Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum by Mark Stevens Read Free Book Online Page A

best-selling book The Surgeon of Crowthorne, which is
an entertaining and thorough account of his life, and should be
easily found by anyone wishing to explore Minor’s story in greater
detail.
    Winchester
records Minor’s birth as having been in June 1834 in Ceylon, now
Sri Lanka. He was the son of missionaries, and one of two children.
His mother died of tuberculosis when he was three, and his father
subsequently remarried and had a second family. Minor remained in
the east with this extended brood until his father sent him to live
with his uncle in New Haven, Connecticut, when Minor reached the
age of fourteen.
    Once in the
US, he attended Yale University, where he studied medicine. He
graduated in 1863, and joined the Union Army as a surgeon in the
middle of the American Civil War. Winchester says that Minor was
sent into action at the awful and bloody Battle of the Wilderness
in May 1864, and that this experience haunted him. At Minor’s
trial, years later, his defence suggested that the horrors of war
had caused his mental illness. Particularly, he had witnessed an
execution, and had been required to brand an Irish deserter from
the Union cause with a letter ‘D’. Whilst this theory will have to
remain conjecture, it presents a powerful picture of a traumatised
individual, which Minor certainly was.
    After the end
of the civil war, Minor remained in the American army and indeed
rose through the ranks. The pressures of his work continued, though
without him showing any immediate signs of insanity. The only
catalyst presented for the change in his behaviour is hearsay: that
he had become engaged, but that the relationship ended. It is the
earliest point in Minor’s story that sex enters the narrative,
though it seems unlikely that Minor had not already been consumed
by sexual thoughts before this point. What is known is that he was
discovered frequenting brothels in New York, where he was stationed
at the time. Such behaviour might be considered normal for a
soldier, even tacitly encouraged, but instead there must have been
something about Minor’s behaviour that was not normal. Bearing in
mind his subsequent history, the possibility that Minor was
engaging in either homosexual or bisexual acts might be one
possible conclusion. A deliberate move was organised for Minor to
Florida to remove him from a scene of temptation, but this failed
when he began to exhibit delusions of persecution by his fellow
officers. In 1868, the army diagnosed him as suffering from the
mental illness of monomania, or an obsession with one subject,
which gave rise to delusions. He was sent to the Government
Hospital for the Insane in Washington DC (now St Elizabeth’s
Hospital).
    Despite his
obviously continuing illness, Minor was released from St
Elizabeth’s in 1871, though now a man in enforced retirement from
the army and also in receipt of his pension, which he could add an
income from his well-to-do family. He travelled to London at the
end of the year, ostensibly to spend time touring Europe. He did
not make it any further. It appears that he first took up residence
at Radley’s Hotel, in the West End, before moving to Lambeth after
Christmas, where it seems likely he felt he would have easier
access to the sex trade. It was in Lambeth that he shot and killed
a stranger called George Merritt or Merrett on 17th February 1872.
Minor had already approached Scotland Yard, reporting that he was
being followed and otherwise persecuted by various nameless men.
The warning was ignored. One night Minor woke, and saw a figure at
the end of the bed which he reckoned to be one of his abusers. He
pursued the phantom spirit into the street, where Minor chanced
upon Merritt walking to work at a brewery near to Waterloo.
Merritt, was married and had six children, with another on the way,
and that night he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Minor chased him, pursued him as he ran, and then caught and shot
at him several times before