Serial Killer Investigations (51 page)

If that need is satisfied, then the next level emerges—the sexual level. This is not merely the need for sex, but the need to love and be cared for.

If this is satisfied, the next level is self-esteem, the need to be liked and respected by one’s fellows, and if possible to be admired. This is the level of the ‘wannabe’ that we have encountered so frequently in this book. As I thought about this, I saw the same levels emerging in the development of society in the past few centuries—and in the types of crime in those societies.

In the eighteenth century, the majority of people were at that basic level, the need to get enough to eat. So crime was also basic, most of it connected with robbery.

In the nineteenth century, things had advanced, and there was now a middle class whose chief needs were connected with their homes and domestic security. The crime historian thinks of the mid-nineteenth century as the age of domestic murder. But a new level is also emerging

—the sexual level. In the US, a doctor named H. H. Holmes lures women into his ‘murder castle’—complete with hidden doors and secret rooms—to violate them and dispose of their bodies, and Sunday school teacher Theodore Durrant murders and rapes two young women in San Francisco. In England there is Jack the Ripper, in France, Joseph Vacher, a mentally deranged journeyman who rapes and mutilates peasant women. The age of sex crime has begun, and it escalates in the twentieth century into serial murder.

In the 1920s, the next level, the self-esteem level, makes its tentative appearance with Leopold and Loeb, the wealthy students who wish to see themselves as intellectual supermen. But self-esteem crime gets into its stride in the 1950s, with Melvin Rees, and in the 1960s with the Moors Murders and Charles Manson. Self-esteem criminals need to impose their will on other people. DeBardeleben belongs to this type; so does Leonard Lake and Jack Unterweger.

But beyond that, Maslow posits the next level of the hierarchy of needs: self-actualisation. Not all people rise to this level, but in our society, the number of self-actualisers increases steadily. It is, of course, the creative level, but not necessarily artistic or intellectual creation. It may be somebody who enjoys putting ships in bottles or making dolls. Maslow knew a woman who was so good at bringing up children that when her own were grown up she went on adopting more, just for the sheer pleasure it gave her.

And of course, there is no category of violent crime associated with the self-actualisation level. The two are a contradiction in terms. This explains why no creative artist has ever committed a premeditated murder—which would seem to imply that at the next level of social evolution, crime will naturally decrease.

There is another interesting mechanism of change that points towards the same conclusion: what the biologist Rupert Sheldrake calls ‘formative causation’, which, in effect, guarantees the increase in the number of self-actualisers. Formative causation takes place through the influence of a factor that Sheldrake has labelled ‘morphogenetic fields’, which you might compare to the field around a magnet, which can be communicated to other magnets.

The wing of a bird or the tentacle of an octopus is shaped by a kind of electrical ‘mould’—just like the moulds into which we pour jellies—which is why many creatures can regrow a limb that has been cut off. These ‘moulds’ seem to be magnetic fields, which shape the living molecules just as a magnet can ‘shape’ iron filings into a pattern. Sheldrake suggests that these ‘fields’ can be used to explain some rather odd observations made by biologists.

For example, in 1920 the psychologist William McDougal performed an experiment at Harvard to see if baby rats could inherit abilities developed by their parents (the ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’ that Darwinists regard as such a fearful heresy). He put white rats into a tank of water from which they could escape up one of two gangplanks. One gangplank had an electric current running through it, and the first generation of rats soon learned to choose the other one. Then McDougal tried the same experiment on their children, and then on their grandchildren, and so on. And he found that each generation learned more quickly than its parents—that is, he had proved that the inheritance of acquired characteristics does occur.

Now when a scientist performs an experiment on a group of animals, he always keeps an exactly similar group who are not subjected to experiments; these are called the ‘control group’—the purpose being to have a ready standard of comparison. When a colleague of McDougal’s—W. E. Agar of Melbourne—repeated his experiment, he also decided to test the control group at the end of several generations. To his baffled astonishment, these also showed the same ability to learn more quickly. And that was impossible, for they had merely been sitting passively in cages. It looked as if the control rats had learned by some kind of telepathy.

Not telepathy, says Sheldrake, but by ‘morphic resonance’. The control group of rats ‘picked up’ the morphogenetic field of the trained rats in the same way that an iron bar can pick up the electrical field of a coil of wire and turn into a magnet: simple induction.

Incredibly, this seems to work not only with living creatures but with crystals. New chemicals, when synthesised for the first time, are often extremely difficult to crystallise. But as soon as one of them has been crystallised in any laboratory in the world, it becomes easier to crystallise in all the others. At first, it was suspected that scientists travelling from one laboratory to another might be carrying fragments of crystals in their clothes or beards—or even that tiny quantities are carried in the atmosphere. Both explanations seem highly unlikely. The likeliest, Sheldrake suggests, is a process of ‘induction’ through morphogenetic fields.

A series of experiments has been performed to test the Sheldrake hypothesis and has produced positive results. At Yale, Professor Gary Schwartz found that people who do not know Hebrew were able to distinguish between real words in Hebrew and false words—because Jews all over the world already know the genuine words. Alan Pickering of Hatfield Polytechnic obtained the same result using Persian script. In another experiment, English-speaking people were asked to memorise two rhymes in a foreign language—one a well-known nursery rhyme, one a newly composed rhyme. The result—as the hypothesis of formative causation predicts—is that they learned the traditional rhyme more easily than the newly composed one.

We can see that this must also be true of self-actualisation. When the number of self-actualisers in a society has increased beyond a certain critical mass, it will go on increasing by the action of morphogenetic fields.

Which explains why, on the whole, I do not share the current pessimism about the way the world is going. Human beings seem to have an odd ability to solve apparently intractable problems with a mixture of determination and serendipity; faced with such problems, they seem to have the ability to set unknown forces in motion. Or, as Buckminster Fuller put it: ‘I seem to be a verb.’

Crime is a disintegrative force. Self-actualisation is an integrative force. And the lesson of history is that it is the integrative force that finally prevails.