Heart and Soul: The killer's counsel
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 16 February 2024
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Doctor Gwen Adshead is a forensic psychiatrist working with the UK’s most violent offenders, many of them serving life sentences at Broadmoor Prison for murder. Gwen believes that empathy starts with a recognition that there is a capacity for evil in all of us. She believes that for her patients, “no matter what their history”, therapeutic treatment works. She speaks to the writer and convicted murderer Erwin James. Together they reflect on Erwin’s life story and how he came to commit the crime he did. Erwin asks Gwen about her relationship with Christianity and how it has supported her in her work.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Lives Less Ordinary is the podcast from the BBC World Service, |
| 0:04.0 | bringing you extraordinary personal stories from around the globe. |
| 0:08.0 | Search for Lives Less Ordinary, wherever you're |
| 0:15.0 | listening to the Killers Council for Heart and Soul for the BBC World Service. |
| 0:22.0 | This program contains descriptions of violent crime |
| 0:25.8 | from the point of view of the perpetrators of those crimes. |
| 0:31.5 | How is it that you think you lost your control over your violence? You let that |
| 0:37.5 | violence happen when that man, when you killed that man? How did that... |
| 0:41.0 | Can you... Those men? there were two men I killed |
| 0:44.3 | to it can you remember so must unimaginable to me to try and figure out. I said I killed those people, there were three of us involved. |
| 0:59.4 | I was drunk and I just got to the end of life I kind of explain it, how the heck I go into that situation. I feel exploited the first one. |
| 1:17.0 | I cannot explain how the heck I got into that situation. |
| 1:22.0 | I feel exploited the first one and I just I can't I can't I can't say you know but I did I was responsible for that man's death. |
| 1:37.7 | The second time he'd like a fight in the mile. |
| 1:40.9 | I jumped in. |
| 1:50.6 | I was the bigger guy and we beat this chape up and he died four days later. |
| 1:59.0 | They were totally out of control, totally utterly out of control. I looked back and I think, why didn't you do this? Why don't you do that? Why don't you stop? |
| 2:07.5 | And this is exactly what I hear other people who've killed say exactly the same thing that at the moment that it happens it's all like a |
| 2:14.6 | dreadful dream and actually you see it kind of unfolding there's nothing you can do |
| 2:18.8 | to stop it's just going to happen. When you're going down that dark path and you wake up, I didn't even know this is the first one, I didn't |
| 2:26.4 | know it happened. |
| 2:27.4 | I opened the evening standard and there was a news report this man was found dead and I thought |
... |
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