Dr. Jonathan Willett

**Jonathan Willett** is an American psychiatrist and convicted murderer. On 31 May 2018, Willett attacked and murdered Lucy Hawthorne in her home in Highgate, London. Willett also admitted to the disappearance and murder of one of his patients in America, Charles Dexter Ward, before travelling to the United Kingdom. At his subsequent trial, Willett was judged to have been suffering from an acute paranoid schizophrenic episode, despite having no history of mental disturbance, and he was therefore committed to Broadmoor Hospital in Berkshire, England by October 2018.

Since his trial, Willett’s mental health has shown no signs of improvement. In fact, only a matter of weeks into his incarceration at Broadmoor, Willett lost his sight and suffered some facial disfigurement as a result of a supposed act of self-harm involving a pan of boiling water after managing to access one of the hospital’s kitchens.

Further investigation by podcasters Matthew Heawood and Kennedy Fisher indicates Willett’s strong ties with occultist circles, specifically with Charles Ward, led directly to his declining mental health and subsequent violent, criminal behaviour.

## Early career

Jonathan Willett was a respected psychiatrist and his former colleague, Dr Mark Lyman described him as “nothing if not of sound mind. A more rational human being you really couldn't hope to meet.” A diligent notetaker, Willett kept meticulous audio recordings of his various therapy sessions, a practice that would continue in documenting and trying to justify his own criminal behaviour later on.

## Treatment of Thomas Marston

Willett became the psychiatrist for Thomas Marston sometime after Marston had been involved in the Rendlesham Forest Incident in Suffolk, England. By all accounts, the incident which occurred in 1980, left the young man mentally scarred and at the urging of his parents, and the possible influence of Amelia Fenner, Marston left England and moved to Providence where Willett started to treat him.

While Willett’s professional competence and mental health were not thought to be compromised at the time he was treating Marston, he was nonetheless unsuccessful in helping the man as Marston eventually returned to England and Rendlesham and ultimately committed suicide by hanging himself in 2015.

## Contact with Charles Dexter Ward

From 2006 to 2007, Dr Willett was contracted by Sarah and Howard Ward to help their 13-year-old son, Charles Dexter Ward, with some minor behavioural issues. Initially, the young boy’s issues were not of any particular concern to Willett but this changed when Charles started to have more contact with his school’s librarian, Barbara Sayers. Sayers encouraged the boy to engage with a number of occult texts as well as to investigate his own family’s history. Matters became worse when, after Charles was invited to leave the public school system, Sayers was contracted as his personal tutor for home-schooling. Willett expressed concerns about Sayers’ influence over Charles but this led to him being fired by the Ward family in 2007.

After the mysterious death of Sarah Ward in 2010, Howard arranged for the now 17-year-old Charles to reengage in therapy with Willett. The psychiatrist was shocked at how much Charles’s state of mind had deteriorated. He managed to get Howard Ward to fire Barbara Sayers and began the process of trying to undo the psychological damage that Sayers had apparently inflicted on the teenager in the intervening years. Willett was particularly concerned about Charles’s fascination with the Necronomicon and a spate of grave robbing that was being reported in the local area at the time. However, Willett’s efforts to treat Charles were cut short again when Howard, shortly before his death and at the behest of his son, fired Willett for a second time, this time replacing him with the services of Dr. Allen.

There was no further contact between Jonathan Willett and Charles Dexter Ward until the start of 2016 when Willett received a letter from the 23-year-old Ward. Within this letter, Ward requested Willett’s help destroying all traces of the experiments he had been conducting with Dr Allen. The letter also encouraged Willett to kill Allen, should he encounter him. Willett phoned Ward in response to this letter but Ward’s response was confused and the call was cut short by Allen, who obviously had considerable control over Ward by this point.

Based on the contents of the letter, Dr Willett managed to get Ward committed to a secure psychiatric facility in Providence, Rhode Island. This led to over a year of very regular contact between the two men as Willett served as Ward’s primary physician. This contact changed Jonathan Willett’s outlook on the world around him. It appears that, either through direct discussion with Ward or through background research in connection with Ward’s apparent psychosis, Willett became as obsessed with the occult as his patient.

By 2017, Willett made the decision that his patient could not be treated and was, in fact, no longer the same person who had been committed two years earlier. The various physical changes Ward underwent while on psychiatric care (changes in hair colour, height, etc.) prompted Willett to believe that Ward had become a vessel for the entity, Ipqu-Aya. In response, on 6 March 2017, Willett took the devastating step of apparently murdering the Charles Dexter Ward vessel in his cell, which resulted in the body immediately turning to dust. However, Willett’s understanding of the occult in these matters had progressed to the point where he understood that only killing Charles Dexter Ward did not solve the problem completely.

## Murder of Lucy Hawthorne

A year after killing Ward, Willett travelled to England where he located Ward’s distant cousin, Lucy Hawthorne in her ground-floor flat off Archway Road in Highgate, London. He audio-recorded his attack and fatal stabbing of Hawthorne and immediately after committing the crime, he sent this digital recording to his colleague and former friend, Dr Mark Lyman.

Within this recording, Willett’s fears about Lucy Hawthorne’s potential state as another vessel for Ipqu-Aya were borne out when, after feigning fear and ignorance, Hawthorne was recorded correcting Willett’s pronunciation of an invocation of Ipqu-Aya.

> “You're not even saying it right. Y'ai'ng'ngah Yog-Sothoth h'ee-l'geb f'ai throdog uaaah ogthrod ai'f geb'l - ee'h Yog-Sothoth ngahng ai'y zhro. I am who you seek.”
>
>

While this would seem clear evidence that Willett had correctly identified Hawthorne as the current vessel for Ipqu-Aya, her body did not apparently turn to dust as the Charles Dexter Ward and Joseph Curwen vessels had done. Willett later argued that the body found by police was likely planted as evidence in order for Willett to be incarcerated and removed as a threat after he had successfully destroyed two Ipqu-Aya vessels in relatively quick succession.

## Incarceration at Broadmoor Hospital

Following his trial and conviction for the murder of Lucy Hawthorne, Willett was remanded into custody at the high-security psychiatric facility, Broadmoor Hospital. Soon after his arrival, he lost his sight and suffered facial disfigurement. The circumstances that led to these injuries are disputed. When questioned by Matthew Heawood, Sir Godfrey Tillinghast claimed the injuries were the result of an act of self-harm whereby Willett gained access to the kitchen and poured a pot of boiling water over himself. Willett appeared to dispute this, alluding to it being a cover story, but in subsequent interviews with Heawood, the psychiatrist has not provided any sort of counter-narrative for this incident.

Once incarcerated, Willett would begin to make connections between the Ipqu-Aya possessions of Charles Dexter Ward and Lucy Hawthorne, and Thomas Marston’s possible possession by the entity, Nyarlathotep.

## Victims

* Charles Dexter Ward\*
* Lucy Hawthorne\*

\* Both of Willett’s victims were inhabited by Ipqu-Aya at the time.

## Appearances

* *The Lovecraft Investigations*
	+ The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
		- "Episode 1" (recordings)
		- "Episode 2" (recordings)
		- "Episode 3" (recordings)
		- "Episode 4" (recordings)
		- "Episode 7" (recordings)
		- "Episode 9" (recordings)
		- "Episode 10"
	+ The Whisperer in Darkness
		- “Episode 6”
	+ The Shadow over Innsmouth
		- "Footsteps" (archive audio)
		- "Haumea" (archive audio)

## Notes

* The character of Jonathan Willett is loosely based on the Lovecraft character of Marinus Bicknell Willett, who was the main protagonist of H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’.

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 TCoCDW: ”Episode 1”
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 TCoCDW: ”Episode 9”
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 TCoCDW: ”Episode 10”
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 TCoCDW: “Episode 5"
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 TWiD: "Episode 6"
6. ↑ TWiD: “Episode 3”
7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 TCoCDW: ”Episode 3”
8. ↑ TCoCDW: ”Episode 2”
9. ↑ TCoCDW: ”Episode 7”