The Silent twins
Twins...
Every time I hear this word I always think about how confused I get when identifying them and the special bond they share. It’s a very fascinating phenomenon, something very difficult to comprehend. It’s speculated that they have a sixth sense when it comes to their twin. What really is this bond? And how deep can this go?
A BOND between twins is a special one - but the one between June and Jennifer Gibbons must surely be one like few others, to the outside world they were mute and mysterious. For most of their lives together, they refused to speak to anyone but each other—a refusal that led to their emotional exile, their institutionalization, and, eventually, to the misguided appropriation of their story.
The vow of silence:
One of the most intriguing things about June and Jennifer gibbons’ silence was that it was ignored for years. They didn’t just fall mute one day. It went back to the time when they were toddlers. The girls just didn’t talk. They would say one or two words here and there and that was it. Their parents just thought that the twins were just going through a phase and they were just shy. They kept words for each other: June told BBC series Inside Story in 1994 “We had our own language. When my sister and I spoke we knew what we were saying; my mother had to guess.”
Their silence, their color and their co dependence weighed heavy on them as they became the target of bullies in school. The twins soon stopped making eye contact with others, so as not to have to see themselves judged. They also stopped speaking to their parents and their older siblings, whose questions they had previously responded to. “We made a pact,” June explained. “We said we weren’t going to speak to anybody. We stopped talking altogether—only us two, in our bedroom upstairs.”
As the girls grew older, their behavior became stranger. They would only walk in a line, one in front of the other. They would take each step at the same time, arms swinging in time. They walked like this everywhere. They also started doing everything in unison standing up and sitting down, crossing and uncrossing their legs as well as sipping tea. All of this was done in perfect sync and to achieve this mirror movements any motion would be slow and deliberate. This as one would expect only added to their weirdness. They dressed in matching clothes, braided their hair in the same way and they never left each other’s sides, even to their bathroom and of course they did all of this in complete silence.
In 1976, a doctor visiting the school to administer vaccinations noticed their strange behavior. Neither girl spoke, they walked with heads down, almost synchronized, and appeared to be in a sort of trance. "They were totally expressionless. You spoke to them, they didn't react," Dr John Rees told Inside Story. "I'd never seen anything like it."
After the psychiatrist, the girls were taken to see a speech therapist at Withybush Hospital. It was here where the therapist recorded them speaking and managed to decipher their ‘secret language’, which turned out to be a blend of England and Bajan slang spoken extremely quickly.
The girls were referred to a series of specialists, but because the girls still refused to talk to any of them no one could really offer a diagnosis. They still weren’t entirely convinced that their muteness was selective. The twins perhaps really didn’t know how to talk or if they did know how to talk, and were just simply refusing to, that which had to be a pretty disturbing implication on its own as if this was all an act, it was the most committed performance any of the doctors had ever seen. Some of the teachers felt that something really dark was happening with the twins. It was something supernatural. It was as if June was being mind controlled by her twin. One of her therapist said that June was possessed by her twin.
After this incident the twins spiraled out of control. The balance in their relationship ended.
Soon they also began to direct their loathing at their surroundings. Rejected by a local gang, they formed a gang of two. They began stealing bicycles and glue, ringing people’s doorbells repeatedly. They broke into a training center for spastic adults and into a school. They smashed windows, stole books, drew graffiti on walls. They tried to break a pay phone, and then called the police to confess to their crimes, hanging up and running away before the police could arrive on the scene. Eventually, the twins grew bored with the scale of their exploits and decided to escalate. “I’m planning on making petrol bombs,” June wrote. “A bottle, petrol and paper, then hurl it through the window. . . . I’m going to be the biggest arsonist around!” Fire was the ultimate statement of their anguish and their hope: it burned and destroyed and cleansed but unlike their other crimes, arson wasn’t something that could be ignored and so, they were arrested. Their room was searched, and the diaries, filled with stories of fires and theft, were discovered. Two days later, the twins were sent to the Pucklechurch Remand Centre, where they remained for seven months while the judicial system tried to decide what to do with them.
To all the progress they had made during their summer of their heathenism, the twins reverted right back to complete silence for the first few weeks there. Life at the remand centre was chaotic and very tiring for June and Jennifer. They went back to their old habit of being catatonic, unflinching silence, no eye contact and slow synchronised movements. They also went into a pact of starvation. They would alternate everyday which one of them could eat and which would fast. Soon they became emaciated and the staff decided to separate them but this only made it worse as without knowing which one of them was eating and which one was starving, they both refused to eat. The staff remarked that even when they were on opposite sides of Pucklechurch the girls would be in sync, if one of them was reading books, so was the other. If June was sleeping so was Jennifer. They even appeared to mirror each other’s posture. That’s how deeply they were connected to each other and that’s how much they practiced to be in unison.
When they were together they fought viciously. They clawed and screamed at each other and they blamed one another for their present situation.
June wrote: "A deadly day is getting closer each minute, coming to a point of imminent death like hands creeping out against the night sky, intentions of evil, blood, a knife, a mince. . . . I say to myself, how can I get rid of my own shadow? Impossible or not impossible? Without my shadow would I die? Without my shadow would I gain life?
Journalist Hilton Als wrote :
“When they were together, they wanted to kill each other. When they were apart, they were so lonely they wanted to die. Then, when they were reunited, they were disappointed and imagined that they had felt stronger alone.”
In the spring of 1982, a psychiatrist named William Spry was enlisted by the twins’ defence lawyer to evaluate their condition. Eventually, he diagnosed the twins as having a psychopathic personality disorder and proposed that they be sent to Broadmoor, England’s notorious maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane.
Days after the twins arrived at the Broadmoor, June slipped into a torpor. A few weeks later, she attempted suicide. Jennifer attacked a nurse. They were regularly administered with antipsychotics.
To understand identity blending we need to know a little bit of twin psychology.
It is always advised to parents to encourage some individualization in twin sets. It is very common to see twins having similar names, wearing similar clothes, people telling that it is difficult to tell them apart and this leads to blended identities. We already know that Gloria exclusively called the girls “twinies”, dressed them alike, braided their hair the same way and commented that the girls did everything together since birth. She had even breastfed them simultaneously. She didn’t see any harm in it but it seems like after sometime June and Jennifer started to merge into one person whom they called “J”. It probably started as a game at first, but it evolved into a warped battle of wills and eventually the game dictated every part of their life.
Wallace also felt that Jennifer was the enforcer of the silent pact. They felt that June was the good twin the one who could have been popular and successful without the over bearing nature of Jennifer. So Jennifer needed June to stay the same as she was because she was terrified of being left alone. This fear would have been exacted because the Gibbons family was the only black family in the neighbourhood over the years but neither of the girls expected that as they got older they wanted to have their own life by being separate from each other. They didn’t know how to go back to being 2 people and when they did do something different, they found the change so revolting that they would attack each other for it. So trapped in this vicious cycle, June and Jennifer spiralled out of control. They weren’t crazy nor were they possessed but were just caught up in their own pact of unison and resentment which led the people to misunderstand.
With this reason Wallace was able to help the twins. She advocated for their case to be revaluated, she also worked with the girls to start talking and having read their diaries she was able to connect with the twins like no one could.
Finally, in March 1993, a month before their 30th birthday, the twins were approved for transfer to a medium-security clinic — their first step to freedom after 12 long years.
Wallace visited them one last time before they were moved. The conversation was jolly at first, Wallace told NPR, but then in the middle they said the day that they left Broadmoor, the day that they were free from the secure hospital, one of them was going to die. She told them that she doesn’t want to hear anything about it anymore.
The end of the pact:
On the bus to their new facility, Jennifer, who had been feeling lethargic and unwell, laid her head on her sister's shoulder. As the gates closed behind them, she said, "At last, we're out of Broadmoor".
There, leaning on her sister, her shadow, Jennifer slipped into a coma. She was pronounced dead that evening due to undiagnosed acute myocarditis (rarely fatal) and thus the pact was fulfilled.
June was initially destroyed by the death of her twin, but eventually she acclimated to the society. She started talking and in an interview 7 yrs after her release she says that she visits Jennifer’s grave every Tuesday. One of June’s poem is inscribed on the head stone:
We once were two
We two made one
We no more two
Through life be one
Rest in peace.
Her death could have been because of the medication in Broodmore or could be the effect of the starvation pact or it could have been that Jennifer knew that deep down it was time to let her sister go and the only way that June could do that was if Jennifer was gone or the most sinister one that June killed her sister Jennifer.
Until next time,
Every time I hear this word I always think about how confused I get when identifying them and the special bond they share. It’s a very fascinating phenomenon, something very difficult to comprehend. It’s speculated that they have a sixth sense when it comes to their twin. What really is this bond? And how deep can this go?
A BOND between twins is a special one - but the one between June and Jennifer Gibbons must surely be one like few others, to the outside world they were mute and mysterious. For most of their lives together, they refused to speak to anyone but each other—a refusal that led to their emotional exile, their institutionalization, and, eventually, to the misguided appropriation of their story.
The vow of silence:
 |
| June and Jennifer Gibbons |
This extraordinary story begins when Jennifer and June were born on April 11, 1963 to Gloria and Aubrey Gibbons. Their parents had immigrated to the United Kingdom from Barbados three years earlier, and their father became a technician with the Royal Air Force. June was older than Jennifer as she was born 10 minutes early, but Jennifer was considered the more dominant one compared to the other.
One of the most intriguing things about June and Jennifer gibbons’ silence was that it was ignored for years. They didn’t just fall mute one day. It went back to the time when they were toddlers. The girls just didn’t talk. They would say one or two words here and there and that was it. Their parents just thought that the twins were just going through a phase and they were just shy. They kept words for each other: June told BBC series Inside Story in 1994 “We had our own language. When my sister and I spoke we knew what we were saying; my mother had to guess.”
Their silence, their color and their co dependence weighed heavy on them as they became the target of bullies in school. The twins soon stopped making eye contact with others, so as not to have to see themselves judged. They also stopped speaking to their parents and their older siblings, whose questions they had previously responded to. “We made a pact,” June explained. “We said we weren’t going to speak to anybody. We stopped talking altogether—only us two, in our bedroom upstairs.”
As the girls grew older, their behavior became stranger. They would only walk in a line, one in front of the other. They would take each step at the same time, arms swinging in time. They walked like this everywhere. They also started doing everything in unison standing up and sitting down, crossing and uncrossing their legs as well as sipping tea. All of this was done in perfect sync and to achieve this mirror movements any motion would be slow and deliberate. This as one would expect only added to their weirdness. They dressed in matching clothes, braided their hair in the same way and they never left each other’s sides, even to their bathroom and of course they did all of this in complete silence.
In 1976, a doctor visiting the school to administer vaccinations noticed their strange behavior. Neither girl spoke, they walked with heads down, almost synchronized, and appeared to be in a sort of trance. "They were totally expressionless. You spoke to them, they didn't react," Dr John Rees told Inside Story. "I'd never seen anything like it."
After the psychiatrist, the girls were taken to see a speech therapist at Withybush Hospital. It was here where the therapist recorded them speaking and managed to decipher their ‘secret language’, which turned out to be a blend of England and Bajan slang spoken extremely quickly.
The girls were referred to a series of specialists, but because the girls still refused to talk to any of them no one could really offer a diagnosis. They still weren’t entirely convinced that their muteness was selective. The twins perhaps really didn’t know how to talk or if they did know how to talk, and were just simply refusing to, that which had to be a pretty disturbing implication on its own as if this was all an act, it was the most committed performance any of the doctors had ever seen. Some of the teachers felt that something really dark was happening with the twins. It was something supernatural. It was as if June was being mind controlled by her twin. One of her therapist said that June was possessed by her twin.
They were then transferred to a special care school known as The Eastgate, as they felt that the twins needed some serious help. None of the therapies worked for them as the sessions were always silent ,they refused to talk, they refused to make eye contact and continued their habit of slow synchronised movements.
The following year, the twins’ parents agreed to separate them to see if their behaviour changed when they were apart. One teacher reasoned “they are dying in each other’s arms and we must save one of them even at the price of the other”.
Twins break their silence:
The girls hated the idea of separation.
Suddenly, they could talk—or would talk. They telephoned Thomas (the therapist) and other staff members at Eastgate, promising to speak if they were allowed to stay together but nothing happened. So when the staff made good on their threat, that one of the twins would be sent away. It provoked an unprecedented reaction. Within moments, they were screaming and hitting each other. Jennifer dug her nails into June’s cheek. June pulled a chunk of hair out of Jennifer’s head. They chased each other out of Thomas’s (the therapist) office, shrieking, and had to be forcibly parted.
In March, 1978, the separation was carried out but at St. David’s June fell into such despair that she stopped moving almost entirely. It once took two people to get her out of bed, and then all they could do was prop her against a wall; her body was as stiff and heavy as a corpse. June silently cried for hours on end. The only time she stopped crying was when she was allowed to talk with Jennifer on the phone.
Journalist and mental health campaigner Marjorie Wallace who knew the twins shared her thoughts on their relationship. ‘They had these rituals where they decided between them which one would wake first, which one would breathe first, and the other wasn’t allowed to breathe until the first one breathed,’ she revealed according to Wales Online.
‘It was like some sinister childhood game that got out of control.’
Even as they struggled to become themselves, they could not live without each other. “You are Jennifer. You are me,” Jennifer would say over the years, when she felt her sister pulling away from their bond. “I am June. I am June,” her sister would cry out in anguished response. “One day, she’d wake up and be me, and one day I would wake up and be her,” June told. “And we used to say to each other, ‘Give me back myself. If you give me back myself, I’ll give you back yourself.’ ” Needless to say, the separation was a failure, at least from the standpoint of “rehabilitation.” June was sent back to Eastgate, and by the winter of 1979, when they were sixteen, both girls had left school forever and were on the dole.
Venture into the outside world:
By 1979 the twins were 16 years old and were let loose to figure out the rest of their life for themselves. They enjoyed their freedom for a little while. It was exactly what they had wanted and that was to be left alone with each other. They spent their days in their room with their dolls, in their imaginations, living very rich though entirely a fiction based life. Their fantasy worlds was also a way to communicate with each other but they still remained silent and their pact of unison still existed.
By the year 1980 their terms of pact started to shift. The first development was their diaries. Gloria gave June and Jennifer each a red, leather-bound diary with a lock. They immediately started documenting the details of house bound life but, it was this very act of recording their own thoughts that threw the power dynamics of their relationship into question. They realized they were not equal and started to resent each other but they had no idea about how to escape this and they despised each other over time.
Jennifer wrote in her diary:
“June can’t be my real twin. My real twin was born the exact time as me, has my rising sign, my looks, my waves, my dreams, my ambitions. Here she will have my weaknesses, my failures, opinions. All this makes a twin. No differences. I can’t stand differences’”
The other factor in all this is that the girls were 17 yrs old now and had gone through puberty, which is all about self discovery but the twins felt chained to each other, locked to their childhood bedroom unable to connect to anyone else. They wanted friends, lovers and lives of their own.
So they decided it was time to venture into the world. The twins decided what they really needed were their boyfriends but they could never muster up the courage to talk to the boys in their neighbourhood. They would weirdly stay silent and just giggle, and eventually they had alienated all the boys in town. They decided to change tactics and fixated on a boy they knew from Eastgate, Lance Kennedy
Twins break their silence:
The girls hated the idea of separation.
Suddenly, they could talk—or would talk. They telephoned Thomas (the therapist) and other staff members at Eastgate, promising to speak if they were allowed to stay together but nothing happened. So when the staff made good on their threat, that one of the twins would be sent away. It provoked an unprecedented reaction. Within moments, they were screaming and hitting each other. Jennifer dug her nails into June’s cheek. June pulled a chunk of hair out of Jennifer’s head. They chased each other out of Thomas’s (the therapist) office, shrieking, and had to be forcibly parted.
In March, 1978, the separation was carried out but at St. David’s June fell into such despair that she stopped moving almost entirely. It once took two people to get her out of bed, and then all they could do was prop her against a wall; her body was as stiff and heavy as a corpse. June silently cried for hours on end. The only time she stopped crying was when she was allowed to talk with Jennifer on the phone.
Journalist and mental health campaigner Marjorie Wallace who knew the twins shared her thoughts on their relationship. ‘They had these rituals where they decided between them which one would wake first, which one would breathe first, and the other wasn’t allowed to breathe until the first one breathed,’ she revealed according to Wales Online.
‘It was like some sinister childhood game that got out of control.’
Even as they struggled to become themselves, they could not live without each other. “You are Jennifer. You are me,” Jennifer would say over the years, when she felt her sister pulling away from their bond. “I am June. I am June,” her sister would cry out in anguished response. “One day, she’d wake up and be me, and one day I would wake up and be her,” June told. “And we used to say to each other, ‘Give me back myself. If you give me back myself, I’ll give you back yourself.’ ” Needless to say, the separation was a failure, at least from the standpoint of “rehabilitation.” June was sent back to Eastgate, and by the winter of 1979, when they were sixteen, both girls had left school forever and were on the dole.
Venture into the outside world:
By 1979 the twins were 16 years old and were let loose to figure out the rest of their life for themselves. They enjoyed their freedom for a little while. It was exactly what they had wanted and that was to be left alone with each other. They spent their days in their room with their dolls, in their imaginations, living very rich though entirely a fiction based life. Their fantasy worlds was also a way to communicate with each other but they still remained silent and their pact of unison still existed.
By the year 1980 their terms of pact started to shift. The first development was their diaries. Gloria gave June and Jennifer each a red, leather-bound diary with a lock. They immediately started documenting the details of house bound life but, it was this very act of recording their own thoughts that threw the power dynamics of their relationship into question. They realized they were not equal and started to resent each other but they had no idea about how to escape this and they despised each other over time.
Jennifer wrote in her diary:
“June can’t be my real twin. My real twin was born the exact time as me, has my rising sign, my looks, my waves, my dreams, my ambitions. Here she will have my weaknesses, my failures, opinions. All this makes a twin. No differences. I can’t stand differences’”
The other factor in all this is that the girls were 17 yrs old now and had gone through puberty, which is all about self discovery but the twins felt chained to each other, locked to their childhood bedroom unable to connect to anyone else. They wanted friends, lovers and lives of their own.
So they decided it was time to venture into the world. The twins decided what they really needed were their boyfriends but they could never muster up the courage to talk to the boys in their neighbourhood. They would weirdly stay silent and just giggle, and eventually they had alienated all the boys in town. They decided to change tactics and fixated on a boy they knew from Eastgate, Lance Kennedy
(pseudonym) ,who had defended them against the abuse of their other classmates. Lance was American, and though they had not been able to acknowledge him then, they had stored away their memory of him. By the time the twins tracked down his family’s address he had moved to Philadelphia but he did have three younger brothers who were still in Wales.
They were introduced to an entirely new world of alcohol and drugs but their summer with the brothers also brought some darkness and confusion. The destruction came to ahead when Jennifer lost her virginity to one of the Kennedy boys. After years of demanding that the 2 remain entirely equal in every way. Terrified that her sister would outshine her, it was Jennifer who took this monumental step forward first, differentiating herself as the most attractive sister, the more lovable, the more desired. The illusion of equality was shattered and two days after losing her virginity, Jennifer started attacking June aggressively choking her and beating her, later taken aback by all this they decided to leave the house and go for a walk and during their walk in the street it was June who pushed Jennifer off of a bridge and into a river. Here they stared a brawl in the river and was toppled by a passerby. Things would never be the same again.
They were introduced to an entirely new world of alcohol and drugs but their summer with the brothers also brought some darkness and confusion. The destruction came to ahead when Jennifer lost her virginity to one of the Kennedy boys. After years of demanding that the 2 remain entirely equal in every way. Terrified that her sister would outshine her, it was Jennifer who took this monumental step forward first, differentiating herself as the most attractive sister, the more lovable, the more desired. The illusion of equality was shattered and two days after losing her virginity, Jennifer started attacking June aggressively choking her and beating her, later taken aback by all this they decided to leave the house and go for a walk and during their walk in the street it was June who pushed Jennifer off of a bridge and into a river. Here they stared a brawl in the river and was toppled by a passerby. Things would never be the same again.
Delinquency:
After this incident the twins spiraled out of control. The balance in their relationship ended.
Soon they also began to direct their loathing at their surroundings. Rejected by a local gang, they formed a gang of two. They began stealing bicycles and glue, ringing people’s doorbells repeatedly. They broke into a training center for spastic adults and into a school. They smashed windows, stole books, drew graffiti on walls. They tried to break a pay phone, and then called the police to confess to their crimes, hanging up and running away before the police could arrive on the scene. Eventually, the twins grew bored with the scale of their exploits and decided to escalate. “I’m planning on making petrol bombs,” June wrote. “A bottle, petrol and paper, then hurl it through the window. . . . I’m going to be the biggest arsonist around!” Fire was the ultimate statement of their anguish and their hope: it burned and destroyed and cleansed but unlike their other crimes, arson wasn’t something that could be ignored and so, they were arrested. Their room was searched, and the diaries, filled with stories of fires and theft, were discovered. Two days later, the twins were sent to the Pucklechurch Remand Centre, where they remained for seven months while the judicial system tried to decide what to do with them.
To all the progress they had made during their summer of their heathenism, the twins reverted right back to complete silence for the first few weeks there. Life at the remand centre was chaotic and very tiring for June and Jennifer. They went back to their old habit of being catatonic, unflinching silence, no eye contact and slow synchronised movements. They also went into a pact of starvation. They would alternate everyday which one of them could eat and which would fast. Soon they became emaciated and the staff decided to separate them but this only made it worse as without knowing which one of them was eating and which one was starving, they both refused to eat. The staff remarked that even when they were on opposite sides of Pucklechurch the girls would be in sync, if one of them was reading books, so was the other. If June was sleeping so was Jennifer. They even appeared to mirror each other’s posture. That’s how deeply they were connected to each other and that’s how much they practiced to be in unison.
When they were together they fought viciously. They clawed and screamed at each other and they blamed one another for their present situation.
June wrote: "A deadly day is getting closer each minute, coming to a point of imminent death like hands creeping out against the night sky, intentions of evil, blood, a knife, a mince. . . . I say to myself, how can I get rid of my own shadow? Impossible or not impossible? Without my shadow would I die? Without my shadow would I gain life?
Journalist Hilton Als wrote :
“When they were together, they wanted to kill each other. When they were apart, they were so lonely they wanted to die. Then, when they were reunited, they were disappointed and imagined that they had felt stronger alone.”
In the spring of 1982, a psychiatrist named William Spry was enlisted by the twins’ defence lawyer to evaluate their condition. Eventually, he diagnosed the twins as having a psychopathic personality disorder and proposed that they be sent to Broadmoor, England’s notorious maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane.
Days after the twins arrived at the Broadmoor, June slipped into a torpor. A few weeks later, she attempted suicide. Jennifer attacked a nurse. They were regularly administered with antipsychotics.
Marjorie Wallace, who was then a reporter for the London Sunday Times, was alerted to the twins’ story through a friend of Tim Thomas’s. She visited June and Jennifer at Pucklechurch, in 1982, after gaining the confidence of Aubrey and Gloria, who handed over the girls’ diaries and writing. In those pages Wallace discovered far more than she had anticipated. She found poetry reflecting deep intricate lives that June and Jennifer led from the safety of their small bedroom. The imagery was so potent and language so powerful she was just as convinced as Thomas that the twins didn’t belong in Broadmoor.
 |
| June and Jennifer Gibbons with Wallace |
In order to help the twins, she had to explain their silence. Wallace proposed that the twins’ criminal behavior was a misunderstood cry for help. They knew that something was wrong with them, with their silent pact, with their lives as a whole but they had no idea how to escape it. So the twins saw the police and the justice system as a force of good, people who could help them. Wallace thinks that subconsciously they started their crime spree with the express intention of being arrested because they were that desperate for an intervention. Remember that they called the police to report their own crimes more than once and as for their silence itself, Wallace thinks that it was one simple symptom of a much larger issue. The twins suffered from an extreme case of identity blending.
To understand identity blending we need to know a little bit of twin psychology.
It is always advised to parents to encourage some individualization in twin sets. It is very common to see twins having similar names, wearing similar clothes, people telling that it is difficult to tell them apart and this leads to blended identities. We already know that Gloria exclusively called the girls “twinies”, dressed them alike, braided their hair the same way and commented that the girls did everything together since birth. She had even breastfed them simultaneously. She didn’t see any harm in it but it seems like after sometime June and Jennifer started to merge into one person whom they called “J”. It probably started as a game at first, but it evolved into a warped battle of wills and eventually the game dictated every part of their life.
Wallace also felt that Jennifer was the enforcer of the silent pact. They felt that June was the good twin the one who could have been popular and successful without the over bearing nature of Jennifer. So Jennifer needed June to stay the same as she was because she was terrified of being left alone. This fear would have been exacted because the Gibbons family was the only black family in the neighbourhood over the years but neither of the girls expected that as they got older they wanted to have their own life by being separate from each other. They didn’t know how to go back to being 2 people and when they did do something different, they found the change so revolting that they would attack each other for it. So trapped in this vicious cycle, June and Jennifer spiralled out of control. They weren’t crazy nor were they possessed but were just caught up in their own pact of unison and resentment which led the people to misunderstand.
With this reason Wallace was able to help the twins. She advocated for their case to be revaluated, she also worked with the girls to start talking and having read their diaries she was able to connect with the twins like no one could.
Finally, in March 1993, a month before their 30th birthday, the twins were approved for transfer to a medium-security clinic — their first step to freedom after 12 long years.
Wallace visited them one last time before they were moved. The conversation was jolly at first, Wallace told NPR, but then in the middle they said the day that they left Broadmoor, the day that they were free from the secure hospital, one of them was going to die. She told them that she doesn’t want to hear anything about it anymore.
The end of the pact:
On the bus to their new facility, Jennifer, who had been feeling lethargic and unwell, laid her head on her sister's shoulder. As the gates closed behind them, she said, "At last, we're out of Broadmoor".
There, leaning on her sister, her shadow, Jennifer slipped into a coma. She was pronounced dead that evening due to undiagnosed acute myocarditis (rarely fatal) and thus the pact was fulfilled.
June was initially destroyed by the death of her twin, but eventually she acclimated to the society. She started talking and in an interview 7 yrs after her release she says that she visits Jennifer’s grave every Tuesday. One of June’s poem is inscribed on the head stone:
We once were two
We two made one
We no more two
Through life be one
Rest in peace.
Her death could have been because of the medication in Broodmore or could be the effect of the starvation pact or it could have been that Jennifer knew that deep down it was time to let her sister go and the only way that June could do that was if Jennifer was gone or the most sinister one that June killed her sister Jennifer.
Until next time,
Stay snoopy and stay spooky....
by the crime nut
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