Cold Blooded Murders (38 page)

Dutton died a terrible death trying to prove
that evil men could be brought back to conventional life through hard work. He
did not succeed with his experiment and he paid for failure with his life. His
mistake was not in his handling of the experiment so much as his inability to
understand how evil some wicked men can be. Dutton took no precautions against
his own idealism. Until the end he wanted desperately to believe that the
better bad-men on the island would restrain the evil bad-men. He was convinced
the good bad-men would stand by him, protect him. He was wrong. By believing
that, Dutton signed his own death warrant. He should have known that mob
hysteria causes men to sink to the lowest level, rarely to rise to the nobler levels
of human behaviour.