J. Ballard - Running Wild

As the kidnappers fled with the child, pausing at the door to fire a last shot at myself, I recognized them as Annabel Reade and Mark Sanger of Pangbourne Village.

It was some minutes later, when the ward filled with police, security staff and emergency medical teams, that I switched off the television set. The screen was wet with blood, and I realized that I had been shot in the left hand.

During November, as I convalesced from the wounds to my wrist and palm, I had ample time to replay in my mind that terrifying scene at the Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital. Discussing the episode with a CID superintendent, we came to the conclusion that the entire assault had taken no more than twenty seconds, from the overturning of the trolley to the kidnappers' flight with Marion Miller. In this time one uniformed policeman had been killed, a second constable and the woman Special Branch officer seriously wounded. Detective Carter's intervention almost certainly saved my own life-it seems probable that the kidnappers intended to shoot both of us after disposing of the police guards.

Their ruthless efficiency confirmed that the kidnapping had been carefully planned. No trace has been found of the gang, and we can only guess whether Marion Miller is still alive. The suggestion that two of the Pangbourne children were responsible met with strong resistance, both at the Home Office and in the national press. Too much emotional capital had been invested in the notion of the thirteen orphaned children.

However, Annabel Reade and Mark Sanger have been repeatedly identified, not only by Officer Carter and myself, but by the nurses and doctors of the two wards to which these murderous adolescents had been admitted for observation. They had arrived three days before the kidnapping, apparently referred to Great Ormond Street by the casualty department of a north London hospital. This gave them ample time to survey the security and layout of the building, and the exact location of Marion Miller. As children they were never challenged, a problem which would have faced any adult kidnappers.

Interestingly, they left their fingerprints all over the furniture and utensils in their wards, and this suggests that they are fully prepared to admit their part in the kidnapping and, by implication, in the murder of their own parents. However, I would guess that the children are now far beyond the point where questions of guilt and responsibility have any meaning for them.

Is Marion Miller still alive? The assumption at the Home Office and Scotland Yard is that she will have been killed before she could reveal the whereabouts of the gang, and that the kidnap was in fact a botched execution. Needless to say, I am confident that Marion is alive, and that the nightmare logic of the Pangbourne Massacre demands this. Just as the older children required Marion to play her part willingly in the murder of her parents, so they need her now to believe in the rightness of their cause. Fanaticism of that kind is rooted in total unity. Besides, the older children must realize that within a year or two at the most, when she ceases to be a young child, they will have won Marion forever.

A spate of fresh theories has been offered to account for the murders, many of them variants of earlier theories that the children are the agents of a foreign power or have been brainwashed by advanced hypnotic drugs. There is even the suggestion that the massacre was a misguided rehearsal of the murder of the Kremlin Politburo by their own grandchildren, which would be triggered in the event of a nuclear war.

The Home Office dismisses all these, and points instead to the Jonestown Massacre. It believes that the children came under the sway of one of the older adolescents, a Manson-type ringleader who exerted a messianic hold over the others, seducing them by the force of his warped personality. The murder of their parents was the initiation rite that led to membership in his deranged cult. The Home Office is confident that, sooner or later, the gang will break cover as they forcibly recruit new members, or as the leader's megalomania carries him over the brink into delusions of omnipotence.

I doubt this. There is no sign that any of the older children was a ringleader, or that any kind of coercion was ever employed. Despite the desktop newspapers, cassettes and videos which they circulated, the Pangbourne children tended toward solitary pursuits. Thanks to the television cameras and their crowded recreation schedules, the children were virtually prisoners in their own homes.

My own view is that far from being an event of huge significance for the children, the murder of their parents was a matter of comparative unimportance. I believe that the actual murders were no more than a final postscript to a process of withdrawal from the external world that had begun many months beforehand, if not years. As with the Hungerford killer, Michael Ryan, or the numerous American examples of crazed gunmen opening fire on passersby, the identity of the victims probably had no special significance for them. More than this, I would argue that for such killings to take place at all, the deaths of their victims must be without any meaning.

By a grim paradox, the instrument of the parents' deaths was the devoted and caring regime which they had instituted at Pangbourne Village. The children _had_ been brainwashed, by the unlimited tolerance and understanding that had erased all freedom and all trace of emotion-for emotion was never needed at Pangbourne, by either parents or children.

Denied any self-expression, and with even the most wayward impulse defused by the parents' infinite patience, the children were trapped within an endless round of praiseworthy activities-for nowhere were praise and encouragement lavished more generously than at Pangbourne Village, whether earned or not. Altogether, the children existed in a state closely akin to sensory deprivation. Far from hating their parents when they killed them, the Pangbourne children probably saw them as nothing more than the last bars to be removed before they could reach out to the light.

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.

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 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.