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Leyton was also a black belt in karateThe British actor Anthony Hopkins
won plaudits for his creepy portrayal of
the serial killer Hannibal Lecter in the
1991 film The Silence of the Lambs, but
the world’s leading authority on mass
murderers walked out of the cinema in
disgust.
The Canadian criminal psychologist
Elliott Leyton abhorred the glamorisa-
tion of serial killers in Hollywood and
made it his mission to demystify them;
without exception they lacked guile and
cleverness, he claimed. The vast major-
ity could not hide behind a cloak of in-
sanity either, and had chosen to be evil.
“The view of orthodox psychology at
that time was that the people who
committed these kinds of killings were
clearly victims of complex mental dis-
orders, and that their actions could only
be explained on those terms,” Leyton
told The Sunday Telegraph in 1994.
“Everything I found out pointed to
them being small-minded, socially in-
adequate goons, whose grudges against
the rest of us could only be redeemed
through murder.” Often they came
from chaotic homes, had been abused
as children, had drink and drug prob-
lems, were unemployed and largely
constituted “alienated men uninterest-
ed in continuing the dull lives in which
they feel trapped”.
Leyton’s fascination with serial
killers began in 1980 when his wife
brought home a book on Ted Bundy,
who kidnapped, raped and murdered
30 young women and girls between
1974 and 1978. He borrowed it and be-
came so absorbed in the subject that he
visited his local library and discovered
there were hardly any books on serial
killers. He realised that it had never
been recognised as an academic subject
and decided to fill the gap.
Six years later he published Hunting
Humans: The Rise of the Modern Multiple
Murderer, analysing six American serial
killers (David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz,
the “Boston Strangler” Albert DeSalvo,
Bundy, Edmund Kemper, Mark Essex
and Charles Starkweather). The book
would become a bestseller and a
standard text for homicide detectives,
establishing Leyton as arguably the
world’s leading authority on the subject.
For a later book on British murder
rates, Leyton was given an office in
Scotland Yard and unprecedented
access to British police records for
every murder committed between 1982
and 1992, which confirmed his earlier
theory that most violent killers
conform to a predictable pattern: “Look
at Dennis Nilsen — a pathetic little
bore. The cleverest thing the Yorkshire
Ripper did was to persuade the world
that he was mad. These people aren’t
geniuses; they are evil, angry morons
who can’t find any other way to express
themselves,” said Leyton, a short and
stocky man who, as a black belt in kara-
te, was more than capable of looking
after himself.
Yet for all the gory exposure of such
crimes on these shores in Men of Blood
(1995), Leyton was fascinated by
Britain’s low murder rate being just over
1 per 100,000 people — compared with
10 in 100,000 people in the US by some
estimates.
While not denying that violence and
antisocial behaviour were on the rise,
Leyton claimed that an ancient British
someone than the Scots or Welsh. “It
suffers from social inequality, a high
divorce rate, racial tensions... and a
lack of family adhesion. Logically the
homicide rate should be comparable to
that of the US. The public has been led
to the conclusion that civilisation is
collapsing. That the centre cannot hold.
The facts just don’t bear that out. You
don’t have anything like the romantic
worshipful attachment to violence that
exists in the US.”
Whether he reconsidered his view as
areas of Britain’s inner cities were
increasingly engulfed by a wave of
murderous knife crime and drug-related
violence is not known, but the statistics
Leyton cited in the 1990s had not largely
changed. In the last UN study in 2018 the
UK murder rate was found to be 1.2 per
100,000. He called it “one of the great
cultural oddities of the modern age”.
Elliott Leyton was born in 1939 in the
town of Leader in the Canadian region
of Saskatchewan. His father was a
doctor. He studied English at the
University of British Columbia and
went on to do a PhD in anthropology at
the University of Toronto in 1972 andtheir lives since 1835 — the equivalent of
a death a week.
One such fisherman was Eddie
Horsefield, Blenkinsop’s father, who
had died in 1963 after a heart attack on
board the Loch Melfort, for which he
had received no medical assistance.
“He needed someone who knew what
they were doing. The skipper wasn’t a
doctor. I could have still had my dad.”
Five years later, when Blenkinsop
heard that St Romanus had sunk in the
North Sea, she was determined to do
something. There had been no radio on
board, which was fully legal, and all 20
crew members died. Just over two
weeks later the second trawler, the
Kingston Peridot, went down after a
storm off Skagagrunn on the Icelandic
coast, also killing everyone on board.
Blenkinsop couldn’t sleep. She scribbled
down ideas for 27 measures that she
thought essential to the men’s safety.
Unbeknown to her, three other
women from Hull were doing the same.
Led by Bilocca, a cod-skinner whose
father, husband and son were all trawl-
ermen, the group started a petition,
which became known as the Fisher-
man’s Charter. By knocking on doors
with a clipboard they received 10,000
signatures within ten days.
Joined by 500 other housewives and
fish-factory workers, the four women
assembled at Victoria Hall and made
stirring speeches to the local press. Blen-
kinsop, a mother of three and cabaret
singer, was a natural orator, so she took
to the stage first. With a beehive of plati-
num blonde hair, a fur coat and a girlish
smile, Blenkinsop perhaps seemed an
unlikely candidate to defend the rights
of the burly fishermen, but the anguishElliott Leyton
World-leading criminal psychologist who studied Britain’s murder rates
then became a research fellow at
Queen’s University, Belfast, where he
taught sociology. Latterly, he was pro-
fessor of anthropology at the Memorial
University of Newfoundland.
He loved fieldwork most of all, em-
bedding with Protestant and Catholic
communities in Northern Ireland and
among Newfoundland miners dying of
silicosis. This appetite ended after
several months of field work research-
ing his book The Myth of Delinquency:
An Anatomy of Juvenile Nihilism. “I
found the price of field work too high. I
was too abused and ripped off by people
I worked with and it became too painful
to process, so I resolved to do no more
field work.”
Leyton’s research on homicide was
all the more remarkable for the fact that
he never met a serial killer, but im-
mersed himself in diaries, confessions
and psychiatric interviews. He was
often called by detectives from the FBI
or Scotland Yard in search of insights.
“The techniques I devised to help police
nail them quicker have had some
success.”
For himself, Leyton owned his “nega-
tive, obstructive emotions”. To achieve
the inner calm and serenity that he re-
quired to write, he would spend an hour
of “violent exercise” in his gym at home
so that “the rage that’s in me begins to
come up. When I step out of the shower
it’s Elliott Leyton the writer.” Such
Zen-like calm came in handy when he
appeared on the late-night Channel 4
discussion programme After Dark witha drunken Oliver Reed, who asked him
insolently, “Are you a Jew? You look like
one.”
However, Leyton was forthright in
expressing how uncomfortable he felt
about the glamorisation of serial killers
as an artistic resource, a form of mass
entertainment and a way of “scaring
ourselves silly”. After 15 years research-
ing murder he declared that “I’m tired
of being Dr Death”, but later subjects
were not without their morbidity. His
study of the Rwandan genocide led to
his 1998 book, Touched By Fire: Doctors
Without Borders in a Third World Crisis.
Living in a clifftop seaside home in
Newfoundland, Leyton was an out-
doorsy man who enjoyed shooting and
kayaking. He is survived by his wife
Bonnie, a sculptor whom he married at
18, and by their sons Marco and Jack.
At the last lecture before his retire-
ment in 2005, he warned his students of
a forthcoming wave of violence and
homicide in the US, based on the
theory that when a country is engaged
in a war overseas, the homicide rate in-
creases radically at home. America was
pursuing a war in Iraq at the time: “We
can expect as Iraq groans on and on
people become more desensitised to
violence and more brutalised and that
everyone will begin to kill again.”Elliott Leyton, criminal psychologist, was
born on August 21, 1939. He died of
undisclosed causes on February 14,
2022, aged 82He viewed serial killers
as socially inadequate
goons with grudges
Yvonne Blenkinsop
The last of Hull’s ‘headscarf revolutionaries’
who campaigned for tighter safety laws at sea
As they boarded the 7.55am train from
Hull to London “the headscarf
revolutionaries” were jostled by a hive
of journalists and TV crews. Yet when
they arrived at King’s Cross station it
was eerily quiet. They asked the guard
where everybody was. “We’ve had to
pull them back off the platform because
it was dangerously overcrowded,” he
explained. “So we’ve put barriers up
there to hold them back. We only do
that for the Queen.”
Yvonne Blenkinsop, with Lillian
Bilocca, Christine Smallbone and Mary
Denness, had become a media sensa-
tion virtually overnight. In February
1968 the papers revelled in the head-
scarved and high-heeled women who
were, amid vicious vitriol, doggedly
campaigning for better safety laws in
the fishing industry.
The campaign had started the previ-
ous month after three deep-sea trawl-
ers — St Romanus, Kingston Peridot
and Ross Cleveland — set off from the
port of Kingston upon Hull (the first
two on January 10 and the third on Jan-
uary 20). All three ships would be blast-
ed by fierce storms and sank within
weeks of each other, in what became
known as the Triple Trawler Tragedy.
In Hull, huddles of wives, daughters
and sisters had gathered in trepidation.
They were terrified but they were also
angry. In the 1960s Hull was the most
powerful maritime city in the world;
each year 150 trawlers brought home up
to a quarter of a million tonnes of fish
(then about 25 per cent of the UK’s total
catch) but in an age of rudimentary
safety laws they did so at immense
personal risk. More than 6,000 men
from the tight-knit community had lostObituaries
code of civility and politeness that
could be traced to the end of the
13th century, when foreign travellers
noted how safe England was, still played
a part in a culture that denigrates open
displays of aggression. “England began
abrogating violence from an early stage.
A better form of mediation was provid-
ed by the courts,” wrote Leyton, who
was himself a man of courtly manners.
The English were still influenced by a
traditional role model of the “heroic
adventurer who is brave, capable and
lethal but restrained by an essential
decency”, he added.
And while such lingering values did
not deter relatively modern phenome-
na such as football hooligans or lager
louts, “very few of them get into homi-
cide”, said Leyton, who found that Brit-
ain’s murder rate was 50 times lower
than it was in the Middle Ages and half
the rate of the Georgian era. The vast
majority of modern homicides were the
preserve of less than 100 hardened
criminals, he added.
“England has the same problems or
worse than any other developed coun-
try,” said Leyton, who even claimed that
the English were less likely to murder
CHRIS HAMMOND/MEMORIAL UNIVERSITY