Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 01.pdf/21

4 one. For several weeks all the skill and all the effort of a great system of police have utterly failed to connect any one with a series of atrocious murders, committed not in solitary places, but in one of the most densely populated districts of London; not in the recesses of some lonely wood, but on the public streets of the largest city in the world. The murderer has succeeded in avoiding suspicion during all this time. No doubt the very immensity of the population may be an element of safety to the guilty person in such a case. If he once get clear of the immediate vicinity of his victim, concealment and escape are obviously more easy amid such a throng, even should he have been momentarily seen in suspicious circumstances. But should no one have seen the deed, and should no one have seen the murderer near the spot, even for a moment, it is not unlike the proverbial looking for a needle in a haystack to begin to seek for him among some hundreds of thousands of men, not to mention the watching of all the countless egresses from the neighborhood.

Yet, after making due allowance for these considerations, it is surprising that, in the present cases, there has been a failure to discover the perpetrator or perpetrators of the moral deeds; for they have not been ordinary murders. They have not been simple in their character or bare of particulars. Not only are the details as revolting as any which the records of medical jurisprudence contain; they are also marked by certain characteristics which at first sight would seem to afford a peculiarly strong likelihood of the crimes being cleared up. The very number of the crimes, the almost exact repetition of the murderer's procedure in each, the similarity of hour and circumstances, the elaborate mutilation of the bodies, the selection of victims from one sex and class only, and the like,—these things might not unnaturally be expected to give some clew. Yet this abundance of circumstances gives none. That all these facts will be strong links in the chain of circumstantial evidence hereafter is almost certain. But something further must first emerge before they can be of use in connecting a criminal with the crimes. So far from giving a clew, they would seem to conspire to baffle the police, who, to judge from indiscriminate arrests and wholesale search, are not yet on the track.

It may not be amiss to consider for a little some of the peculiar features of these murders, in view of the theory which has been put forward and widely favored, that they are the handiwork of a homicidal maniac. Without at all prejudging the case, we may discuss shortly how far the facts give color to this explanation, and how far they consist with alleged instances of this monomania,—the monomanie meurtrière of the French alienists.

In so far as possible we shall, in these few remarks, avoid touching on the question of the reality or non-reality of what is known by the various names of Affective Insanity, Moral Mania, and, in the language of Pinel, who first maintained its existence, Manie (ou Monomanie) sans délire. This derangement is defined by Pritchard as consisting in "a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits, and dispositions, without any notable lesion of the intellect or knowing and reasoning faculties, and particularly without any maniacal hallucination." The reality of such a state has been maintained, though with certain qualifications, by such distinguished alienists as Pinel, Esquirol, Georget, Gale, Rush, Pritchard, Ray, and Professor Maudsley. Yet many call that reality in question, and deny the existence of an irresistible criminal impulse in minds otherwise sound. "Public writers and lawyers," says Dr. Maudsley, "naturally jealous of the application of the doctrine to excuse crime, have rejected and reviled it as a dangerous and absurd legal crotchet; having been probably the more moved to do so because they perceive that, if it be admitted, they will be impotent, by reason of their ignorance of insanity, to put a proper check upon its appli-