Commentary On Murder

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30965, 22 January 1966, Page 4

Commentary On Murder

The World’s Worst Murderers. By Charles Franklin. Odhams. With engravings and index. 320 PP-

Two causes celebre lately in the public eye make this commentary on murder of unusual interest at the present time.

The first is what has become known as the Moorland Murders, which, whatever the final verdict, will surely take its place in any future collection such as Mr Franklin’s. Revolting though the evidence has been of sadistic orgies of torture and killing, the record of murders he sets down makes it regrettably impossible to conclude that this sort of bestiality is unique. Unfortunately, as this book shows, there have been many murders parallel or worse in their cruelties and callousness.

The other currently-prom-inent case is the inquiry whether Timothy Evans, hanged in 1950, was wrongly convicted of the murder of his wife and baby daughter. Three years later John Reginald Halliday Christie, who lived in the same house as the Evanses at 10 Rillingtoh place, Notting Hill, London, confessed to the killing of Mrs Evans before he was executed for a series of murders of women actuated by a perverted sexual urge. Mr Franklin discusses both the Evans and Christie trials in detail and draws some conclusions which provide an informative background to the present inquiry. There are horrors aplenty in this symposium on murders that have made world headlines—there are 23 of them classified under such descriptions as “Human Butchers,” “Psychopaths,” “Mass Murder for Money,” “The Poisoners” and “The Young Intellectuals.”

The collection is not, however, just a parade of horror for horror’s sake. Mr Franklin (real name Frank Usher) is a former journalist and writer of crime novels- who has lately turned his attention to factual crime. In this reviewer’s opinion this book is a thoughtful, worthwhile study of the mental mechanics of murder (we were tempted to say philosophy of murder).

It should be of considerable interest to the criminologist and the psychiatrist, for Mr Franklin points the differences and similarities between one murderer and another and analyses the causes and supposed causes. He is not averse to questioning the conclusions of the eminent crime essayist, Edmund Pearson, in certain respects. He is both critical and complimentary concerning the place of psychiatry in murder trials, and he frankly questions the legal systems of several countries that come within his purview. In England, for instance, he claims that the odds are unduly loaded in favour of the accused.

I Christchurch, New Zealand, has earned an inglori-

ous place in this volume with a full discussion of the Pauline Parker-Juliet Hulme sensation. Under the heading of “The Young Intellectuals,” it is paired with the notorious Leopold and Leob trial in the United States earlier in this century. Mr Franklin says of the two girls: “The New Zealand law was certainly very lenient with them. They spent only five years in prison for their quite appalling murder. The fact that it was 34 years before the American authorities allowed Leopold out of prison shows how public opinion has changed, or perhaps how the century has speeded up. Pauline and Juliet reckoned to have some motive—the fact that Pauline’s mother was bent on ending their unhealthy relationship. But Leopold and Leob were bored and feckless youths who murdered in order to get a thrill out of life. ...”