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I often think of Annabel Reade and Mark Sanger at the Great Ormond Street
Hospital, and of their toneless faces as they turned their weapons on us. I
remember the experiments in sensory deprivation that I attended at the School
of Aviation Medicine at RAF Farnborough, and the great dangers to the
laboratory staff presented by these deeply desensitized volunteers. The
attempt to help them from their soundproof immersion tanks could be fraught
with risk. On numerous occasions the volunteers had injured themselves and
even attempted to strangle the laboratory staff while under the impression
that they were warding off stray equipment that had intruded into their zero
world.
The same schizophrenic detachment from reality can be seen in the members of
the Manson gang, in Mark Chapman and Lee Harvey Oswald, and in the guards at
the Nazi death camps. One has no sympathy for Manson and the others--an
element of choice existed for them all--but the Pangbourne children had no
such choice. Unable to express their own emotions or respond to those of the
people around them, suffocated under a mantle of praise and encouragement,
they were trapped forever within a perfect universe. In a totally sane
society, madness is the only freedom.
The Trigger
In the cases of Michael Ryan, Mark Chapman and Oswald one can assume that the
unconscious decision to commit their crimes had been taken many weeks before
the actual event. What provided the trigger for the Pangbourne children? This
will not be known until the children are captured and interrogated, if ever.
Nonetheless the planned arrival of the producer of the TV documentary on June
25
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may have warned the children that time was running out. The program
researchers and the fashionable sociologist who would front the documentary
had also agreed to visit the estate, and had already spoken to the older
children.
The last issue of _The Pangbourne Pang_ reveals that the provisional title of
the documentary was
_The New Samoa_, a reference to Margaret Mead's influential but partly
discredited work in which she described the idyllic world of these unrepressed
islanders, from whose lives all jealousy, repression and discord had been
erased. The prospect that a glib sociologist would soon take up virtual
residence at
Pangbourne for the three months of the program's filming may well have spurred
the children into action.
Another factor may have been the reports, well advertised in the architectural
press, that the
"success" of Pangbourne Village had led to plans for the construction of
similar estates nearby, and that within two or three years these would be
amalgamated in a super-Pangbourne with its own schools, community clubs and
resident youth counselors, protected by even more elaborate security systems.
At all events, the children must have known that they had only a few days to
act before they were enrolled into the documentary. Intensely proud of
Pangbourne Village, the parents were all present on
June 25, presumably to meet the TV team. How the children planned the massacre
is not yet known, but it is possible to reconstruct the last hours leading up
to the murders, with the help of a few imaginary interpolations.
June 25, 1988--The Reconstruction
_5:56 a.m._ The first sighting of one of the children on the morning of the
massacre. A
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surveillance camera picks up the night security officer Edwards as he walks
down The Avenue, on his way to the gatehouse. He has made his final circuit of
the estate. At 6:00 he and Officer Baines will hand over to their two
replacements on the day shift. As the camera follows Edwards it catches the
seventeen-
year-old Jasper Ogilvy watching through the transom windown of his bathroom.
Jasper's slim, childlike face is composed, but he has a lot to do. At 6:00
Mark Sanger, who can see the gatehouse from the laundry-room window of the
Sanger home, will signal that the guards' change-
over has taken place. On Saturday morning the replacement shift is often late,
and the men will then make tea together in the gatehouse, subtracting fifteen
minutes from the next two crowded hours. During this time Jasper must see that
the three children on his roster (Marion and Robin Miller, and Annabel
Reade) are awake and ready for action, then slip out and retrieve the shotgun
he has buried behind the rose pergola. He must return to his bedroom with the
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