“This sister of mine, a dark shadow robbing me of sunlight, is my one and only torment.”
—June Gibbons

 

The story of the Gibbons twins sounds like a Hitchcock film. They spoke their own coded language, were inseparable, became criminals and repeatedly tried to murder each other.

 

June and Jennifer Gibbons were identical twins and the only black girls in their small Welsh town, which made them feel ostracized at a very early age. As they grew, they continued to move inward toward each other and away from the rest of the world; so much so that they were dubbed “the Silent Twins,” as the Gibbons twins refused to speak. Doctors diagnosed them as “elected mutes.” At home, however, they spoke to each other in a shorthand language. Their mother noticed that her daughters “had distorted their speech into a secret code only they could understand.”

 

The Gibbons twins also insisted on mirroring each other’s every movement. A therapist,

Cathy Arthur, studied their mirroring and was fascinated. She took them horseback riding to encourage individual movement; but if one fell off the horse, the other would immediately follow.

 

Incredibly they were both avid writers from an early age.

 

Both girls kept countlessjournals full of individual feelings of being tormented by each other. Both repeatedly expressed desires to gain independence by killing off the other sister.

If the other was alive, she would always be robbing the other of their deserved sunlight. They were convinced of this. Interestingly enough, they each wrote and published novels when they were teenagers. June wrote Pepsi Cola Addict and Jennifer wrote Discomania; both include disturbing acts of violence and crime.

 

True to their stories, the twins started to take up crime. They turned to theft and arson because, as June wrote, “No friends. Nothing else to do. Nothing to fill the cold hour.”

 

It was at this time that they began attacking each other, another attempt to fill the “cold hour.” Jennifer strangled June with a telephone cord. June tried to drown Jennifer in a river. But they remained inseparable, apparently able to forgive each other for attempted murder. They continued their short crime spree until they were caught for burning down a

barn in 1982. In court they were diagnosed aspsychopaths and sent to the infamous

Broadmoor, a psychiatric hospital, when they were 18.

 

They were mostly kept apart at the hospital, but that didn’t stop each other from continued attacks. They attempted suicide multiple times. June wrote about Jennifer at this time: “I really aim to be alone. Yet, I am deceiving myself…My heart does not beat so fast now. It only beats fast when J is around.”

 

When they turned 29, the Gibbons twins made a pact that one of them had to die. Marjorie Wallace, a reporter who befriended the girls and eventually penned abiography about them, visited them at this time. Jennifer told her point-blank: “Marjorie, I’m going to die. We’ve decided.”

 

On the day of their release from Broadmoor, Jennifer suddenly died due to an inflammation of her heart. The exact cause remains unknown.

 

Since her sister’s death, June lives a normal life with her family in Wales. It’s as if she never had a psychotic twin sister that she tried to kill a bunch of times. She has her sunlight.