The killing of Philip Hendy

Dr Dermot J Ward

One beautiful Sunday morning in April 2007 in Bristol, 75 years old Philip Hendy was stabbed twice outside his local newsagent. He had gone there to pay his paper bill. Despite the best efforts of nearby Frenchay Hospital he died 10 days later. He had never known his attacker. The killer was Stephen Newton who was well known to Bristol Mental Health Services. He was, according to one son, Julian, a kind man much loved parent and grandparent. The trauma for his wife and family can scarcely be imagined.

One of his sons, Julian, a journalist has been making TV documentaries for some 20 years. On the 1^st March 2010 BBC2 carried a programme made by him, Why did you kill my father? He had been concerned that no-one in the health service wanted to answer his anguished questions about Mr Newton – often parried with the excuse of protecting patient confidentiality. Patient confidentiality? There had been an open court case and of course an inquest. Julian (I have never met him) discovered that the killer had a history of psychotic mental illness: that it was said in court that he had taken “industrial quantities” of amphetamines and had been on antipsychotic medication.

Four days before he killed Philip Hendy his family had called the local ‘community mental health team’ to get him sectioned. He was paranoid, bullying and threatening his mother. The ‘community mental health team ‘it was alleged, declared they could do nothing because he didn’t want to be treated. One day I hope to devote a piece to the abuse of the team concept by politician dubious involvement and its worse than uselessness as a conduit of safe and effective patient treatment. Later a woman police officer told Julian that her police statement revealed that Mr Newton claimed he was the illegitimate son of the Prince of Wales. He also claimed that his son had been murdered by an MP, been replaced by a clone and forced into a sex- change operation by former US president George Bush in order to “make him look like Kylie Minogue”.

Clearly, I do not possess all the details but it is extremely difficult to understand why it was considered so by the ‘community Mental Health Team’that Stephen Newton could not be sectioned when requested by his family.  I have used single inverted commas to emphasise the absence of consultant psychiatrist as the professional most empowered in law to action a section when an appropriate application has been made. I viewed the TV documentary when it went out and decided to record it anyway on DVD. That was just as well. Julian had interviewed Tony Maden, professor of forensic psychiatry at Imperial College London and consultant at Broadmoor high security hospital. He told Hendy: “when I trained as a psychiatrist I was taught, along with everyone else in the 1980s that there was no association between mental illness and violence...it was only in the late ‘80s that a robust association between certain type of mental illness and violence [was established]”.

Steady on there, young Maden! By 1980 I had been a consultant psychiatrist for upwards of 10 years involved in Dublin’s Postgraduate Psychiatric Training Scheme and can recall lecturing on the association between mental illness and violence. I will mention but one (there are many more) useful reference: Weller MPI. Violence and Mental Illness. Br Med J 1984;289:2-3. This editorial mentioned, inter alia, ‘an analysis of records of 1241 of men remanded in Brixton Prison showed that in the group charged with homicide just over a third were psychiatrically abnormal; five (11%) of those convicted were schizophrenic. Despite the risk of undercounting this was a disproportionately large group in relation to expectation from epidemiological data, and the number of schizophrenic patients who had been violent towards others without resulting fatality exceeded expectations by over 22 times’.

Apart from extensive literature support what about old fashioned common sense connection of mental illness and violence in our faces: the Central Mental Hospital in Dublin or ,say Broadmoor in Berkshire. No-one is admitted to such facility for biting their nails. Neither is there a separate hospital with compulsory powers of admission and detention for other illnesses (very rarely epidemic/pandemic infections have limited compulsory powers). This situation has existed since Victorian times in the interest of humane care and treatment of mentally ill persons and public protection. There has been a strong political pressure since the hijacking, from the 1960s onwards of responsible doctor-initiated control of community care and government driven closure of thousands of psychiatric hospital beds which has surely contributed to the homicides incidence of such as Philip Hendy. His mentally ill killer seemed to observers at the scene to be indifferent to his dreadful deed.             

Julian Hendy’s other expert interviewee was Professor Louis Appleby CBE, National Director of Mental Health, Criminal Justice Professor of Psychiatry at Manchester University (I accessed his blog 5/3/2011 at bmj.com/content/328/7432/126.3/...DCI). He informed Hendy about the statistics surrounding homicides such as that of his father at the hand of severely mentally ill people and claimed that there was a more or less steady 50 such killings per year. However, Julian Hendy’s own professional (a skilled journalist) researches revealed the number of such homicides to be about a hundred, not fifty, and that no one part of the country was exempt from this carnage. That last word is appropriate as the killings can be quite remarkably awful.

On the same net page as Professor Appleby listed “My achievements” there is a paragraph “What others say” and the only comment is from Dr Trevor Turner, consultant psychiatrist, Homerton University Hospital, London who states:-

‘The national service framework and the reviews of mental health by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence are nice, but nothing much else has happened. The real problem is that there are so many agencies that Professor Appleby has got completely cut off from services. He now uses the language of government and managerialism, rather than the language of clinicians. And he has been taken on board, “gone native” so to speak. If there is going to be a “tsar,” that tsar should be independently elected by the relevant part of the profession. So far I’m rather negative about the usefulness of stardom.’ He does add that Appleby is “a perfectly nice guy” and touches on a few less relevant points of his perception of Louis Appleby’s, work.

The last 20 years has seen Britain’s prison population double from 40,000 to 80,000. The number of psychiatric hospital beds fell from 55 000 in 1990 to 30 000 in2003 after which numbers have become too difficult to establish. In 1939 Lionel Penrose showed a negative correlation between the prison population, the homicide rate and the availability of mental hospital beds. It is such a pity it took the killing of a journalist’s father to focus our minds a little more closely on mental illness and violence.