Unnatural Causes

by Dr Richard Shepherd

The police officer told me quietly that the father had begun a relationship with a female resident in the psychiatric hospital. He had confided to his new lover that he was just pretending to be mad and that in fact family life had been getting on his nerves. He had simply shot his family because

he was tired of them.

And what was I supposed to do? Bring home flowers? Light candles at meal times? I would have liked to ask other men how they managed to make warmth, humour and this love business a part of their everyday married lives, but such a conversation would not have been acceptable in work circles. In fact, it would have been impossible. We talked about homicide, not love. And so I blundered on.

Doesn't realize who he's being.

Sometimes perpetrators seem more like victims, and Theresa was both suffering and remorseful.

‘More detachment,’ she said. ‘It’s your answer to everything.’ ‘I shouldn’t let myself care about verdicts. I’m sure that’s right,’ I said. Jen shrugged. ‘It was interesting watching you talk about that case with so much passion. Maybe you should do it more often.’ I shuddered. Passion. I certainly didn’t want to feel that at all, let alone more often. It was the sort of thing that could get you into a lot of trouble.

We are now inside a law of nature that sometimes seems to account for the bulk of my work: the law of unforeseen consequences.

One of the interesting aspects of homicide by knife is that it is very often a woman’s weapon of choice.

‘Why won’t you let me love you?’ Jen would cry. ‘Why are you so quiet all the time?’

Cocaine users can talk for hours, have heightened responses to physical stimuli, so sex is more enjoyable, and they have little need for food or drink. It can, however, lead to a greatly stimulated heart rate, agitation and psychosis. So, if restraint is required for a cocaine

I’m sorry to tell you that the purity of scientific truth rarely cuts through contemporary social attitudes.

In the adversarial cauldron of that courtroom, truth had turned into an individual, nuanced, malleable commodity, and that is why as an expert witness I was pressured to interpret facts in ways I found uncomfortable.

I have learned over the years, however, that there is almost nothing people will not do to avoid a murder charge. Self-inflicted injuries are generally recognizable: they are created with the minimum force to create maximum effect, and obviously they are always in parts of the body which are readily accessible to its owner’s hand.

I am no stranger to joy. I know that joy can be truly experienced only by those who have known adversity. And adversity is an inevitability.

as Aeschylus allegedly said, the first casualty of war is truth.

My PTSD is not caused by any particular one of the 23,000 bodies on which I have performed post-mortems. And it is not caused by all of them. It is not caused by any particular disaster I have been involved in clearing up. And it is not caused by all of them.

It is caused, in its entirety, by a lifetime of bearing first-hand witness to, on behalf of everyone – courts, relatives, public, society – man’s inhumanity to man. The result of this diagnosis? The summer of 2016 off work. Two cures: talking and pharmaceutical. And this book.