In the intervening seven years, they have been convicted of, on average, 16.8 crimes, 5.4 of which were violent, resulting in a total of 1,214 days in prison.These statistics have broad implications for how we think about criminality. What if, for example, as a result of his brutal childhood, Joseph Franklin has a lesion on his frontal lobes, an atrophied hippocampus, a maldeveloped left hemisphere, a lack of synaptic complexity in the pre-cortical limbic area, and a profound left-right hemisphere split? What if his remorselessness was just the grown-up version of the little boy, Martin, whose ability to understand and relate to others was so retarded that he kept on hitting and hitting, even after the screams began? He might still be sane, in the strict legal definition. But that kind of medical diagnosis suggests that his ability to live by the rules of civilised society, and to appreciate and act on the distinctions between right and wrong, is quite different from someone with a happy childhood and a normal brain.The organic perspective on violence promises enormous insights about how to rehabilitate prisoners and prevent violence and restore to health those turned into criminals by no fault of their own. But there is no doubt that there is something a little unsettling about using medical evidence to explain certain kinds of criminal behaviour.

It may be a more flexible and sophisticated way of looking at criminality, but something is clearly lost in the translation. The moral force of the old standard, after all, was in its inflexibility and lack of sophistication. Murder was murder, and the allowances made for aggravated circumstances were kept to a minimum. Is a moral standard still a moral standard when it is freighted with exceptions and exemptions and physiological equivocation?When Lewis went to see Bundy in Starke, Florida, on the day before his execution, she asked him why he had allowed her – out of all the people lining up outside his door – to see him. He answered, “Because everyone else I’ve talked with these past days wants to know what I did.

You are the only one who wants to know why I did it.” It’s impossible to know what the supremely manipulative Bundy meant by this: whether he genuinely appreciated Lewis, or whether he simply regarded her as his last conquest. What’s clear is that, over the handful of times they met in Bundy’s last months, the two reached a kind of understanding, and by the end she sensed a certain breakthrough.”The day before he was executed, he asked me to turn off the tape recorder. He said he wanted to tell me things that he didn’t want recorded, so I didn’t. It was very confidential.” To this day, Lewis has never told anyone what Bundy said There is something almost admirable about this.