so the pattern is set,  generating more and more schizophrenic persons in ensuing generations.

This theory is based on something called the Emotional Scale. Basically the lower you are on the human, emotional scale, the more likely you are to mate and cohabit with a person who also functions at this same, low level of emotional vulnerability. The off-spring of such a union will develop at an even lower, emotional level by virtue of having two, low level functioning parents, and the ensuing off-spring will then mate and cohabit with a partner at that same, even lower emotional level. After approximately three or four generations the emotional level of the children drops until it can drop no further, i.e. schizophrenia. These children can be highly intelligent but they are emotionally bankrupt.

It has been established that schizophrenia runs in families and therapeutic intervention is required in order to work on raising the emotional level of schizophrenic children. Teaching low level, functioning parents how to raise their own emotional level should be a vital part of the learning process. This is an area where therapy could excel and the payoff might be worth the effort especially if the therapist takes the time to study and understand the temperament types of their patients.

In order to escape the real world, schizophrenic children and adults live in worlds of fantasy, but the fantasy always goes awry. A schizophrenic, fantasy world is filled with audible voices that are really the person’s own thoughts that he or she cannot turn off. The real beings with real personalities who inhabit their space are really aspects of their own personality. A person’s personality is merely the surface layer that we present to the world at large. Personality is mostly dependent on temperament type but it is also a result of the circumstances and people that have exerted influences on that particular person over their lifetime.

 Schizophrenic patients believe that other people are reading their minds, controlling their thoughts or plotting to harm them. They suffer from hallucinations, thought disorders, agitated body movements or catatonia which is a state of frozen stupor and immobility. In other words, schizophrenia is an extreme state of mind numbing fear that is beyond the norm. There are only two human emotions. One is “Love” and the other is “Fear.” Anger is merely an offshoot of fear.

Treatment of schizophrenia should incorporate the whole family not just the person in whom schizophrenia has its grip because schizophrenia is a family problem not an individual illness. In families where there are two birth parents and none of the children have been adopted, only two different temperament types need to be studied. In the case of an adopted child or a step parent there could possibly be three or four different temperament types involved.

Child Murderers: Jon Venables (Born 1982) and Robert Thompson (Born 1982)

Another theory based on the theory of Schizophrenia is that it can take three or more generations to create any type of extremely dysfunctional child, a child who could possibly grow up to be a murderer, a serial rapist or a serial killer. Children who become murderers before reaching adulthood, as in the case of two English boys, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson both aged ten, who abducted, tortured and beat to death, two year old James Bulger, are extreme cases. This awful crime took place in the Liverpool area of the United Kingdom, in February 1993.

Two year old James Bulger disappeared from a shopping center where he had wandered off just a few yards from beyond where his mother stood. After they were captured, the schoolboy perpetrators of the crime told police where to find the body, and James’s mutilated, little body was found on a railroad track miles away from the shopping center.

The two boys revealed that they had planned the whole thing; it was not a spur-of-the-moment choice to abduct a toddler; any toddler would do, and they made plans to push the toddler into traffic. Instead of pushing the toddler into traffic, they led him on a long trek to the railway tracks where they tortured the toddler until he died.

Police suspect that there was a sexual occurrence during the crime because the toddler’s shoes, socks, pants and underwear had been removed and his foreskin had been forcibly retracted. Circumcision is not widely practiced in the United Kingdom and probably the other two boys had not been circumcised either.

The boys were crafty enough to lay little James’s body across the railroad tracks in the hope that a train would splice the body and the death would be deemed an accident. A train did splice the body but the murder was found out. The two boys were unaware that the shopping mall had close circuit television and the abduction was recorded. The close circuit recording was shown on local television and that’s how the boys were found out.

Both of the ten year old torturer/murderers Jon and Robert, came from dysfunctional families. Even so-called normal families are part dysfunctional, by virtue of the fact that children born into any family at all, are by nature helpless. They become dependents automatically, imprisoned in childhood and at the mercy of the adults and older siblings around them. At one time or another all children experience the same feeling of being powerless around adults, even if those adults are acting in the best interests of the child.

The younger the child the more powerful the screams if the child’s needs are not met. When the screams of the infants and toddlers subside, children begin to be old enough to know the difference between bad behavior and good behavior in order to get their needs met. But there are some children who choose bad behavior, very, very, bad behavior.

Severely dysfunctional families exhibit many traits and they usually start out with a set of co-dependent parents; one is usually an addict or over time evolves into an addict, and the other becomes an enabler. The addict doesn’t necessarily need to be addicted to drugs or alcohol; the addiction can be to any kind of destructive or unhealthy behavior such as extra marital sex, pornography, child abuse, spousal abuse, bullying, overspending, overeating, gambling, overworking, petty larceny or even watching too much television. The list is endless because addiction encompasses any repetitive behavior that results in adverse consequences.

The family evolves into dysfunction because the other spouse, the spouse who probably suffers from low self-esteem makes excuses for and learns to tolerate the addictive behavior. Many times the enabling spouse feels that he or she has no option but to learn how to live with the addictive behavior of their partner because of having nowhere else to live and not enough money to live off, especially when there are young children to take care of. Or it can be the opposite. The enabling spouse doesn’t want to give up his or her high standard of living or the wealth that accompanies it, by abandoning the marital situation.

Another contributing factor is that to the tolerating spouse, the addictive behavior may seem to be normal because that is all they have ever known. Some families can give the appearance of normalcy, but behind closed doors all kinds of negative behavior is taking place. If a family is dysfunctional every member of that family will be unhappy, confused about their place in society, and for the most part they will suffer silently because they dare not speak out. Speaking out about family problems is taboo within the family, but it is also taboo outside of the family. Sometimes this taboo is broken when a child reaches adulthood, but by then it is too late to repair any damage that was caused by growing up in a dysfunctional family.

Many times family members believe that what they are experiencing is normal, i.e. all families are the same as their own except for those happy families that are portrayed on television or in the movies, because these families don’t seem to be real. The irony of the situation is that quite often, family members don’t even know that they are unhappy because they have little to zero experience of what it does feel like to be happy, peaceful or content.

Child abuse, sexual abuse, extreme conflict, lack of empathy, unfair treatment, vicious jealousy, complete disharmony, mean spirited ridicule, soul destroying shame; these types of behavior can be the norm in dysfunctional families but these unacceptable behaviors rarely exist at the start of the marriage, they develop slowly over the years until a crisis point is reached. The crisis point quite often occurs when a child or children of the marriage reach puberty. It is inevitable that at least one member of the family will go off the rails. But sometimes the crisis point is reached before the child hits puberty as in the case of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson.  

Some parents hate their children and some children hate their parents but the end result is always the same. The children who grow up in dysfunctional families are damaged for life unless there is some kind of early intervention, but how can there be intervention if the children as well as the parents don’t know that what they are experiencing is abnormal? Education is the key and the earlier it can be taught, the better it is for everyone. Children need to be taught at school what kind of behavior in a family is acceptable and what kind of behavior is unacceptable.  

In the case of the murder of James Bulger, those two ten year old boys chose cunning and brutality because of the likelihood that that’s all they had ever known. They had to have learned it from the adults around them. Most certainly electronic games, movies and videos could have contributed much to the psychological misfiring in the minds and brains of the two young murderers, but nothing is ever the result of just one thing. It is always a combination of things or a sequence of events that are the causative factors.

The two boys planned the crime. They carried out their mission and for a few moments in time they must have felt some kind of exhilaration. Venables and Thompson obviously knew themselves to be stronger and more powerful than their victim, and that was what gave them a high. For a short period of time they got to play God by having the power of life or death over a two year old child. Most likely the two young murderers had grown up suffering from acts or words of cruelty and torment that were directed at them, and because of this they had learned to disregard the value of human life. But they both knew that they had done something very bad and they tried to hide what they had done. Jon Venables and Robert Thompson were tried as adults and sentencing consisted of rehabilitation and confinement in a detention school for delinquents.

All reports are that the detention school provided a very good education, a high standard of living and even gave them an allowance that they could spend on their supervised shopping trips to town. Without proper therapy, punishing criminals does not rehabilitate them, but rewarding anti-social, criminal behavior does not work either unless proven, effective therapies are part of the treatment.

In June of 2001, after serving only eight years, a parole board ruled that the boys were no longer a threat to society and both Thompson and Venables were released from the detention school where they had supposedly been rehabilitated. They were released into a witness protection program with a life license, meaning that they were on probation for life.

Venables was described by his elementary schoolteachers as a boy who was repressing a great deal of hostility, and his teachers knew for a fact that he had a festering temper. Most likely Venables was a Choleric because a festering temper is one of the best indicators of a person with a choleric temperament. Venables was an attention seeker but he was also described as anti-social. His hatred of his own father and his loud, violent outbursts in court were noted by those people who were present at the trial.

This illustrates the opposing factors that can rise up in those persons who are natural born extroverts, i.e. Cholerics and Sanguines, but as the result of severe abuse, these natural extroverts can quite often regress into anti-social behavior. An anti-social, attention seeker might seem to be an oxymoron as indeed it is, and these two behaviors do contradict each other, but this contradiction always results from severe oppression.

In June of 2010, Jon Venables was returned to prison after being charged and found guilty of possessing child pornography, some of which included two year old children being raped by adults. He was only given a two year prison sentence and obviously the type of rehabilitation that he had received in the detention school, did not work.

Venables still had a festering temper and he still viewed toddlers as potential victims. As a Choleric, he did not have the same kind of cunning or deep, thinking skills as his partner in crime Robert Thompson.  

Years later, social workers who were involved in the rehabilitation of these ten year old murderers, reported that the boys exhibited no remorse and acted as if the crime had never happened. They did not take ownership of their crime and refusing to take ownership of their own wrongdoings is a very strong trait among those with melancholic and choleric temperaments.

Refusing to take ownership of a wrong doing can also be observed in the other two temperament types i.e. sanguine and phlegmatic, but of the four different temperament types, Melancholics are the most vehement in their denials. Melancholics almost always refuse to admit guilt because they live in a different world from the rest of us, a world where they are consumed by self, and self is all important.

Thompson was obsessed with watching himself on the news. He was self-consumed, self-obsessed and had an unnerving ability to look straight through a person as if the other person didn’t exist. His elementary schoolteachers described him as being a very shrewd liar and a great manipulator, but he was also able to turn on the charm whenever necessary. Cholerics on the other hand have a very difficult time trying to turn on the charm because they prefer to be blunt and get straight to the point.

Robert Thompson became very close to his mother during his confinement in the detention school and was described by the social workers in the detention school as a real mama’s boy. He was able to turn on his melancholic charm and use his mother as a crutch to lean on for the duration of his confinement, but nothing is known about what happened to him after he was released.  

Melancholics make the best liars, the best manipulators, the best crooks and they are generally considered to be the most self-obsessed of the four temperament types. All people have the tendency to lie, cheat and manipulate but Melancholics have an innate ability to do it with expertise and competence like no others.

In ordinary life, a Melancholic with no criminal activity can quite easily evolve into a pathological liar for the simple reason that lying comes so naturally to them that it just becomes a pattern of speech. They even lie when there is no need. But liars cannot remember their own lies and with the passage of time, a pathological liar becomes known to those people around them. Friends and relatives end up having the choice of either shrugging it off or backing away from the pathological liar.

It is a difficult thing to challenge a pathological liar because a pathological liar argues his or her own innocence with the use of more lies. But pathological liars do and can function quite well in society. This well known saying is only too true in today’s world as it relates to Melancholics. “Tell the truth and nobody wants to hear it, but tell a lie and the whole world stops to listen.”

Mary Bell (Born 1957)

     Twenty five years earlier, two lesser known crimes were committed in the slums of Newcastle, but the crimes were equally horrendous, and this time around it was an eleven year old English girl who murdered two little boys, a four year old and a three year old.

Mary Flora Bell didn’t stand a chance in life; her mother was a here again, gone again prostitute, and her father was a drunkard and a petty criminal.

This little girl grew up without receiving any kind of loving support from anyone at all. She was a child who was alone in the world although theoretically she did live in a house together with her two dysfunctional parents. Relatives told a story that at one time Mary’s mother attempted to arrange an adoption for her child, and knowing that the mother really didn’t want to keep her own child these same relatives offered to take care of Mary, but nothing ever materialized to ensure Mary’s welfare. 

Every child in the neighborhood was afraid of Mary Bell. As adults, some of Mary’s past schoolmates were interviewed and they told harrowing tales of what used to happen in the school play yard whenever Mary Bell was around. She used to try to choke other children, she was cruel and the children knew that when Mary Bell fixed her strange, staring eyes on them, they were in trouble. Mary Bell was a Melancholic just like Robert Thompson with his strange, staring eyes that could look right through people as if they weren’t there.

 One of Mary’s past schoolteachers tells a story about noticing a red mark on a child’s face. When the teacher asked the child what had happened, it was revealed that Mary had stubbed out a cigarette on the child’s face. To his credit the teacher actually talked to Mary about the incident but the teacher was unaware that this was an indicator of future barbaric acts that she would commit. 

In addition, the neighborhood children were so afraid of Mary Bell that even when she tried to choke them or stuff sand in their mouths, the children were too afraid to tell the whole story to the police, or even to their own parents.

It is easy to look back on this sad story and judge those adults who knew that Mary’s behavior was not only unacceptable, it was dangerous and the adults did nothing about it. But these people were not the cream of society. They probably had no faith in the authorities and in those days, the late sixties, teachers were supposed to teach and mind their own business.

Many although not all school administrators had very little interest in child welfare and it wasn’t unusual for a child to show up for class in dirty, threadbare, smelly, ragged clothing and for the administrators to turn a blind eye to the situation. In those days children of the slums might have had fleas in their clothing, lice and nits in their hair and may not have eaten for days, but few cared because life was tough and it was a struggle for survival of the fittest. It was an age of corporal punishment for bad behavior and not an age for psychological exploration.

Teachers and other parents knew that Mary was strange but this was 1968; the people were poor and they lived in a crime ridden slum near Newcastle in the northeastern part of England. Nobody did anything and even when police got involved, the police didn’t do anything constructive to find out what was happening to this child of the slums.

Mary’s mother suffered from depression and not only did she neglect her child, she exposed Mary to the sight and sounds of her sado-masochistic sex acts, which was the way she earned a living. The family lived in a small, two roomed house so there was nowhere for Mary to go when her prostitute mother brought the clients home. Later in life Mary divulged in an interview that from the age of four, her mother forced Mary to perform sexual acts for the clients. 

It was noted by the school authorities that Mary was a disturbed, angry child. She constantly stared down other children, she was aggressive and she was cunning. Melancholic Mary Bell was evolving into a depraved murderer and nothing was ever done to address her behavior.

Mary’s first murder went unnoticed. The body of little four year old Martin Brown was discovered by a workman in an upstairs room of a derelict building. This was a time when children freely roamed the streets and it was an unwritten rule that every mother kept an eye on everyone else’s children. The children played in tumble down buildings and it wasn’t unusual for a child to disappear for hours before he or she would be missed.

The cause of death was listed as unknown. There were no marks on Martin’s body and so it was left to anyone’s guess what had caused him to die. But there were clues that were missed. Mary Bell and her friend Norma Bell (not a relative), went to the home where Martin Brown’s body was laid out and they brazenly asked Martin’s mother if they could see the body in the casket. It unsettled the mother and the request was denied, but no one gave it much thought, nobody wondered why two eleven year old girls were showing such a keen interest in seeing a dead child.

At school Mary wrote a story about Martin’s death and drew a picture. In this picture there were details that the police had not revealed to the general public, but the picture was also missed until much later after the second murder had been committed.

Mary Bell was described by those who knew her well as intelligent, sadistic, domineering and tough and it seemed to irritate her that the police couldn’t put two and two together even after she had left so many clues for them to find. Mary decided to commit another murder but this time she committed the murder right in front of a nine year old boy. The boy was considered to be slow witted, but he did manage to give a full account of what he saw and as a result, Mary Bell and her friend Norma Bell were finally arrested and charged with manslaughter.

The girls were not charged with murder because it was considered to be a total impossibility for children of that age to premeditate a murder, but of course that supposition is and always was wrong. The second murder happened when Mary and Norma grabbed a three year old boy named Brian Howell and led him to a disused wasteland where Mary strangled him to death. Not only did Mary strangle the little boy she tried to carve the initial “M” onto his abdomen.

Mary Bell wanted to be caught. She left clues for the police, she attended police conferences and pushed her way right to the front so that she could hear everything clearly, and she obviously enjoyed all the drama. The murders were not a cry for help. The murders were committed because it was Mary’s determination to be noticed by the adults around her, adults who had ignored her and who tried to push her to the side and out of everybody’s way. As a result of this neglect, by the age of eleven, Mary had become so self-centered and so self-absorbed that nobody’s life mattered to her except her own. 

During the trial the two girls blamed each other but it was clear that Mary was in control and Norma was just a follower. Mary enjoyed power and like every other melancholic despot she wanted control over other human beings. She was a bully personified, just like her parents. Mary had learned well at her mother’s knee how to terrorize and subdue little children. She learned it by watching her mother subdue the clients with fake torture.

 Psychiatrists observed that during the trial, Mary made no attempt to keep her emotions under tight control because the truth of the matter was that Mary had no emotions in her that needed to be controlled. She had descended to the depths of her cold, melancholic temperament and she maintained her innocence in spite of the overwhelming evidence against her. Mary was impervious, impenetrable and impregnable. She was devoid of all feelings, and she showed no anxiety at all.

Just like Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, Mary Bell the child murderer, was able to insinuate herself into the good graces of those caregivers and psychiatrists who attended to her whilst she was incarcerated. She was released after only twelve years in spite of the fact that one of the attending psychiatrists described her as a psychopath who needed constant supervision and should not be released.

Mary Bell would not take ownership of her crimes. She wrote letters to her mother stating that her mother should take the blame for everything so that Mary could be declared innocent and set free. Neither her dominatrix mother nor her drunken father ever shouldered part of the blame.

The conditions of Mary’s upbringing coupled together with various forms of abuse and an absence of any kind of loving relationship drove Mary to the wrong end of the melancholic spectrum. She embraced every negative trait that was available in the genetic makeup of a Melancholic, just like her counterparts in the adult world, the serial murderers of society. Thankfully most Melancholics do not hover at the wrong end of the spectrum which is murderous cold rage, but the case of Mary Bell shows just how easily it can happen. However a major catastrophe such as incarceration can sometimes, but not always, knock a person who resides at the wrong end of the spectrum towards middle ground, thereafter allowing them to function more like a normal person.

 Child abuse is something that modern society should never tolerate but it is hard to detect and most often the detection if any, comes too late in the life of the child or the child’s victims. 

   Variable Spectrum of Behavior