It's a shame that the hopes of the festive season don't last, but that's nothing new. In the past few days, hardly into 2018, we have been presented with two failures of the judicial and mental health systems by the Parole Board's decision to release the multiple sex offender, John Warboys and the belated permanent incarceration of the triple murderer, Theodore Johnson. As regular readers of this blog know, I have written many times about the iniquity of releasing violent mental health patients who kill again. During 2015 and 2016, I wrote about this issue so much that I decided not to touch upon it at all last year.
The case of Theodore Johnson, however, is so shocking that I feel I must comment upon it. What staggers me is not simply the horrific murder of his former partner, Angela Best, but the fact that his two previous killings were classed as manslaughter. Take, for example, his first slaying: the killing of his first wife, Yvonne Johnson in November, 1981. They lived on the 9th floor of a block of flats in Wolverhampton until one evening when they quarrelled. Johnson hit his wife over the head with a vase and shoved her over their balcony. Incredibly, he was able to plead provocation and serve a sentence for manslaughter. Had he simply lashed out in anger, something could be said for it, but shoving someone from a balcony requires some forethought and, I think, should have been classed as murder.
When he murdered by strangulation another woman, Yvonne Bennett, in 1992, alarm bells should have rung loud and clear about Johnson, but the response of the authorities was approaching complacent. Even though he had killed before, and his justification for the crime was absurd - he said she had provoked him by refusing a box of chocolates he offered as a "let's make up" gift - he was able to plead diminished responsibility and released after just two years in a secure mental health unit. And, as we know, he murdered Angela Best in December, 2016, after she left him for another partner. From previous study of violent mental patients, this repeated violence is no surprise to me, nor is the failure of Johnson's supervisors to find that he was in a relationship with Best.
Nor is Johnson the only serial killer of his partners. Paula Cocozza, in The Guardian, highlights the fact that one in every four women experiences domestic violence in her lifetime, and two women are killed every week in England and Wales by a current or former partner. This, then, is not simply a mental health issue, but a feminist issue also. Professor David Wilson, who specialises in the study of serial killers, says that this statistic reveals something about murder in general:
"There is this unreflective acceptance that violence towards women is normalised".
Whether Johnson was simply misogynistic or mad (I suspect both!) is now an academic matter, but the wider issue of violence against women is something we urgently need to address.
The case of the other misogynistic thug, John Worboys, raises the other criminal issue that affects women (and sometimes men): that of rape and sexual abuse of all kinds. The controversy over his release is hot news at the moment and there is no need to go over it here. What we can examine is the issue raised many years ago by Lenny Bruce when he said that the difference between rape and seduction was one of technique. There is no doubt about wrongdoing in Worboys' case, of course. When the police arrested him in 2008 after a six-year spell of attacks against female passengers in his black cab, they found a "rape kit" in his car containing champagne miniatures, plastic gloves, a torch, vibrators, condoms, sleeping tablets and an ashtray he used to crush drugs. How this man can be thought eligible for parole is beyond me. However, is this not simply an extension of candle light, soft music and sparkling champagne (or their equivalent) as a seduction technique? I would say "not really", but I can see why many women might say it was.
To conclude: I am happy that Theodore Johnson is now in jail for 26 years and thus unable to kill any more women. Thanks to a suicide attempt, he is physically incapacitated anyway. The BBC says:
"In mitigation for Johnson, Annette Henry QC said: "He does not wish to be alive. He hates himself for what happened".
Whether this was a plea for sympathy or euthanasia was not made clear.
As for Worboys, he will be a marked man on his release, although there might be a chance of his being prosecuted for previous offences against women, and for which he was not charged. Worboys is 60; Johnson was 64 at the time of his latest murder. That means, should Warboys be paroled, he is still young enough to re-offend. It is all too easy to imagine the furore in the media and the reaction of the mental health authorities should that happen:
"Sympathy for the victim... failure of someone...an inquiry will be held...lessons will be learned..."
Yes, I can hear it now...
