EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) (2 page)

Part One: Psychopathic Killers In History 

Emperor Nero

He was quite simply a megalomaniac from a long line of psychopaths.

His grandfather led the way. Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus had been savage and cruel. The gladiatorial contests he organised were so bloody and vicious that the Emperor Augustus had to ask him to tone things down a little. His father, Gnaeus, once rode his horse over a small child on the Appian Way, the road connecting Rome with southeast Italy, just for fun. He was also reported to have gouged out a man’s eyes for criticising him and killed another man for not drinking as much as he had been ordered to. Gnaeus lived a debauched life, he was a serial adulterer and enjoyed an incestuous relationship with his sister, Domitia Lepida. He was known to defraud bankers and when he occupied the important position of Praetor, Nero made a habit of swindling charioteers, victorious in the games, of their prize money. The great Roman historian, Suetonius, described him as ‘despicable and dishonest’.

Nero’s mother, Agrippina, great granddaughter of Emperor Augustus, also came from a troubled background. Born during the reign of the tyrannical Emperor Tiberius, she witnessed her two brothers starved to death by order of Tiberius. To make matters worse, not only did she have her first sexual experience at the age of twelve, but it was with her surviving brother, the future emperor, Caligula. In 39, Agrippina and her sister, Julia Livilla were discovered to be involved in a plot to murder Caligula and replace him with their late sister Drusilla’s widower, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus. Lepidus was executed and the two women were sent into exile on the Pontine Islands where they had to dive for sponges to earn a living. Nero’s first few years, therefore, were spent in relative poverty. Meanwhile Gnaeus died when Nero was three, thus escaping trial for treason, incest and adultery.

Following the assassination of Caligula in 41 CE, Agrippina was recalled to Rome by the new emperor, Claudius, who was her uncle. She married a rich and influential Roman, Passienus Crispus, who divorced his wife, Messalina, for her and when he died not long after – probably as a result of poison administered by his wife – she became a very wealthy widow.

A few years later, she added position to wealth when she became the wife of the Emperor Claudius whose third wife, Messalina, had been executed for plotting to kill him. Agrippina used her influence to persuade her husband to adopt her young son, Nero, as his heir, over his own son with Messalina, Britannicus. Nero also came under the influence of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the stoic philosopher who had been appointed his tutor. Her next step in the fulfilment of her ambitions was to have the fiancé of Claudius’s daughter Octavia falsely accused of having committed incest with his sister. This allowed Agrippina to engineer the marriage of Nero to his half-sister.

The only obstacle that remained in Nero’s way was Claudius himself and he had begun to talk once more of his son Britannicus being restored as heir to the throne. Agrippina dealt with this threat in the same way as she had dealt her second husband. She had Claudius poisoned in 54 CE. The following year, Britannicus died in suspicious circumstances at a dinner.

Nero, the fifth and final emperor of the Julian dynasty gained power at the age of sixteen, the youngest emperor until that time. His reign began well. He had the advice of good men – Seneca and Sextus Afranius Burrus, a Praetorian prefect. After around five years in power, however, the habits of his family began to predominate. He began to indulge in debauchery, eating and drinking to excess and he took his servant, Acte, as mistress, arousing the jealousy of his mother, Agrippina who, some commentators have suggested, was involved in an incestuous relationship with her son. This irritated Nero and he banished his mother to a separate residence. However, it was not long before he became bored with Acte and, anyway, he had fallen in love with the ruthlessly ambitious Sabina Poppaea. Around this time, however, he began to take an interest in male companions, probably under the influence of Seneca. He cultivated a favourite, Doryphorus, possibly because he resembled his mother. It did not last long, however. Nero had him poisoned in 62 CE.

He also made several attempts to murder his mother, especially when she began to side with his wife Octavia in opposition to his new love and even began to support the claim of Britannicus to the throne of Rome. An attempt to poison her failed. Then, he arranged for the ceiling of her bedroom to collapse on top of her, but that also failed. He even went as far as having a collapsible boat built. However, following its collapse at sea, she managed to swim ashore. Eventually, he took the obvious option – he sent someone to beat her and stab her to death and dressed her death up as suicide. But in all honesty, no one missed her. The Roman Senate had never got on with her and Nero was glad to have removed her influence from his life.

He returned to his life of fun and games – staging chariot races and athletics at grand festivals. He put on musical contests at which he could compete, and, obviously win. The Senate was appalled. It was considered undignified to perform in public and for an emperor to do it was unthinkable. Nonetheless, Nero loved it, to the extent that no one was allowed to leave the auditorium while he was on stage accompanying himself on the lyre. Women are said to have given birth while he performed, so afraid were they to leave the auditorium and men sometimes feigned death in order to get out of his marathon performances.

In 62 CE, a new and pernicious adviser entered Nero’s circle. Following the death of Burrus from illness, two new men took office – Faenius Rufus and the cruel and licentious former lover of Agrippina, Gaius Ofonius Tigellinus. When Nero had come to power, he had stopped the hated treason courts that had blighted Rome for many years. Tigellinus re-introduced them. It all proved too much for the wise adviser, Seneca, who resigned as things began to deteriorate at court. That same year, Nero ordered the execution of his wife Octavia for adultery and life became a vile round of sport, music, orgies and murder. He married Sabina Poppaea but would later kick her to death one night after she complained about him coming home late from horse-racing.

The Great Fire of Rome on the night of 18 July in the year 64 CE was devastating for the city. Many Roman houses were made of wood, helping the fire to spread very quickly. It burned for six days and seven nights, destroying four of the fourteen Roman districts and seriously damaging another seven. Of course, the legend has grown that Nero ‘fiddled while Rome burned’, an impossible feat as the violin would not be invented until many centuries later. Some have said that he did climb onto the roof of his palace, however, to get the best view of the conflagration and that he sang a song, The Capture of Troy, as he watched. Others claim that he tried to control the fire and afterwards funded the re-building of large parts of the city from his own pocket. However, it does seem suspicious that after the fire he built his ‘Golden Palace’ on large parts of the city that had been decimated by it. He added pleasure gardens to it, a large artificial lake in the centre and a thirty metre-high statue of himself. If the fire had not destroyed such large parts of Rome, the palace could not have been constructed. The Roman people remained suspicious.

Nero had no doubts. He blamed it on the growing religious sect, the Christians, followers of the recently crucified Jesus of Nazareth. He punished them by crucifying them like their leader or by throwing them to wild animals in the circus. He horrifically used many of them to illuminate his garden at night, tying them to stakes and setting light to them.

There were forces moving against him, however. A plot known as the ‘Pisonian Conspiracy’ was uncovered. Seneca was amongst the nineteen executions and suicides that followed its discovery. Nero had people executed or invited to commit suicide purely on the basis that he disliked them or was suspicious of them. There were no trials.

Towards the end of the decade, he travelled to Greece to take part in the Olympic Games where he won, naturally – everyone was too frightened to defeat him at anything. He even won the chariot race although he tumbled from his chariot.

Meanwhile back in Rome the treason trials continued. Numerous generals, senators and nobles were put to death merely on suspicion that they were conspiring against the emperor. There was also a shortage of food and the people of Rome were becoming agitated. He was summoned back from Greece but it was too late. In March 68 CE, Gaius Julius Vindex, Governor of Gallia Lugdunensis, a vast swathe of modern-day central France, rescinded his oath of allegiance to the emperor and encouraged others, including seventy-one-year-old Galba, Governor of northern and eastern Spain, to do the same. Nero sent legions from the Rhine and they defeated Vindex at the Battle of Vesontio, following which Vindex committed suicide. Unfortunately for Nero, however, the troops sent from Germany also revolted, refusing any longer to acknowledge his leadership. In Africa, Lucius Clodius Mace followed suit but his defection was altogether more serious as he was able to cut off much of Rome’s food supply which came from North Africa. He informed the Senate that he was ready to replace Nero, if required.

The Emperor was helpless, spending his time devising new tortures with which to punish the rebels when he finally defeated them The only man who could have helped him, Tigellinus, was seriously ill and without him, he was lost. The Senate voted to condemn him to death by flogging. But, reluctant to die in this manner, he slashed his own throat as the soldiers approached to take him away. Not quite dead, he was finished off by a servant. ‘What an artist the world is losing!’ he cried as he prepared for death. His high opinion of himself continued to the end.

Charles Vi Of France

What a strange sight he must have been. Wild and unwashed – he had not washed for five months, in fact – and with iron bars in his clothes as supports and protection. The problem was that he had come to believe in recent months that he was made of glass and was terrified of being broken. He had also decided that his name was George and did not have a clue who his wife was when she came to visit him.

Charles VI was very ill. It is suggested nowadays that he suffered from schizophrenia, many of his symptoms being those of a schizophrenic. Porphyria, the disease that blighted the life of Great Britain’s King George III, is also suggested. Porphyria is a hereditary illness that results in delirium and visual and auditory disturbances as well as giving its victims painful physical symptoms such as inflammation of the bowels, painful weakness in the limbs and loss of feeling. Porphyria has certainly been diagnosed as existing amongst a number of Charles’s ancestors.

Indeed, the French monarchy had its share of mad rulers, the first of which was probably Clovis II, known as ‘the Do-Nothing’. His great-grandson, Childeric III was known, for obvious reasons, as ‘the Idiot’ and Robert of Clermont, an ancestor of the Bourbons, who lived at the end of the thirteenth century, seems to have become a psychopath after receiving several blows to the head during a tournament. The 16th century King Charles IX was mentally unstable with sadistic tendencies and uncontrollable rages. In the 18th century, the sisters, Princess Marie Louise and Princess Louise Elizabeth were sadly deranged.

Of them all, however, it was Charles VI who was worst. He became king in 1380 at the age of twelve and seems at that time to have been a pleasant and agreeable young man. He was unfortunate in his regents however, because his uncles, the Dukes of Anjou, Berry, Burgundy and Bourbon, increased the tax burden on the people for their own gain, plundering a treasury already short of funds due to the cripplingly expensive Hundred Years’ War against the English. There was social unrest in France as a result, particularly during the year 1382. Finally in 1388, Charles dispensed with the dukes’ services, replacing them with a group of councillors from humbler backgrounds.

He was married in 1385 to a beautiful fourteen- year-old Bavarian princess, Isabeau, with whom he had fallen head over heels in love with the moment he had seen her. To begin with, the marriage was a very happy one, although Isabeau made no effort to learn to speak French. She would turn out to be a spoilt and selfish woman interested only in getting what she wanted.

Charles’s life seems to have changed following a mysterious illness he suffered in April 1392 when he developed a fever and his hair and nails fell out. While still not fully recovered, in August of that year he undertook an expedition to punish those responsible for an assassination attempt on one of his advisers. Leading a small army, he was impatient at the slow progress they were making. His bad mood was exacerbated by the fact that he was still suffering from periodic bouts of fever.

While riding through a forest, a barefoot man dressed in rags is said to have suddenly ran out of the trees and grabbed the bridle of Charles’s horse, shouting at him to turn back, that he had been betrayed. The man was dragged away from the king’s horse but followed the army, persisting in his warnings to the king.

A little later, as the band of knights emerged from the forest, a page, drowsy in the summer heat, dropped the king’s lance. It clanged against a steel helmet being carried by another page. This sudden noise seemed to do something to Charles because he shuddered and drew his sword, yelling ‘Charge the traitors! They wish to hand me over to the enemy!’ He spurred his horse forward into his own men and started to swing his sword wildly amongst them. Eventually, a chamberlain and a number of his men pulled him from his horse and restrained him on the ground where he slipped into a coma-like trance. Around him lay four dead men.

Charles remained in his coma-like state for two days but then began slowly to recover. He was distraught when he learned of the men he had killed and was never the same man again, his bouts of insanity becoming increasingly frequent. On one occasion, his irrational behaviour almost cost him his life. On 28 January 1393, Queen Isabeau staged a masked ball. Charles was a member of a group of courtiers who dressed as wild men for the party, wearing costumes of linen cloth soaked in either resinous wax or pitch to hold a covering of frazzled hemp, giving them the appearance of being hairy from head to foot. This was obviously a great fire risk and the torch-bearers were, consequently, ordered to stand around the walls of the room, far away from the cavorting men who were chained to one another. Unfortunately, the king’s brother, Louis de Valois, Duke of Orléans, was unaware of the danger. Arriving late and carrying a torch, he approached one of the wild men to see who it was and accidentally set fire to him. Panic broke out and the wild men desperately tried to escape the flames. One of them was close to the Duchess of Berry who quickly threw the train of her dress over the man to protect him. The man under her dress was the king and she had unwittingly saved him from an ignominious and horrific death.

A couple of months later, Charles was in the grip of another debilitating attack. In an attempt to ease the pressure on his brain, a surgeon drilled a couple of holes in his head and, indeed, he did seem to experience some relief for a while. In 1395, however, he was once again in the throes of insanity. In 1397, believing that he was perhaps the victim of an act of witchcraft or sorcery, priests tried to exorcise him. It made no difference, however, and the attacks began to last longer. Even in his periods of clarity, his mood swings were extreme. When ill, he was delusional, denying he was king and that he had a wife and children. He would run dementedly from room to room in his palace, claiming that he was being pursued by his enemies until he collapsed from exhaustion. He was locked in darkened rooms and would attack anyone who came near him, servants and doctors. He smashed furniture and wet himself and in 1405 refused to wash, shave or change his clothes. They tried a primitive form of shock treatment, a number of men blackening their faces and leaping out at him in his room. It seemed to do the trick and he finally agreed to be washed and to change his clothes.

His relationship with his wife was, of course, very bad. She was terrified of him and he began to hate her. She provided him with a young mistress to divert his attention from her. It suited her, as she had for some time been openly having an affair with the king’s brother, Louis. People actually questioned the legitimacy of Charles’s children, especially when the heir to the throne, Charles, was born.

Eventually, the king became unable to govern. Even when not suffering from one of his bouts of anxiety, he found it difficult to make decisions or concentrate and a power struggle developed between his brother Louis and John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy. It had a huge impact on France that was manifested when an English army led by King Henry V defeated a French army five times its size at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.

Over the years, Queen Isabeau’s looks had faded and she became fat and suffered from gout. She had to be pushed around in a wheelchair and became agoraphobic. The interests of the royal children were protected by Bernard of Armagnac who learned that Isabeau was plotting against the king with John the Fearless. Charles, in a period of good health, was furious. He was also angry at Isabeau’s dissolute behaviour and decided to do something about it. He, his son and Bernard of Armagnac rode to Vincennes to deal with her latest lover, Louis de Boisbourdon. They seized him, tortured him savagely, strangled him and threw him into the Seine in a leather sack. As for Isabeau, she was banished to Tours. Released in 1418 by John the Fearless, she took her revenge on Bernard of Armagnac, ordering her new lover, Jean de Villiers, to kill him and carve the cross of Burgundy on his chest.

Isabeau did not have a monopoly on mindless violence, of course. When John the Fearless had a meeting with Prince Charles, in 1419, the sixteen-year-old Dauphin hacked him to death. Isabeau responded by disinheriting Charles.

Meanwhile, the king had been living in a condition of neglect at Senlis, near Paris. Following his marriage to Princess Catherine, daughter of Charles and Isabeau, however, and the naming of him by Isabeau as heir to the French throne, Henry V of England brought Charles back to Paris. He was, by this time, very ill, but is said to have recovered somewhat, thanks to a diet of oranges and pomegranates. In the autumn of 1422 he became ill again and this time he did not recover. He died surrounded by strangers, aged fifty-four.