June and Jennifer Gibbons were twins who at the age of three made a pact to only communicate with each other. The couple kept their agreement until the death of Jennifer Gibbons, freeing June to live among society. Only through death could one be freed from the other. This passage from June sums up how irreversibly entwined June and Jennifer were:
“One day she would wake up and it would be me, and one day I would wake up and it would be her. And we used to say to each other, ‘Give me back to myself.’ If you give me back to myself, I’ll give you back to myself.’”
June lives an ordinary life after the mysterious death of her sister.
June was ten minutes older than her sister, but most people believed that Jennifer was the manipulative sister. The twins, who emigrated to England with their parents and three siblings in the early 1960s, grew closer due to the abuse they suffered.
They rarely stayed in one school for long, so the only constant was each other. Anne Treherne, a psychologist who examined the twins, opined that Jennifer controlled June using eye signals. However, she couldn’t explain the perfect timing of the twins’ actions.
Experts separated the twins to see if they could develop separate identities. However, the experiment failed: instead of diversifying, June and Jennifer became isolated and seemed to give up the will to live.
The separation resulted in the unintended result: it brought the twins closer together. June and Jennifer’s lives together were not entirely happy. The couple had near-fatal fights: June tried to drown Jennifer in the river; Jennifer tried to strangle June with a rope.
June wrote: “I feel like killing myself but will that help? I have fresh marks on my face that prove how harrowing life with my twin sister is making her. Do I have the strength to kill her? Yet June and Jennifer fell ill whenever they were apart, as if bound by some sinister spell.
In 1993, the authorities decided to transfer the twins to a lower-security Caswell Clinic in Wales. Author Marjorie Wallace spoke with npr about the strange conversation he had with the girls days before the move:
“Jennifer said, ‘Marjorie, Marjorie, I’m going to have to die,’ and I kind of laughed. Why are you going to have to die? You are not sick. And she said: ‘Because we have decided.’
Wallace realized that the girls had decided that for one to truly live, the other had to die. The morning of her release, Jennifer laid her head on June’s shoulder and slipped into a coma. Doctors pronounced her dead less than 12 hours later. She passed away due to a sudden inflammation of the heart.
June rejoined the partnership a year after her sister’s death. She lives in the UK close to her family and, as she is no longer tied to Jennifer, she mixes freely with anyone willing to listen.
June described the girls’ time at Broadmoor as twelve years of hell.
June and Jennifer’s self-isolation from the world intensified as they grew older. In 2000, June told the New Yorker The girls prayed for divine intervention to help them talk to their loved ones, but help never came:
“We begged him not to let us hurt our family by ignoring them, to give us the strength to talk to our mother, our father. We couldn’t do it. It was difficult. Too hard.”
The girls dropped out of school in their mid-teens, registered for unemployment, and retired to their room. The family could hear them talk and type, but rarely saw them. Jennifer and June wrote books and novels and meticulously recorded their lives in journals.
At seventeen, Jennifer and June lost their virginity to the same guy. June did not enjoy the sex, writing: “I have no feelings for sex. I think it’s mean and cruel. I just like to go back and let it happen. I want romance and emotional attachment; guys just use my body.”
The girls took up a life of crime involving petty theft and arson. A judge sentenced them to indefinite detention at the high-security Broadmoor facility. The duo’s writing and creativity were significantly curtailed at Broadmoor due to the effects of antipsychotic drugs injected into their bodies by doctors. June summed up life in Broadmoor:
“We had twelve years of hell, because we did not speak. We had to work hard to get out. We went to the doctor. We said, ‘Look, they wanted us to talk, we’re talking now.’ He said, ‘You’re not going out. You’re going to be here for thirty years. We lost hope, really.”
Investigators never got to the bottom of Jennifer’s untimely but expected death. There was no evidence of poison in her system, ruling out suicide or murder. Some doctors opined that the drugs given to the girls at Broadmoor caused her death. However, June took the same medications and had no health complications.
June wrote in her diary: “My dear twin sister Jennifer died today. She is dead. Her heart stopped beating. She will never recognize me. Mom and dad came to see her body. I kissed her stone-colored face. I became hysterical with pain.”
Jennifer’s death meant freedom for June. June told Wallace that the couple had decided that she would live for both of them. Jennifer’s headstone features the following poem by June: “Once we were two / We two became one / We are no longer two / Through life, let us be one / Rest in peace.”
Categories: Biography
Source: vcmp.edu.vn