Serial misogynist murder
Theodore Johnson first killed a woman in 1981. He tipped his wife Yvonne over the balcony of their ninth-floor flat in Blakenhall Gardens, Wolverhampton, having already hit her with a vase. Well, they had been arguing – a factor that enabled him to plead guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of provocation. The second woman Johnson killed was Yvonne Bennett, in 1992. He strangled her with a belt while their baby slept. Her “provocation” was that she refused the box of chocolates he had bought to win her back; he was able to plead diminished responsibility and, after a two-year stay in a secure psychiatric unit, was released and again free to form new relationships. Then, in December 2016, Angela Best became the third victim of Johnson, 64, and on Friday he will be sentenced for her murder. Best’s spur to his violence had simply been to end their relationship and start a new one with someone else.
Couldn’t someone have warned Yvonne Bennett and Angela Best? Shouldn’t Johnson have had some sort of large conspicuous non-removable warning label attached to him?
Paula Cocozza, the author, says there are more such cases, as well as the background violence.
According to the Office for National Statistics, one woman in four experiences domestic violence in her lifetime, and two women are killed each week in England and Wales by a current or former partner.
Prof David Wilson is a criminologist with a special interest in serial killers. “When I looked at Theodore Johnson,” he says, “I saw a man who has killed three or more people in a period greater than 30 days. Technically, he’s a serial killer. What is the context in which he has been able to kill, especially after being incarcerated on two separate occasions? That context is misogyny. Women being killed by men who are in a relationship with them is seen as a thing that happens, something that just occurs. Last year, two women a week died at the hands of their partners or ex-partners. That is an extraordinary figure that begins to reveal something not about serial murder but about the phenomenon of everyday murder. There is this unreflective acceptance that violence towards women is normalised.”
Just one of those things, like fires and floods.
This year the government will introduce a domestic violence and abuse act, the specific proposals of which have yet to be announced, but which should help to clarify and unify the police response to domestic violence. The biggest change Jacob would like to see is better sharing of information. She reads a lot of domestic homicide reviews and many disclose that communication could have been better. Agencies such as police, probation, health services, housing, adult social care, child social care and substance abuse services “are holding back information from each other which, if shared, could save lives”.
At some point in the future, she will read the domestic homicide review for the case of Best’s murder by Johnson. What it won’t say is that the context of domestic violence still somehow persuades too many of us that such murders should be valued differently from a random killing by a homicidal stranger.
“It’s somehow seen as not as large a breach of the social contract we all have with each other,” says Liz Kelly, the director of the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit at London Metropolitan University. Nor is the review likely to mention misogyny, a word that is also absent from risk assessment forms. As Kelly says, “Misogyny is not seen as a form of extreme dangerousness … We need to identify these men who hate women and [understand] that they are a danger to all women.”
That’s the thing. We’re often told it’s “just talk” (or just trolling or just the internet or just a reaction to the “control left”), but it’s not safe to assume that.
Part of the horror for me is the flimsy excuses were seen as sufficient to allow him to plead guilty to a lesser charge when he killed each of these women. Can someone explain to me exactly why the ‘diminished responsibility on grounds of provocation’ even exists? What the hell kind of excuse is that? It’s victim blaming enshrined into law. I don’t care how provoking someone is, if they’re not physically attacking you then there’s no excuse for killing them.
I guess it’s because that is how the law categorizes murder? It distinguishes between planned calculated murder and the impulsive kind?
That’s not wrong, I think – it’s certainly an improvement on the enthusiastic application of the death penalty to crimes like poaching not all that long ago. A law that takes motivations and states of mind into account is more humane than a law that doesn’t.
But. Yes, then you get travesties like this.
I lost a cousin in this way. She and her husband were arguing in a bar. He left, drove all the way home, got his gun, and brought it back to shoot her. For some reason, this was seen as not pre-meditated, and he got manslaughter. A few years later, he was out of jail and got his kids back.
How can it not be pre-meditated if you have to go home, get your gun, and drive all the way back to the bar to shoot her? Just because they were arguing before? But I am sure that she was perceived as having provoked him, and a woman provoking a man is often considered justifiable homicide, at least in an unspoken world that doesn’t say out loud, hey she was a woman, why didn’t she just quit bothering him?
But women who take weapons to men who are abusing them often aren’t so lucky with the courts.
Jezus. I’m sorry.
That “with provocation” thing is so easy to translate to “she had it coming” “she wouldn’t shut up” “she gained weight” “she had a headache” – it’s creepy.
In practice the balance of how the courts handle this has shifted. At the time of the first two murders a man could plead “provocation” on the flimsiest of excuses and given a good lawyer would probably get away with it. A woman who had been abused for years and finally killed the bastard when an opportunity arose would find it almost impossible to get the charge reduced.
We campaigned, of course. Lots of us. I forget exactly how but during the early years of the Labour government 1997-2010 the courts began to treat that plea differently, though I think it is still on the books.
Have we got an English lawyer handy?
The industrialization of prosecution certainly helps make it worse. Plea-bargaining helps fill the jails, and keeps the courtroom workload down.
And socially, serial killers are assumed to be deranged loners; but men like Johnson function in broad daylight. They never seem to lack for new victims, their behavior passes for normal because it actually IS normal enough to pass.
An assumption that probably isn’t true. Being alone is not the same as being a loner; a loner likes being alone, and doesn’t go on killing sprees because they are left alone. In fact, I suspect the thing that would send them over the edge is a surfeit of interpersonal interactions. They are not necessarily selfish, angry, or depressed.