veins in his wrists. Emergency blood
transfusions were needed, and Dr.
Edward Petch, a Broadmoor consultant
psychiatrist, said: “I have never seen
anyone bite himself with that ferocity.
He allegedly had killed four people and
tried to kill six, and we all felt there
was one more left. That was himself,
and he would not stop until he had
succeeded.”
Gonzalez was a schizophrenic, said
Dr. Petch. But Dr. Philip Joseph,
another consultant psychiatrist who
examined him, said he was not
mentally ill, he just had a personality
disorder. “He told me, ‘I wanted to
kill people because I was bored and
wanted to know what it felt like.’”
Gonzalez was a psychopath who
“killed because of the cold, callous
person he is,” said the prosecutor. “It
is his very personality that led him to
kill, disinhibited by a cocktail of drugs
and alcohol.”F
inally, on March 16th the jury
retired to deliberate whether
Gonzalez was mad or just plain bad.
An hour later they unanimously found
him guilty on all six charges. They
had decided he was a drug-crazed,
cold-blooded murderer, and not
suffering from mental illness as hisdefence claimed.
He showed no emotion on hearing
the verdicts. “I think I will
be out in eight to ten
years,” he had told
a psychiatrist at
Broadmoor, but
on March 17th he
learned he would
die behind bars.
“In this case
life should mean
life,” Judge Ann
Goddard told him,
giving him six life
sentences. Because of
the seriousness of the offences, she
said, whole-life orders would be made
in respect of each of the murder
sentences.
“You brought unspeakable misery
and grief to the families of those
you killed. When you set out to kill
you armed yourself with a knife. You
chose where to kill in places where
there would be no witnesses, and you
chose to kill those you considered
vulnerable.”
The two men who survived his
attacks had been left mentally scarred,
“as have the families of those you killed
as your actions have put fear into their
lives,” said the judge. “It does not takeany imagination at all to know how
they have been affected by the events
we have been hearing about – that
includes the defendant’s family as
well.”
Gonzalez had become the 29th
offender
in England
and Wales
to be given
a whole-life
tariff, and he
was taken back to Broadmoor where
he was already considered one of the
most dangerous patients.
At his boarding school in Surrey he
had gained eight GCSEs, become a
skilled chess-player and shown talent as
an actor, telling friends that one day he
would be famous.
While awaiting trial he had posted
a message on the school’s page on
the Friends Reunited website: “I have
been charged with four murders and
attempted murder. Not bad, hey. Well
at least you can all say you went to
school with someone famous.”
In Broadmoor, Gonzalez
attempted to kill himself by biting
himself to death. He survived but
committed suicide in August 2007
by slicing his wrists with the edges
of a CD case.D
ANIel GONzAlez’s
mother was desperately
worried. The behaviour of her
mentally unstable son was
becoming increasingly ominous.
First he had run down the
street naked, and now she had
found her carving knives laid
out in the kitchen as if he’d
been looking for the sharpest.
Before leaving the house he’d
left a crazed three-page note.
she called the police, asking
them to lock him up before he
hurt someone. They couldn’t
find him, and they couldn’t do
anything anyway, they said,
as he hadn’t committed an
offence.
At her wits’ end, she phoned
the social worker assigned to
look after Daniel. He was going
off duty, and advised her to
call the police if she was really
worried.
Daniel had scratches on his
neck and arm when he came
home in the evening two days
later. He’d got the scratches
clearing a friend’s garden, he
told her. A few hours earlier he
had committed his first murder.
Although he had a very high
IQ he had writing disabilities,
and as a boy he was diagnosed
as having a neurologicaldisorder. At his primary school
he was recalled as having been
“incredibly disruptive.” He began
taking drugs in his early teens,
and was cautioned by the police
for biting a bus driver’s face.
In 1998 Gonzalez was sectioned,
diagnosed as schizophrenic,
and spent seven months in a
medium-secure psychiatric unit
after he threatened a carer with
a knife.
He stopped taking his
medication two years later,
saying its side effects were
making him shake and dribble,
and he turned instead to
cannabis and other drugs,
reverting to his former condition.
Gonzalez’s mother made
repeated appeals for help. “Does
Daniel have to murder or be
murdered before he gets the
treatment he so badly needs?”
she asked in a letter to the
director of surrey social services.
In a statement issued after
Gonzalez’s trial, the surrey
and Borders Partnership NHs
Trust said it was very difficult to
diagnose him precisely because
he was a drug-user who admitted
feigning illness. “These incidents
were not preceded by a history
of violence and the Trust does
not believe that his actions couldhave been predicted.”
That may well be so, but did
the jury get it right? What are
we to make of it?
some of us may be surprised
that a “personality disorder”
that prompts someone to go
out and kill four complete
strangers at random is not
considered to be madness. And
we may be even more surprised
to see someone adjudged sane
committed to Broadmoor, a
mental hospital for the criminally
insane. If Daniel Gonzalez was
sane, as the jury concluded, what
was he doing there?Gonzalez as a young man. Were
he and his victims failed by the
system?MAD, BAD – OR BOTH?Caught on CCTV,
the moment when
police arrested
Gonzalez