Stop Asking Yourself Why and What

Good advice from Patricia about “not questioning yourself”! About “psychopaths” versus “sociopaths,” here’s an account of a murder that happened way back in 1965. I’ve only changed one or two names and other details “to protect the innocent” (and the guilty), as it were. I wonder whether people think the perpetrator was a “psychopath,” a “sociopath,” or whatever, and what they think of the sentence he received for his crime.

This man—I’ll call him Lewis—was born on 27 July 1942. He was married on 27 April 1963, which made him just shy of 21 at the time. But his marriage only lasted a few months. He left his wife, claiming she was “abusive” to him, and had an affair with a young black woman.

Lewis must have gotten this woman pregnant in early October the same year, a bare six months after his marriage, because she bore a child to him on the Fourth of July the following year, 1964. (No problem remembering that date!) They named their baby girl Deborah.

Although the two of them were lodging together at the time, this black woman said she didn’t want the child. She felt she was “too young to be a mother.” After a few weeks she disappeared, leaving Lewis literally “holding the baby.”

For a few weeks Lewis did his best to look after little Debbie, getting help from babysitters while he worked his day job, since he had no family who could help him. But he didn’t feel up to the job of being a single father in the long term. So he found an older woman named Laura who was willing to act as foster mother to the baby for a while.

Laura and her husband looked after little Debbie for the next nine months of her life. But Lewis wanted to have the little girl permanently adopted, and he wasn’t having any luck. As fond as they were of the baby, Laura and her husband, who had four children of their own, felt they were too old to raise another child from infancy. They kept pushing Lewis to make some permanent arrangement for the child’s future before she got much older.

Lewis meanwhile was running into barriers of his own. Because the baby was of mixed race, back in the 1960s Lewis was having trouble finding anyone willing to adopt her. As if that wasn’t bad enough, because the baby’s mother had disappeared and couldn’t be traced, Lewis couldn’t get her official permission to have the child adopted. He did apply to an adoption agency, but they refused to help him because they believed the documents he gave them were forged.

But after much pressure from Laura about the baby’s future, Lewis was able to tell her in May of 1965 that the problem was solved. The baby’s mother had reappeared and changed her mind. She did want little Debbie after all. However, she’d moved to a city some distance away where she’d found a job, and Lewis was flying out there with the baby the very next day. He promised to let Laura know how Debbie was getting on as he drove away from her suburban home. When he left, the little girl was seven weeks shy of her first birthday.

The days passed, and turned into weeks, but Laura heard nothing further from Lewis. She called the house where he’d been lodging, but they said he’d left weeks before, leaving no forwarding address. Disappointed, Laura wondered if everything had gone as planned. She called the airline on which Lewis said he’d booked a flight. They had no record of anyone of his name taking a flight on the day he’d mentioned. Or the next day, or the next. Lewis and the baby seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth.

Weeks turned into months. Then in August of that year, a man was walking his dog in a nearby forest when he came across some tattered baby clothes lying on the ground. He poked at the bundle with his stick, and found to his horror that they were concealing the badly decayed body of a baby. Both hands and one foot were missing, having been chewed away by animals. The man called the police, and they published a description of the clothes the dead child had been wearing. Laura saw it on the television news. Right away she knew it was Debbie.

It didn’t take the police long to trace Lewis to the city he’d moved to and bring him back. Despite what he’d claimed, he never had reconnected with the child’s mother. It was all lies. At first he refused to cooperate with police inquiries. But after intense questioning, he eventually admitted he’d killed his baby daughter, the very same day he’d collected her from Laura’s home.

After a car journey during which the baby cried most of the time, he took her straight to a nearby river where he drowned her in deep water. After that, he wrapped the dead baby in a sheet, laid her on the floor of his car and bashed in her skull with two or three blows from a car jack. He didn’t have the means to bury her there and then, so he had to leave her in his car until the next day when he borrowed a spade from a friend, drove out into the woods and dug a shallow grave for the baby’s body. When he’d finished, it was lunchtime, so he went to a local bar and drank several brandies. He then met some friends in a nearby town and had a few beers with them. All along he kept up the pretense that nothing untoward had happened.

Asked to explain his actions, Lewis said:

“It was my duty, as her father, to give her the best I could, and what better place than heaven… I had nothing to offer her. I thought about taking her life for some time. I can’t remember now just how long, but I felt she was getting bigger all the time and it had to be done soon, because the bigger she got the more difficult it would have been to take her life.”

Lewis claimed that after burying his little daughter, he had “said a prayer” before placing an old log over her grave. Afterwards he fortified himself with those shots of brandy. He went on to say:

“I passed judgment on my own child and tried to do what would be best for her without a mother, home or love. I put her into a life of utter bliss, with God in heaven.

I strongly feel that, being the father of the child, I had every right to do this and that it was God’s will.

I would never have taken her life could I have felt sure that there would be some happiness for her, but to be faced with the above circumstances, it just did not seem fair. I feel I gave her a true Christian burial.”

Whether Lewis was sincere, or whether this was a bogus sob story to gain sympathy—not to mention whether he “had every right to do” such a violent deed—is up to the reader to judge. Though I can’t resist thinking that even if a parent did work himself up to perform an act of euthanasia on a child he supposedly “loved,” surely he would have chosen a gentler method of “putting the child to sleep,” such as smothering, instead of bashing in the poor kid’s head with a lump of iron.

I’ll only add that when Lewis, 23 years old by now, appeared in court to answer the charge of murdering little Debbie, he was able to find two doctors to give evidence in his defense. One of them said:

“There is a history of psychoneurosis and instability in his childhood. This was aggravated by his unhappy marriage, by finding himself alone with an unwanted baby, and, possibly [but only “possibly,” please note—this was obviously pure speculation on the doctor’s part]—in a state of anxiety and depression which culminated in the killing of his child. Therefore I think at the material time Lewis had abnormality of mind amounting to disease which substantially impaired his mental responsibility.

Would you buy that as an excuse? All of this happened in the ultra-“liberal” Sixties, when the latest and most “progressive” thinking about criminals held that they’re “not responsible” for their acts, that they “couldn’t help it” because they’d all had such a terrible childhood (and all the rest of it). So all we had to do was treat them kindly to make up for the dreadful time they’d had, and they’d soon reward us by reforming and leading upright lives from then on.

In this remarkable climate of forgiveness, Lewis was able to plead guilty to a lesser charge than murder—and the court accepted his plea. What’s more, he didn’t even have to serve any jail time! As he stood in court with tears in his eyes, the judge let him off with probation!

So what do you think? Did Lewis hoodwink the court? And was he a “psychopath,” a “sociopath,” or what?