The Bern-Harlow mystery is rivaled only by the Jack the Ripper case when it comes to differing versions of the events, disparities in the crime scene, the list of participants, or the possible motives. Every few years a new version of the tale emerges, no more trustworthy than the many others which had preceded it, colored by that era's preconceptions of Hollywood's Golden Age. An amazing cast of characters emerges, from men who sat at the right hand of Irving Thalberg to a simmering stew of oddly reticent servants and vague people who wish to remain anonymous. It is impossible, to pick out from all these dozens of totally anecdotal accounts anything which makes any type of coherent sense whatsoever. It is only possible to relate what is actually known, which is really very little.

After Carmichael had recovered from his faint, he called his fellow servant, gardener Clifton Earl Davis, into the main house and showed him their employer Paul Bern's dead body. This is an ideal juncture to discuss the Bern- Harlow menage. All the servants, including Jean's constant companion Blanche Williams, were black. Of course this was the era before the Civil Rights movement, which goes a great deal towards explaining why all of the servants kept their mouths shut so tightly over the years. Whether they were cajoled by Louis B. Mayer, terrorized by studio publicity head Howard Strickling, blackmailed by security chief Eddie Mannix- who was little more than a thug- or just remained silent out of love and loyalty towards their surviving employer, Jean Harlow, who by all accounts was an absolutely adorable and sweet person... is not known.

The Paul Bern house on Easton Drive was rather eccentric, just like its dead master, who had designed it himself. Pointless staircases and passages led to nowhere, and there was a tower room where Paul would go "to be alone". Bern detested having the servants around him, unlike his friendly wife Jean, who could be seen driving through Beverly Hills in an open car with Blanche Williams, the latter dressed in an elaborate maid's outfit, complete with frilly cap and apron. In consequence, the servants were relegated to a large outbuilding by the pool called "the garage", although it was in fact a combination of garage, servants' rooms, and kitchen. The main house had no kitchen, only a small service hatch with a gas ring for coffee-making and a small sink. Curiously, the house has been involved in two notorious Hollywood crimes, as it was also the residence of hairdresser Jay Sebring, one of the victims of the Manson Family, although the Manson crime itself happened elsewhere.

Somehow, instead of the police being called, M-G-M studio head Louis B.Mayer was the first on the scene. One supposes that all the servants had been carefully coached on how to behave in an emergency.  Mayer brought with him Strickling and Chief of M-G-M police Whitey Hendry. Soon, another party, consisting of Mayer's son-in-law, David O Selznick, production head Irving Thalberg, and actress Norma Shearer, Thalberg's wife, arrived. All in all, there were people trampling over the house for almost two hours. As there is only a certain amount of time one can stare at a dead body, one assumes that it took them that length of time to do what they had to do, which was, decide on a scenario, search the house for anything contrary to that scenario so that it could be destroyed, and stage the crime scene. At some point Strickling found a guest book filled with drawings and signatures by various Hollywood luminaries. On page thirteen of this book a note was found in Paul Bern's handwriting. Soon to become the most famous suicide note in the world, it read:

Dearest Dear,

    Unfortunately, this is the only way I can wipe out the frightful wrong I have done you and to wipe out my abject humiliation. I love you.

                                                                                                                                              Paul

You understand last night was only a comedy.

This guest book was carefully placed near the dead man's body in the dressing-room, folded to page thirteen. It would of course be absurd to keep a guest book in the dressing-room where guests would not be able to write in it. Guest books are invariable placed prominantly near the front door of a house.

In their excitement over finding something that passed as a suicide note, however, the gang of conspirators carelessly overlooked a very important piece of evidence- a woman's stylish and expensive bathing suit with yellow flowers on it, rinsed out and hung up to dry- and it wasn't in Jean Harlow's size.

Soon all Hollywood was buzzing with rumors of Paul Bern's tragic death. Hollywood has changed in some ways since the 1930's but not in others, and the entire town was then, as it is now, a giant nest of spies. Probably the source of the story was the M-G-M switchboard, which would have handled all the calls going back and forth from the Mayers' to the Thalbergs' and the Selznicks'. The one question on everybody's lips was, "When are they going to call the police?" Even then, everyone suspected a studio cover-up. When Thalberg was good and ready to call in the authorities, at around 2:00 PM, there had been newsboys on the street for at least an hour selling "Extra" editions featuring Paul's death. However, Hollywood being a "company" town, the police treated his call with great respect, and never questioned its timing.

As soon as the police arrived Strickling and Mayer explained to them that Bern's death was of course a suicide, that there was no other explanation, that there was after all a gun under the body, (why they had moved the body so that they could see the gun in the first place was of course not explained) and a suicide note. Attention was directed to the open guest book, just in case the police should miss it, and the book itself described as a "diary"

.Mayer and his coterie then exited, one imagines, sighing with relief. The next job was to tell Jean, who was still at her mother's houseand, as far as anyone knew,was still blissfully unaware that her husband was dead. An argument broke out over whose responsibility this was. No one wanted to be the one to tell her. Disgusted, Irving Thalberg said that he would do it. What he would soon say to Jean about the death of her husband when he saw her we will never know, but she became hysterical and had to be sedated by doctors several hours later.

These are the only events that happened on that 5th of September so long ago, that can be actually verified. There are so many other unanswered questions

.Was Paul Bern right-or left handed? Was page thirteen the last page in the guest book to have writing on it? What were all those people doing in that strange little house all that time with a slowly stiffening corpse? Did Paul die where he was found? With a destroyed crime scene, we can only guess at any of the truth.

Next week, we will talk about some well-known theories of the crime and discuss whether Paul Bern killed himself or was killed. I will then unveil my own theory about the Bern-Harlow mystery; there is I feel one very obvious suspect but no one ever thinks of her. But then, I contend, that's how she got away with it.

It was Labor Day weekend, 1932 and for M-G-M and its hundreds of employees, life was good. The studio boasted that it had "more stars than there are in heaven" and with Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, newcomer Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, William Powell, and Robert Montgomery under contract this was no idle boast.  M-G-M was the only studio to pay dividends that year, as it was the middle of the Great Depression.  The two rival studio bosses, the fatherly Louis B. Mayer and "the boy wonder" Irving Thalberg has their little differences, as Mayer liked musicals and "family" pictures, whereas Thalberg preferred tales starring sexy divas getting themselves in and out of passionate situations. This was what was known as the "Pre-Code" era in Hollywood, where there was next to no censorship (except local) and practically anything could be shown on the screen, so Thalberg generally won in the end. But, Mayer and Thalberg each had their own little coterie of "supervisors" (what we would nowadays call producers) who were loyal to either one man or the other.

One of Thalberg's top supervisors was German-born Jew Paul Bern, who had an Academy Award under his belt for producing "Grand Hotel", one of the first pictures to feature an "all-star" cast. He was a middle-aged, effeminate sort of man, who seems to have inspired violent reactions in people.  They either loved him or loathed him. Louis B. Mayer's daughter Irene regarded him as her best friend. Gossip columnist Sydney Skolsky thought Bern was homosexual.  He had an odd reputation for becoming involved with beautiful, mixed-up women such as alcoholic Lila Lee, unstable Joan Crawford, or morphine-addicted Barbara La Marr, whose refusal of Bern's marriage proposal resulted in a plumber having to be called to the house Bern shared with actor John Gilbert, as Bern's attempt to drown himself in the commode resulted in his head becoming stuck to the seat.  After this fiasco, La Marr, known as "The Girl Who Was Too Beautiful" (and who was soon to die of a drug overdose) confided in journalist Adela Rogers St John.  Exactly what she told St John remains a mystery, but Paul Bern seems to have either been a hermaphrodite or had a penis the size of a woman's little finger, depending upon what source you go to. St John was adamant whenever discussing the Bern case that "Bern had no right to be married to any woman".  However, in point of fact, on that holiday weekend in 1932 Bern was a newlywed, celebrating his two-months anniversary to 21 year-old Jean Harlow, whose career he had rescued from the Hollywood garbage-heap. He was also a bigamist.

Jean Harlow isn't a star well remembered today, except for a brief and trashy cult in the early '60's inspired by the scandalous and inaccurate biography Harlow, by Irving Shulman, which spawned two eponymous and dreadful motion pictures.  A lot of her pictures were, of course, "Pre-Codes" and featured partial nudity or situations which would not have made them suitable for television viewing until a few years ago.  This is too bad, as Harlow was such a great star. The best way to describe her in a nutshell was that she combined the best aspects of Marilyn Monroe and Mae West.  She was also blessed with a great and unique beauty and a truly eye-popping figure . She was known as the first of the "Platinum Blondes", starting a craze in hair bleaching which has lasted down to the present day.

Harlean Carpenter was born into a wealthy family in Kansas City, Missouri on March 3, 1911.  Her mother, Jean Harlow Carpenter, was what was then known as "a new woman" or as we would say nowadays, a feminist.  She found life in Kansas City with her husband, dentist Mont Clair Carpenter unbearable. After being granted a divorce in 1922 she and Harlean, known by one and all as "The Baby" drifted about the country.  Both soon wound up married, Harlean at age sixteen to Charles McGrew, a young millionaire with a taste for the bottle and Jean, known as "Mama Jean" to a rather questionable individual known as Marino Bello, who claimed to be descended from Italian nobility and seemed to always have an oil well or gold mine that needed investors.  Everyone wound up in Los Angeles, the McGrews; it is thought, to distance themselves from the Bellos, and the Bellos to sponge off the McGrews.  Everyone commented on the beauty of nineteen-year old Harlean, and as she was waiting to pick up a girlfriend at the Fox Studios one day she was spotted by casting directors, who promised her as much work in pictures as she could handle.  She laughed the whole thing off, but made the mistake of repeating the anecdote to Mama Jean.  Suddenly, Mama Jean finally had the chance she had been waiting for her whole life- she would be the mother of a movie star. It was her destiny.  Very little thought was given to what Harlean might have wanted, which was to remain happily married to Charles McGrew.  Mama Jean fixed onto Harlean like grim death.  Before she knew what hit her, Harlean was registered at Central Casting under the name "Jean Harlow" and was spending her spare time posing nude in Griffith Park (back then, actresses handed nude photos of themselves out to casting directors and producers).  Her husband Charles was outraged, the more so when he discovered that Mama Jean had arranged for Jean Harlow, lately Harlean, to have an abortion. Soon the marriage was on the rocks and Jean was at the studios all day, playing various bit parts. But this was about to change.

When Jean started out in pictures, the "talkie" was just coming in.  Eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes, who dabbled in films from time to time, had been involved in filming a WWI epic, Hell's Angels.  He was years and millions over budget, and the picture was the joke of Hollywood.  He had started Hell's Angels out as a silent, and decided, that as the public would no longer accept silents, he would have to reshoot the dramatic scenes (most of the picture consisted of aerial dogfights).  He was saddled with a star, Greta Nissen, who could not speak English.  He fired her and signed a new leading lady- Jean Harlow.

When Hell's Angels was finally released, much to everyone in Hollywood's amazement, it was a smash hit.  Crowds gaped at the realistic dogfights, in which it was rumored a man had been killed.  But Jean Harlow was the name on everyone's lips when the crowds left the theater. Hughes had thought to include a Technicolor reel of Jean in a semi-transparent evening gown, and the new technology had audiences raving.  Everyone thought this was a girl destined for great things.  Instead, she went straight down into the pit. It did not take directors and producers long to find out that Jean could not act.

To the rescue...Paul Bern

Irving Thalberg was having a problem casting a picture called Red Headed Woman.  Paul Bern, who had been seeing Harlow on a regular basis- their relationship was platonic, as were all his relationships, whether with men or women- convinced Thalberg to make a test of Jean for the part, which was not easy to do, considering she had become such a joke in Hollywood. Yet Bern convinced Thalberg that Jean was a born comedienne, and that she had just been miscast before.  He was so adamant that finally Thalberg agreed, and the test was made.  To his own surprise, Thalberg liked it.  Jean's contract was bought out from Howard Hughes, who had totally lost interest in her, and she joined the roster of stars at M-G-M. Bern was right. Jean was a born comedienne, and Red Headed Woman, with Jean in a red wig, was a smash hit.

What happened next was even more surprising to Hollywood insiders.  Paul Bern and Jean Harlow announced their engagement.  Everyone was shocked and making bets on how long the marriage would last.  Paul's best friend Irene Mayer, by then married to David O Selznick and expecting a child, told him if he married Harlow he'd probably wind up blowing his brains out. Jean's ex-lover, gangster Longy Zwillman, who had financed some of her early, dreadful films, had Bern investigated.  What he found out shocked the hard-boiled mobster.  He told Jean that Bern was nothing but a pansy who liked to have pretty girls around him.  Harlow told him to mind his own business. "Have you f***ed him yet?" asked Zwillman. "No" said Jean. "He's a gentleman" Zwillman retorted that she was a fool, but Jean said "Paul is the only man who loves me for myself, without all this sex business"

Of course, if she hadn't been a relatively unsophisticated 21-year old, Jean might have wondered why.

The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on as it is never of any use to anyone. The disaster-in -the-making occurred on July 2, 1932 and was attended by many Hollywood notables such as Irving Thalberg, his wife Norma Shearer, and members of both Paul's and Jean's families. After the wedding, Paul and Jean retired to Bern's house at Easton Drive, where Blanche Williams, Jean's maid and companion, turned back the sheets on Bern's double bed and bid the happy couple goodnight.  The next morning, Bern met her outside of the bedroom. "The Baby's still a virgin", he announced.  Blanche, who had been with Jean through one marriage and several lovers, was baffled.

Jean herself told M-G-M's powerful publicity chief, Howard Strickling, the truth about her marriage- that it was, in the parlance of the times, "lavender", or sexless. "We'll have a long life together and a long marriage", Bern had told her.  Strickling was amazed that Jean seemed to be undistressed by the situation "Paul had completely sold her on this 'respect' business" Strickling recalled.

Banking on Jean's huge success in Red Headed Woman, M-G-M had cast her in Red Dust as a prostitute in Vietnam who winds up on Clark Gable's rubber plantation, hiding from the "gendarmes".  Work took up a lot of Jean's and Paul's time, and no one knows what goes on beyond closed doors. After the tragedy, many people came out and said Jean and Paul were the perfect lovebirds, whereas others said he beat her in private and belittled her in public.

On that fateful Labor Day weekend, Marino Bello, Jean's stepfather, and Clark Gable had decided to go marlin fishing. Mama Jean was upset at being left alone on a holiday and convinced Jean to sleep at her house instead of at home with Paul.  Jean was busy doing retakes at the studio and so wasn't going to have much of a holiday weekend anyway, so she agreed. Paul stayed at Easton Drive, where he was working on a new project for Jean called "China Seas".

The next morning, Monday, September 5, at 11:30 AM John and Winifred Carmichael, Jean and Paul's butler and cook, arrived at Easton Drive as usual (Blanche Williams was with Jean). Winifred started to make breakfast, while John, going into the dressing room, found Paul Bern lying dead on the floor, shot through the head.  It looked as though he had committed suicide- or had he?

Coming Next Week- Was It Murder? Or Was It Suicide?

There has been a dramatic increase in both suicide and murder-suicide dads since the mid-1970s.

In terms of causative factors, these fall well outside the archetypal narcissist Christian psychopathic type so beloved of Hollywood, and if we are to understand and ameliorate the causes we must recognise more explicable contexts than ideologically-censored social science permits.

America and Australia have two genres in common and it is possible that these are also related to the horrifying increase in massacres.

War Syndrome: Wars emotionally and psychologically cripple around one third of surviving infantry soldiers, and inflict damage on all. Both nations live with the product of WWII, the Korean War, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan; returned soldiers now living as civilians in the mainstream community.

Defence and Health authorities are well aware of the damage sustained by these men but this is actively unacknowledged because politicians have refused to allocate funds for adequate treatment. It is this absence of public accountability that we must focus on, rather than bureaucratic failures, because this directly reflects the wider parallel trend towards decision-making from the top down, rather than the democratic governmental response to electoral sentiment that is our right.

Conditions will continue to deteriorate in this and all other respects, until electorates challenge the century-long propaganda that democracy and representationalism are one and the same thing. They are not.

As Abe Lincoln put it, in such lyrical and very deliberate over-statement, Democracy is Government of the people, by the people and for the people. Representationalism is electing an already pre-selected pawn of the plutocrats to do our thinking for us; a manifestly unwise way to determine our own future. If we reflect that we have just handed our own share of people’s power to corrupt politicians; and remember that power always corrupts, we should anticipate increasing loss of freedom, rights and prosperity.

If we stop to think (who, these days, has time for that?), we will immediately recognise that the much-proselytised phrase representative democracy is in fact an oxymoron.

This lack of electoral influence on Government is also responsible for the source of social dislocation we will next examine.

Casualties of Feminism: Women activists of 1967 to 1970 pursued admirable agendas of equal rights and equal opportunity, which (in Australia and NZ at least) were entirely supported by the majority of men. Disturbed by this evolution of democracy; David Rockefeller and Rupert Murdoch initiated a sustained global media campaign to sabotage the movement.

In tandem with this, they also arranged for the United Nations to develop multi-sourced programmes channelled directly at youth through universities and schools to depress the original women’s objectives and instead pursue aggressive affirmative action. This transferred wealth and social mobility from family men to a select stratum of women; the upper demographic. Women in the lower socio-economic blocs did not benefit.

To appreciate the reversal of moral direction this constituted, it is illustrative to compare this with a hypothetical anti-slavery movement wherein, instead of banning all slavery, roles are simply reversed; with slave owners becoming slaves and slaves becoming slave owners. In other words, a mere shift in power occurred and no moral ground was reclaimed or justice achieved.

Moreover, under the feminist regime, academics who were suitably compliant were very well supported in their publishing endeavours. The author of the Female Eunuch was the most celebrated example. The text of this book was mindlessly one-eyed; it insulted and alienated half of humanity, and revealed the author’s mean-spirited and negative personality. Intellectually, it demonstrated an appalling miscomprehension of human nature. But the book’s cover design was visually brilliant; it’s only redeeming feature.

Young women in UK and Australia have publicly rejected the author, Germaine Greer, for being false and betraying every single principle she claimed to represent. In Australia, her homeland, she dare not return because several thousand Aussie women have stated publicly that they will beat her to a pulp. Other feminists have been similarly reviled, even by their own daughters.

Feminism, as intended, down-valued the role of mothers in birthing, loving and nurturing their children, and it turned men and women against each other: daughter against father, and wife against husband. What for millennia had been men ‘courting’ young ladies suddenly become stalking. Foreplay, in which women did not enunciate a sober and distinct verbal “yes”, became rape if intercourse took place. If couples had sex while inebriated, the female partner was encouraged to prefer charges of rape, and youths actually did prison time for this. History and human nature were both turned on their heads.

The insanity progressed. Little boys who exhibited an ‘unhealthy’ desire to play with toy guns were thrust in the direction of dolls, and traditional girl’s sports such as netball, suddenly had hapless boys thrust onto the court. The message to boys was unmistakably Boys bad; girls good.

By 1975, a campaign to present the natural male/female relationship in marriage as a war of oppression against women was having its effect, and marriage itself was effectively depopularised; if not actually outlawed. The terms husband and wife became the target of derision and revulsion, and women were actively encouraged to rid themselves of their husbands.

The majority of adults harboured serious reservations about these trends, but fear of public and media-driven reprisals prevented a wholesale condemnation of the harm being done to society by feminism. The intimidation continues but now many women are crying, enough! The damage to both men and women has been profound, but the real target of the manipulators was always FAMILY.

One of the functions of Feminism was to depress family incomes. A family income today, with both parents working full time, is now 10% less than it was in 1960, with the male parent the sole breadwinner. The proportionate levelling effect of women entering the workforce gradually eroded the incomes of the average male worker (which is a statistic around 100% different to the average male income of typical social science focus).

Simultaneously, and internationally, economies began to shrink, with wealth sliding rapidly towards the big end of town, and the poverty class expanding exponentially, especially in Australia (which went from zero percentage in poverty to 54% in little more than three decades). Quite apart from supporting parents, the aged and the infirm; twenty percent of people became permanently unemployed, inasmuch as they could not secure a living wage.

In the US this figure is generally accepted as 30%, although many believe the figure now comes closer to 40%.

Obviously, feminism was only one of the factors in the material and social destruction of families; others being tariff removal, FTAs, inequitable taxation regimes, corporate off-shoring and outsourcing, and outrageous increases in migrant and refugee numbers. However, the sources of policies that brought these damaging developments into being, including the sub-prime crisis, were the same… the global banker and corporate plutocrats that control governments through financing of election campaigns. But in terms of damage to families and children, feminism outperformed all other weapons.

Meanwhile, poked and prodded by the media, national cultures continued to encourage women to materialistically value men on the basis of being successful breadwinners. This was immensely destructive for most men and few, when surveyed, could outline a coherent male role in society to which they could realistically aspire. The pulse of male anger was gradually becoming palpable.

This was also a time when the term 'loser' was propounded and proselytised in the media and acronyms such as SNAG slid into currency; promoted as usual by the Murdoch-led media. Using sport as a Trojan horse, the word elitist gained a respectability it had not known since the 1790s.

As far back as 1976, following demands by the United Nations, social security laws were changed to encompass the provision of benefit incomes for women who wished to leave their 'oppressive' husbands; or to not marry at all.

As a welfare officer at that time, I had a running caseload of 100 'supporting mothers', with about 3% on average, presenting genuine grievances. In other words, female commitment to marital relationships was fast disappearing in western culture. In Family Courts, all official parties were made to understand that men were always wrong, and that cruelty and violence was to be presumed. By 1978, it was understood that children did not need fathers anyway and that only in instances of irrefutable evidence of serious neglect and abuse by mothers, could fathers gain custody of their children. Even mothers who abandoned their babies had superior rights under Family Law. Only when three Family Court Judges were shot by furious Australian fathers, were these excesses toned down slightly.

In these times, it was routine for feminist operators of ‘women’s refuges’ (their very existence a propaganda exercise) to provoke visiting fathers with suggestions that their wives and daughters would henceforth be raised as lesbians, and in fact were enjoying lesbian orgies at that moment. They then videoed the distraught men as they attempted to reach their children; silent footage that was presented in Court as evidence of their violent behaviour.

Restraining Orders and Protection Orders became standard tactics to create spurious evidence of violence, and husbands were encouraged to use lawyers who then liaised with the wife’s lawyer to further undermine the male parent’s rights and interests.

By the 1980s, male resentment was running deep, albeit expressed openly only with jocular and slightly barbed humour. More tangible expression was repressed by omniscient feminist fury, which has targeted its victims with a fanaticism that compares favourably with that of the Spanish Inquisition's Torquemada.

Perhaps the extent to which feminism continues to dangerously override reality can be demonstrated by government-funded television advertising which condemns domestic violence, and men, with the dark solemnity of a hanging judge.

However, studies around the world have found that around 80% of domestic violence is initiated by women. Astonishingly, concomitant surveys revealed that the most commonly expressed reason for inflicting violence on their husbands was that "he wasn't listening to me". These assaults included homicide by knife and gun.

Contemporary women now feel entirely comfortable with slapping or punching their boyfriend and husbands, because, as evidenced by the media and government, it is only violence if perpetrated by men. And the emotional violence of humiliating men in public with references to grossly inadequate sexual prowess, is now simply not acknowledged.

A similar stream of logic has infected all of society, with even Government officials ruling, for example, that white abuse of blacks is racism, but black abuse of whites is highly understandable reaction to centuries of abuse and denial of basic human rights and is, therefore, not racism. In other words, cultural values are no longer integrated, but operate in societal isolation; the prelude to total cultural collapse.

In only two decades, marriage break-up went from 30% to 54%. With other surveys finding that 80% of relationship breakdowns are now attributable to the female partner, it is clear that something of historical breakdown in human values has occurred and that children are at imminent risk of losing all protection and sources of love, affection and nurturing.

Most certainly, by 2005 it was becoming apparent that so many children were growing up without a normal father image as a role model for adult life that a crisis in behaviour was emerging; for both boys and girls, but very dramatically for boys. The only male role models most children now have access to are film and TV stars and sports heroes; or Mum's current boyfriend. But male partners who are genetically unconnected to their partner’s children, are often abusive or neglectful.

Because the sports heroes tend to be self-absorbed, hyper-competitive or violent; or all three, it is unsurprising that many children's behaviour has become erratic and anti-social. And with both types of heroes, genuine role modelling is almost certainly futile in any everyday sense. This leaves a legacy of violence and resentment and an almost complete absence of respect.

In schools, curriculum was redeveloped continually over three decades to favour females; a trend reinforced by the mass retirement of men from school-teaching; a career becoming untenable, with feminist-driven attitudes which equate normal male affection for children as paedophilia, and one-on-one teaching of adolescent girls as ipso facto evidence of underage sexual predation.

Very clearly, it is fast becoming impossible for most men to emerge into adulthood equipped with a coherent and positive direction and role in life; and in society. In short, they are bitterly angry but inarticulate, and are directionless and without the anchor of values and role models. That many drift into depression, substance abuse, nihilism and suicide should be a surprise to no one. That some take their nearest and dearest down with them is one of the oldest acknowledged traits of mental illness in history.

To restore the sanity of both individuals and the mainstream community, will require returning direction back to the community, and by concomitantly disarming the dangerous and destructive lobbies and agents of control that have wrought such destruction for more than three decades.

There is a simple way such a redeeming and healing process can be launched and that is by restoring government by informed electoral consensus. Or to put it another way, by bringing back democracy.

Night fears: There is a third source of psychological and emotional insecurity and that is fear. This is an issue that appears to effect only one nation, and that is the US.

This is not a new observation. Home-born critics such as Michael Moore have queried the violence and fear inherent in American society compared with, for example, Canada.

So far, a correlative factor has not been put forward that might explain this phenomenon. It is felt that researchers have ignored a prosaic aspect of American life that might very well account for otherwise inexplicable behaviour. A clue may be that the American tendency to precipitate premature violence in tense situations is most prevalent in the white middle and upper classes.

What is probably invisible to Americans, it being entirely normative behaviour, is putting babies and small children alone in bedrooms to sleep. Outside the United States, where this is seen in American movies, it is either regarded as a worrying exercise in isolation and withdrawal of parental affection, contact and protection; or, especially to people of more child-indulgent cultures, as a horrific failure to provide their child with the affection, proximity, love, nurturing and protection that infants and children need as much as food; and certainly more so than clothing and shelter.

To outside observers, it seems that Americans believe that their children will suffer from sleep deprivation if silence does not reign in the child’s bedroom. Whatever the reason, it seems to be the common outcome for American children to lie alone and terrified in their room, seeing monsters in every shadow. Add this to the tendency for American fathers to give less love and affection to their boy infants than they give to their daughters, and you have deeply neurotic children, who will be unable to give affection in their own adult relationships.

If both parents are thus afflicted, you have seriously unconnected and emotionally undeveloped children. The apparent upper demography of this syndrome is reinforced by the notion that the children of poorer families must share beds with parents or siblings and, therefore, enjoy immediate comfort.

The relationship between skin contact and affection with parents, and healthy development of children should not be underestimated. We are reminded of the real reason Spock the paediatrician originally became famous.

In his time, many hundreds of children being treated in hospitals succumbed to what was known as wasting disease. The cause was unknown, but the death rate was highest in the most modern and well resourced hospitals; in one case, 100%.

Spock and his associate hired women whose only skill to contribute was their compulsive motherliness, and directed them to pick each baby or infant up in turn and cuddle and coo to them each for twenty minutes. Wasting disease dropped from 100% to zero overnight.

Two decades earlier in France, at a time when mentally retarded children were automatically put in juvenile institutions, the managers placed ten children in a home for mentally retarded adults, and monitored their development against a control group in the conventional children’s institution. All ten of the children raised by the adults grew up to live independent lives; three of them went to university and one of them secured a degree.

What happened, is that the retarded adults had informally adopted the children and lavished them with saturation love and affection and admiration.

This is the power of expressed love and affection. The denial of this creates a deep and painful hollowness; and not an anticipation but a certainty of rejection and withdrawal of love. Such a child will grow up to be deeply fearful, and to panic whenever familiar visual reinforcements are taken away. Moreover, he or she will respond to the hunger from within by imposing power on those around them; whether this takes the form of bullying, emotional blackmail, violence or powerfully compulsive behaviour; which in turn will be coloured and linked by other circumstances, such as punitive upraising, religious fanaticism, or disturbing social or sexual behaviour.

Let us be very clear here; what is said here is eons from being definitive, but a clarion call should be heard for urgent research into this destructive but locally invisible aspect of American culture. Ideally, the research should be conducted by a team made up of ordinary graduates of widely disparate cultures. PhDs should be avoided like the plague, because such personnel are almost guaranteed to be the product of the emotional and social sterility we are trying to avoid. They will bend the results of the research to reinforce their own status, as all social scientists do.

Tony Ryan is a world-famous tile-layer, sharpshooter, and taxidermist. Write to him at tonyryan43@gmail.com.

During the more than two years we had to wait while Neil Entwistle cooled his heels in the Middlesex County House of Correction and the Bridgewater State Hospital (to find out if he was sane enough to stand trial) we all wondered what on earth he would use as a defense. For it was obvious to anyone with any experience that Entwistle was as guilty as Cain, or perhaps even guiltier, as Cain only killed his brother while Entwistle killed his wife and baby. If I had been his lawyer I would have plumped for the insanity defense. It would have had next to no chance of success, but at least it would have had validity. I think that Entwistle was completely abnormal. According to criminal profiler Pat Brown, every narcissist is not a criminal, but every criminal is a narcissist. And, every criminal is not a sociopath, but every sociopath is a criminal. Entwistle, was, I believe, all three of the above.

Finally, the great day arrived. The prosecutor, Michael Fabbri, gave a fairly conventional opening statement in which he pointed out that Neil Entwistle had not dialed 911 to get help for his wife and baby when he "found" them shot, and that he had not even called his dead wife's parents. Instead he drove to his in-law's house in Carver to return the murder weapon to his father-in-law's gun collection and then hightailed it off to London, where he left the keys to his in-law's house locked inside his BMW in the parking lot at Logan Airport- the keys he claimed that he could not find, as he had supposedly only gone to the house to commit suicide with one of the guns from his father-in-law's collection.

I have a great advantage in this case, and it is that I live in Middlesex County, where the crimes were committed. For example, I know that Entwistle's story about driving about "in a fog" between Hopkinton, where the murders were committed, and Carver, is absurd. In the first place, it's more than an hour's drive. One would think that this would be more than enough time for someone to come out of a fog. In the second place, he would have had to take route 495, which is a six lane superhighway loaded with eighteen-wheeler trucks going 80 miles an hour. If he really was in a fog, knowing Massachusetts drivers as I know them, he never would have survived the trip.

Next up was the defense, giving I felt a very weak opening, where Elliot Weinstein,the lead attorney, claimed that we the public didn't know the real Neil Entwistle and that all the weird things that he had done were because he was a man crazed with grief, and that "everything he said, everything he did was because he loved them"

"Neil Entwistle is not guilty"

Of course Entwistle's affect in the courtroom was completely bizarre. He sat at the defense table with an expression on his face of an almost bridal radiance. I think in his own twisted mind he had finally made it; he was the center of attention at last, surrounded by cameras, even if it was only in a small Massachusetts county courtroom, accused of the most heinous of crimes. Only once did he behave in a normal manner, which was when Massachusetts State Police Chemist Deanna Dygan displayed his baby daughter's blood-soaked footie pajamas on a board. He turned his face away from the cameras and wept, then.

But worse was to come.

After the State Medical Examiner Dr. William Zane took the stand for the prosecution, he was subjected to a brilliant cross examination on murder-suicides by Stephanie Page, another member of Entwistle's defense team. Never has such legal talent been so wasted as Page's, as it sunk in slowly on all of us observers that the defense planned to blame Rachel Entwistle for the death of her own baby. Disgust filled the courtroom as the defense described how a "depressed" Rachel Entwistle (they offered no evidence that this girl was depressed) first shot her baby and then herself in the top of her head.

Much to our amazement, the defense put on no case of its own whatsoever, declaring that it had proved reasonable doubt with its cross-examinations. In his closing statement, Elliot Weinstein claimed that Neil Entwistle had driven to Carver to return the murder weapon to his in-law's home to preserve his wife's reputation so that "no one would know she had killed her own baby and shot herself." He had sacrificed himself, according to Weinstein, for his wife. This has to go down as about the nuttiest defense theory I have ever heard. Here we have two dead bodies with .22 caliber bullets in them, and somehow if the gun is not found, no one will suspect a thing.

The jury was out a respectable 11 hours before it convicted Neil Entwistle on two counts of first-degree murder, most of which time they spent with the murder weapon trying to see if it was possible for a petite woman like Rachel Entwistle to shoot herself in the top of the head. They found that it was not physically possible as her arms would not have been long enough.

Entwistle's response on being convicted of the first-degree murder of his wife and child was to laugh and roll his eyes.

At a somber press conference after the verdicts of life in prison without parole had been read, Rachel's mother and stepfather, Priscilla and Joseph Materazzo, thanked the public for their support.

Showing a complete lack of respect, which included not rising for the judge and jury in the courtroom, Neil's mother Yvonne Entwistle, made the following statement: "We know that our son , Neil, is innocent, and we are devastated to learn that the evidence points to Rachel murdering our grandchild and then committing suicide." (What evidence? She must have been watching a different trial than I was . All I heard were a bunch of ludicrous accusations made on cross with nothing to back them up. Most states would not even have allowed this, but Massachusetts allows every latitude in a first-degree murder case. We have no death penalty here either.)"I knew Rachel was depressed. Our son will now go to jail for loving, honoring and protecting his wife's memory."

This was a truly sickening ending to a truly heartrending case. In the next thirty years or so he spends in a Massachusetts jail, I am sure that Entwistle will continue to do what sociopaths and narcissists do best- lie, lie, and lie, and hope that they will find someone stupid enough to listen to them so that they can go back out in the world and kill and cheat again. I hope that this time he will find no one to believe him.

Next Week- Why Did He Do It, And Other Murderous Dads.

Last Thursday, in the Middlesex Superior Courthouse, in Woburn, Massachusetts Neil Entwistle, 29, was found guilty of murder in the first degree in the execution-style slayings of his wife Rachel Entwistle, 27 and their baby, nine-month old Lillian Rose. Thus ended a transatlantic tragedy that began in late January, 2006, when a worried parent, Priscilla Materazzo, telephoned to the Hopkinton police department that she could not locate her daughter, son-in-law or grandaughter. After several searches of the rented colonial-style house, which they picked the locks of with a credit card, police found the two decomposing corpses hidden in an upstairs bedroom under a comforter and pillows.The bodies, from their positions, had been shot in their sleep. At first I was very puzzled as to why the Hopkinton police could not find the bodies on their first search of the house. But, having seen the crime scene photos with my own eyes (unfortunately they were courtroom exhibits and cannot be reproduced here) it becomes understandable. One would never guess that there was one body lying under that carefully arranged pillow and comforter, let alone two.

Rachael Matterazzo was studying at Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts when she decided to spend her senior year abroad at York University in England, where she met Neil Entwistle. They fell in love and decided to get married. The Entwistles began their married life in the upscale village of Droitwich Spa. Rachael Entwistle taught at St. Augustine's Catholic School in nearby Redditch. Neil worked at a nearby company as an engineer. This idyllic existence went on for three years. I feel that if we knew why the Entwistles left England for America we might be able to get more of a handle on this case and why the murders happened. My brilliant theory is that he was either so much in debt in England that he thought going to America would give them a fresh start, or else he couldn't cut the muster at work- or both

At first I was of the opinion that Neil Entwistle, the missing father, would be found dead in the woods, by his own hand. But no, I was wrong. Entwistle's rented BMW was found at Logan Airport, having been there since January 21, and Entwistle was found in London, having a gay old time with friends, attending films, eating out at restaurants, and making copious notes in a pocket notebook he had purchased which read,"Sell story to highest bidder". There was also in his possession a page ripped out of a magazine advertising escorts. He also ran his mouth like few murderers before or since. Each of his friends was told a totally different story about the "tragedy", which he of course claimed to have no part in. Some were told that he telephoned 911 before he ran away to London; others were told that he telephoned his wife's parents; some heard that he telephoned the Massachusetts State Police. All were of course lies. After committing the murders he ran away without calling anyone. He also found time, although he didn't find the time to fly back to America to attend his wife and baby's funerals, to telephone to his landlord in Massachusetts that he could keep the security deposit and that he wouldn't be wanting anything from the house as he wouldn't ever be coming back to America.

Well, Neil, you were wrong about that one.

By this time Massachusetts investigators had built up quite a case against him. His father-in-law, Joseph Matterazzo, was fond of target practice and had taught his son-in- law to shoot and load guns, of which he had a collection. These guns were all tested by the State Police Laboratory and one was found to have Rachel Entwistle's DNA on the muzzle and Neil Entwistle's DNA on the trigger. I guess a brilliant guy like Neil thought that returning the gun to Mr. Matterazzo's house would somehow absolve him of all suspicion. Neil Entwistle was arrested for his crimes on a subway platform in London. He attempted to escape, but was chased down by British police. He waived extradition and was returned to Massachusetts to face trial.

Meanwhile we were learning more and more about Neil Entwistle. He was obviously a pathological liar and con artist. His wife told her mother that the expensive house that they had rented in Hopkinton, which was worth more than a half million dollars, would soon be purchased by Neil with money he had in an "offshore account" They just had to wait for the money to"get there". In actuality Neil Entwistle was deep in debt, and one of the only true remarks he made in the days following his wife and baby's death was that he planned to declare bankruptcy in both Britain and America. Also supposedly Neil was "looking for work". The only thing the record shows is that he was looking for sex, trolling the Internet and joining groups like "Adult Friend- Finders" and making internet searches for "half-price escorts" He also claimed to be employed by British intelligence doing top secret work.

Neil also ran a couple of internet sites which seemed to be no better than pyramid schemes, or as we call them here in Massachusetts, Ponzi schemes, after Charles Ponzi, one of the greatest confidence tricksters of all time. Every day at lunchtime in downtown Boston, Ponzi would open the windows of his office in South Station and fling armloads of twenty-dollar bills out of the window. He had people standing in lines around the block waiting to give him money. Unfortunately, Neil Entwistle had no such luck. One of his websites, millionmaker.co.uk, promised 24-hour seven-day- a- week support to those running pornographic internet sites.A profit of $6,000 a month within the first six months was promised.

A Web site that tracks internet scams lists millionmaker.co.uk as a possible scam site. Also, Neil Entwistle had 16 complaints in the last month he was in business alone on e-bay for non-delivery of services. Several of the complaints targeted Rachel Entwhistle. Another stated "Complete scam. E-bay users beware! Absolutely nothing received!"And then there were those penis enlargement kits. Sometimes people like Entwistle don'r seem to realizr that it is easier to work for a living than it is to try and cheat people.

We all eagerly awaited the trial, figuring that maybe we would learn the answer to that question that always is raised in cases like this one- Why? How little we knew the shocks and the surprises we had waiting for us.

Next Week- The Trial