By Theodore Dalrymple
Even murderers in prison have a moral hierarchy, the lowest of their low being the killers of children for sexual purposes.
Ian Huntley killed two ten-year-old girls for such purposes in the small town of Soham in Cambridgeshire in 2002. He had been suspected by the police of many sexual attacks on women and young girls in a different area of the country when he was appointed school caretaker in Soham, and later (while in prison) admitted to having raped an 11-year-old girl. He had no actual convictions at the time of his school appointment; the vetting procedure failed to reveal the police’s prior suspicions.
He received a sentence of a minimum of 40 years’ imprisonment.
In 2005, a man named Mark Hobson threw boiling water over Huntley in prison. Hobson had been doing time for killing his girlfriend with 17 hammer blows; then, a week later, luring her sister to his flat, where he tortured, raped, and strangled her; and then, a day later, murdering an elderly couple during a burglary. But at least he, Hobson, was not a child murderer.
In 2011, Damien Fowkes—an armed robber who had already strangled a child murderer named Colin Hatch to death in prison—cut Huntley’s throat, and said, when he learned that Huntley had not died, that he wished he had killed him. At least Fowkes was not a child murderer.
On February 26 of this year, a man named Anthony Russell was almost certainly the one who fashioned an instrument in the prison workshop whose spike he fatally planted in Huntley’s brain. Russell was in prison for having strangled a man whom he thought to be having an affair with his girlfriend; he murdered the man’s mother, too, inflicting more than 100 injuries on her; then he raped and murdered another young woman whom he had lured to her death with promises of a drug deal, and also committed a violent robbery fracturing his victim’s skull. But at least Russell was not a child murderer.
All four of the above-named, who between them killed 11 people, were diagnosed as psychopaths. Though devoid of moral sense, they were capable of moral outrage. Russell reportedly shouted exultantly, “I’ve done it, I’ve done it!” after he attacked Huntley, to the reported applause of the other prisoners, many of whom would have been murderers themselves.
The capacity for moral outrage, of course, is not the same as a moral sense, let alone as morality itself.
First published in City Journal
