I t is the sort of riddle Agatha Christie would dream up. It is the early hours of Sunday 24 May 1987, in Toronto, Canada. A 23-year-old electronics worker called Kenneth Parks falls asleep on the sofa in his house while watching Saturday Night Live. The time is 1.30am.
When he opens his eyes, it is still dark outside. But Kenneth is standing in a different house. He has a knife in his hands. His mother-in-law is dying in front of him. He has no memory of what has just occurred or how he travelled the 14 miles from his house to the home of his parents-in-law. All he sees is the blood on his clothes. In a state of shock, Kenneth flees and drives to the nearest police station and arrives uttering the chilling line: “I think I have killed some people.”
The events of that night will consume the attention of criminologists for decades. But the facts are indisputable. Kenneth’s father-in-law was strangled unconscious – and survived. His mother-in-law was stabbed five times, suffered a subarachnoid haemorrhage from a fracture to the skull and died at the scene. Kenneth Parks was interviewed seven times but his story remained consistent. He had no memory of what happened. He had no motive to kill his parents-in-law. One moment he was falling asleep, the next he was committing murder.
But that is not the most shocking part of the story. Despite all the evidence that he committed the crime, Kenneth Parks was found not guilty of murder and attempted murder. His defence was sleepwalking, or non-insane automatism as part of a presumed episode of somnambulism. Kenneth returned to normal life and went on to have six children.
Nearly two decades later, in 2006, Kenneth Parks hit the front pages once again. This time, he had staged an unlikely bid to be a school trustee. Not surprisingly, his bid provoked local opposition and was soon dropped, but the night of 1987 was back in the public consciousness – and people had questions, questions they’ve been asking ever since. Did Kenneth Parks use the sleepwalking defence to get away with the perfect murder? If you murder someone while sleepwalking, are you guilty or not guilty? If your eyes are open but your brain is still asleep, did you intend to commit a crime or not?
Whether or not sleepwalking is the perfect cover-up for a murder, Kenneth Parks is not the first to have used it in his defence. In January 1859, Esther Griggs, an impoverished Londoner, was accused of throwing her baby through a window and screaming, “Save my children!” while her other two lay in bed. Griggs claimed she was dreaming about her house being on fire and was trying to save her baby son by throwing him out of the window. Against all the odds, the defence worked. The court believed that she was asleep at the time of the murder and so was not responsible for her actions. Esther Griggs, like Kenneth Parks, was acquitted.
Two decades later, on 9 April 1878, Simon Fraser, a married father of two, living in Glasgow, saved his sleeping family from a wild beast that had broken through the floorboards by smashing its head on the ground. On waking, Fraser saw that he had killed his 18-month-old son. At his trial, the defence proved that he had a long history of night terrors and violent somnambulism, including the attempted strangulation of his sister. The case against Fraser was discharged by the court. But it came with one condition. He was ordered to sleep alone in a locked room for the rest of his life.
We don’t know whether Fraser’s eyes were closed as he slept through his tragic destruction of that imaginary beast – if he was asleep, we would assume they would have been. After all, our eyes presumably cannot be open while our brains are asleep. We are either awake or asleep, surely? Not so, according to neurologist and sleep disorder specialist Dr Guy Leschziner, author of The Nocturnal Brain: Nightmares, Neuroscience and the Secret World of Sleep. “The concept of being asleep or awake is not entirely representative of reality,” says Leschziner. “To understand how this is possible, we must grapple with a phenomenon called ‘local sleep’. Most of us think being awake means our brains are fully awake. But, actually, little areas of our brains are constantly dipping in and out of sleep. Feeling awake and looking awake doesn’t always mean that our brains are active.”
Leschziner goes further: “There is very clear evidence that when people are sleepwalking, it’s the parts of the brain responsible for emotion, movement and vision that show this waking pattern, whereas the parts of the brain that are responsible for rational thinking and memory demonstrate sleeping behaviour. If you think about which parts of those brains are disconnected, it’s the bits that are responsible for being a sensible human being. That’s why people exhibit strange phenomena like sleep terrors.”
As many as 10% of those living in the UK suffer night terrors, according to Lisa Artis of The Sleep Charity, and around 40% of the population will suffer with sleep issues at some point in their lives, with the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis causing a rise in sleep issues. One in three adults have symptoms of insomnia, and around 22% of us sleepwalk, frequently walking with our eyes open.
Most of us won’t remember doing so after being woken by someone else, and may also be confused, and even aggressive. Sleepwalkers who commit crimes may cite a family history of the behaviour disorder, and are right to do so: sleepwalking may run in the family.
Scott Falater, an engineer from Phoenix, Arizona, claimed just that, following the death of his wife of 20 years. In 1997 Falater stabbed her 44 times, hid the knife and her bloodied clothes in the back of his Volvo and then held her head underwater in their swimming pool. His defence claimed that he had been sleepwalking at the time, pointing out also his family history of sleepwalking. Unluckily for Falater, a neighbour testified that he had seen the accused motion for his dog to lie down during the night in question. The jury took this as evidence of consciousness and intent and Falater was found guilty of first-degree murder.
A guilty verdict is not always that clear-cut, however. “There is no ‘one size fits all’ answer to how sleepwalking is treated in criminal law,” says criminal barrister Ramya Nagesh, author of A Practical Guide to Insane and Non-Insane Automatism in Criminal Law. “A person who is sleepwalking is not in control.” That does not mean they can claim diminished responsibility due to insanity. “You would be hard-pressed to find a medical doctor who would classify them as insane,” says Nagesh. The problem, then, is how to classify these cases. “In my view we need some sort of special verdict for sleepwalking cases which does not label people ‘insane’, but which allows the judge to provide they are supervised medically.”
As for a jury faced with the blurred lines between sanity and insanity and between a suspect being awake and asleep, it is a forensic minefield, says Leschziner. Even so, there are several key ways a jury can try to establish whether a defendant really was sleepwalking when they committed their crime. The first, and most obvious, says Leschziner, who acts as an expert witness in criminal cases involving somnambulism, is establishing whether or not the story adds up. Does the defendant have a history of sleepwalking? Is there evidence of non-REM parasomnias (the technical term for sleep disorders), reported by family members or partners? What might have triggered a sleepwalking episode? Is the defendant’s behaviour consistent with sleepwalking?
Addressing the last question involves a degree of guesswork, guesswork that may well not stand up in a court of law. “The only way to be absolutely certain that a particular act was committed during a non-REM parasomnia,” says Leschziner, “would be to have electrodes attached to that individual while they’re committing that act.”
Obviously that is not going to happen, leaving sleepwalking a defence of choice for those hoping to get away with a crime they fully intended to commit. That’s where the role of sleep forensics comes in. Neurologist Dr Michel Cramer Bornemann founded Sleep Forensic Associates (SFA) in Minnesota, USA, in 2006, in part “as a result of the increasing volume of requests to evaluate bizarre difficult-to-understand crimes” and “the seemingly nonsensical”, he says, but also to research the broad spectrum of unusual parasomnias.
When we speak, he has 13 legal cases on the go, four involving homicide. “Over half of my cases involve allegations of sexual assault and an investigation into possible sexsomnia [engaging in sexual activity while asleep]. In a typical week, I will be fielding enquiries from attorneys to determine whether a sleep forensics investigation is indicated or worthwhile, and review and analyse legal case files, including analysing police bodycam videos, audio of the initial encounter and any toxicology reports.”
Happily, sleep-related murder is still unusual, according to Nagesh, who estimates that in the UK the average criminal barrister is unlikely to come across more than one or two cases of sleepwalking in their career. “It is still relatively rare,” she says. “Even if a defendant raises sleepwalking as a defence, it has to be made out on the facts.”
As someone who writes mystery thrillers for a living, what fascinates me is not the facts that we do know, but how little we know about what happens when we sleep and how close sleep is to death, as the haunted Hamlet articulated so memorably with his reflection, “To die, to sleep; / To sleep, perchance to dream.” It is the unknowable aspects of the mind, what Freud saw as the “most mysterious of all instruments”, that I myself, in the past always a good sleeper, find compelling.
I’ve spent the past four years researching the dark side of insomnia for my new novel. By the time I typed the final line, my own sleep had become even worse. My dreams are filled with all the stories I’ve read. Sometimes I wake up and remember blurry images about knives, bodies and the residue of a terrible crime. I now wonder if researching these cases might cause my own unconscious to re-enact them. What if I wake up in a different place with no memory of getting there, having committed some terrible act? Is it neurologically possible to have an anxiety dream about the consequences of anxiety dreams? Judging from my own experience, yes it is.
For Bornemann, sleep tells us more about ourselves than we might care to know. For him, it offers “another window in which to understand human consciousness… ‘Monsters are real’”, he says, quoting Stephen King. “‘They live inside us... and sometimes, they win.’ Research into cognitive neuroscience has revealed that human beings are much less in control of their actions than we had thought. Anyone who sleepwalks can kill.”
Anna O by Matthew Blake (HarperCollins, £16.99) is available at guardianbookshop.com for £14.95
