Understanding Autism - No Excuses for Crime

 

I liked to think that there was nothing much that could shock me. As regular readers of this blog know, the darker side of life gets covered a lot on here. Vladimir Putin, Axel Rudakubana, Nicola Edgington and many other pitiless killers have featured in blog items over the years, and I was happy at being able to cope with these matters, despite my feelings of revulsion.

Then, to disturb my complacency, there erupted the case of  Nicholas Prosper, seen above. As the BBC says:

"Nicholas Prosper used a shotgun to kill his mother Juliana Falcon, 48, his brother Kyle, 16, and 13-year-old sister, Giselle, at their home in Luton on 13 September 2024".

Seldom has a single sentence seemed so shattering. The Southport murders last year were devastating enough, but this mass killing of a family seemed to violate all the normal feelings and principles of human relationships - an act of unmitigated, blatant evil, to rank with the Southport stabbings. Prosper, however, wanted to go further than Axel Rudakubana in his vile, anti-human crimes. Beyond the heinous crime of killing his family members, Prosper wanted to wipe out a class of young children at the primary school that he had attended when younger. And he would have done, had the police not caught him in time. 

Well, it comes as a relief to know that according to Prosper's defence counsel, David Bentley, his client is not a psychopath but (quoted in The Metro): 

"socially impaired with autistic traits...a young man who has gone down an internet wormhole".

Yes, I was being sarcastic. That is no relief at all. Addiction to the internet is no excuse for such a despicable atrocity. But we can now discern something that Rudakubana and Prosper have in common: Autism. And I have to admit that I did not fully understand this condition. So, I have made some effort to understand it better, especially as people as diverse as Elon Musk, Chris Packham (the naturalist) and Anne Hegarty (of "The Chase") have been diagnosed as autistic.

So what is it?, I asked myself. I turned to the website of the National Autistic Society (NAS), where I found a happily straightforward explanation:

"Autism influences how people experience and interact with the world. It is a lifelong neurodivergence and disability. Autistic people are different from each other, but for a diagnosis they must share differences from non-autistic people in how they think, feel and communicate".

Autistic people may feel and react to stimuli differently to non-autistic people. They might find social mixing bewildering and tiring, and could become overwhelmed in noisy, crowded places. They can have absorbing hobbies which reinforce their sense of social isolation by providing a personal refuge from society. They could prefer regular routine, and move or act in repetitive ways to calm themselves down or express feelings. Often, they mask their discomfort to fit in with others, which can lead to unhappiness that leads to mental illness.

So then, I learned that the two killers under discussion were not actual psychotic murderers. Simply being autistic did not make them mentally ill, but disabled. The so-called "autistic traits" manifested themselves in a fascination with mass murder (Rudakubana) and for Prosper down his internet wormhole, a fixation with a book called (unbelievably) "How to Kill Your Family". Were it up to me, the author of that book would be serving a Life sentence along with his acolyte, Nicholas Prosper.

It needs to be said then, that these two are not typical of the murderous mental health patients that I have blogged about so often. Rudakubana and Prosper knew what they were doing.

As Judge Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb told Prosper: 

"You intended to unleash disaster on the community. Your plans were intelligent, calculating and selfish. Your ambition was notoriety...The lives of your mother, brother and sister were collateral damage on the way".

The remarks of the judge were highly appropriate to Prosper and, incidentally, about Rudakubana, who applied his intelligence to the careful planning of the Hart Street murders.

But is there a wider issue here? After all, there have been other senseless murders by socially isolated individuals before. There was the Hungerford Massacre by Michael Ryan in 1987; the Dunblane Massacre by Thomas Hamilton in 1996 and, in 2021, the mass shooting in Plymouth by 22-year old Jake Davison.

In the London Standard of March 20, Maddy Musseen wrote perceptibly of the Netflix series, "Adolescence" which she relates to the women-hating "incel" online "community". She writes of Rudakubana here:

"Southport killer Axel Rudakubana, who stabbed to death three young girls at a Taylor Swift dance class last July, was remembered by a former classmate in The Times for “how a look would flash across his face whenever the topic of women’s rights came up in class”."

Perhaps, then, absorbing online misogyny played a part in the planning of the crimes of Rudakubana and Prosper. I believe, however, that any explanations of their crimes must not be allowed as excuses. Personally, I have read a number of explanations and am still shocked at their deeds. The words of Detective Chief Inspector Sam Khanna about Prosper describe Rudakubana also:

 "...truly evil...I've never encountered anyone capable of such horrific acts, showing no remorse".

My final words on Nicholas Prosper and Axel Rudakubana is that I hope that they are never released.