In his book about Kenneth Taylor, the dentist who severely beat his wife on their honeymoon, cheated on her, and later battered her to death, Peter Maas quoted him as saying, “I loved her so deeply. I miss her so much. What happened was a tragedy. I lost my best lover and my best friend.... Why doesn’t anybody understand what I’ve been going through?”8
LACK OF EMPATHY
Many of the characteristics displayed by psychopaths—especially their egocentricity, lack of remorse, shallow emotions, and deceitfulness—are closely associated with a profound lack of empathy (an inability to construct a mental and emotional “facsimile” of another person). They seem unable to “get into the skin” or to “walk in the shoes” of others, except in a purely intellectual sense. The feelings of other people are of no concern to psychopaths.
In some respects they are like the emotionless androids depicted in science fiction, unable to imagine what real humans experience. One rapist, high on the Psychopathy Checklist, commented that he found it hard to empathize with his victims. “They are frightened, right? But, you see, I don’t really understand it. I’ve been scared myself, and it wasn’t unpleasant.”
Psychopaths view people as little more than objects to be used for their own gratification. The weak and the vulnerable—whom they mock, rather than pity—are favorite targets. “There is no such thing, in the psychopathic universe, as the merely weak,” wrote psychologist Robert Rieber. “Whoever is weak is also a sucker; that is, someone who demands to be exploited.”9
“Oh, terrible, very unfortunate,” snapped a young inmate when told of the death of a boy he had stabbed in a gang clash. “Don’t try to soften me up with that crap. The little puke got what he deserved and I can’t worry about it. As you can see”—he gestured toward the interrogating officers—“I’ve got my own problems here.”
In order to survive both physically and psychologically, some normal individuals develop a degree of insensitivity to the feelings and plight of specific groups of people. For example, doctors who are too empathic toward their patients would soon become emotionally overwhelmed, and their effectiveness as physicians would be reduced. For them, insensitivity is circumscribed, confined to a specific target group. Similarly, soldiers, gang members, and terrorists may be trained—very effectively, as history has proved over and over again—to view the enemy as less-than-human, as an object without an inner life.
Psychopaths, however, display a general lack of empathy. They are indifferent to the rights and suffering of family members and strangers alike. If they do maintain ties with their spouses or children it is only because they see their family members as possessions, much like their stereos or automobiles. Indeed, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that some psychopaths are more concerned with the inner workings of their cars than with the inner worlds of their “loved” ones. One of our subjects allowed her boyfriend to sexually molest her five-year-old daughter because “he wore me out. I wasn’t ready for more sex that night.” The woman found it difficult to understand why the authorities took her child into care. “She belongs to me. Her welfare is my business.” She didn’t protest very much, however—certainly not as much as she did when her car was impounded, during the custody hearing, for nonpayment of traffic tickets.
Because of their inability to appreciate the feelings of others, some psychopaths are capable of behavior that normal people find not only horrific but baffling. For example, they can torture and mutilate their victims with about the same sense of concern that we feel when we carve a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner.
However, except in movies and books, very few psychopaths commit crimes of this sort. Their callousness typically emerges in less dramatic, though still devastating, ways: parasitically bleeding other people of their possessions, savings, and dignity; aggressively doing and taking what they want; shamefully neglecting the physical and emotional welfare of their families; engaging in an unending series of casual, impersonal, and trivial sexual relationships; and so forth.
CONNIE IS FIFTEEN, hovering between childhood and womanhood, sometimes darting from one to another in a single day. She is a virgin but attuned to her burgeoning sexuality like one listening intently to a song inside her head. But on a hot sultry day when her family has left her to herself, a stranger comes to her house—a stranger who says he’s been watching her.
“I’m your lover, honey,” [he tells her]. “You don’t know what that is but you will.... I know all about you.... I’ll tell you how it is, I’m always nice at first, the first time. I’ll hold you so tight you won’t think you have to try to get away or pretend anything because you’ll know you can’t. And I’ll come inside you where it’s all secret and you’ll give in to me and you’ll love me—” ... “I’m going to call the police—”.... [Out} of his mouth came a fast spat curse, an aside not meant for her to hear. But even this “Christ!” sounded forced. Then he began to smile again. She watched his smile come, awkward as if he were smiling from inside a mask. His whole face was a mask, she thought wildly, tanned down to his throat. “This is how it is, honey: you come out and we’ll drive away, have a nice ride. But if you don’t come out we’re gonna wait till your people come home and then they’re all going to get it.... “My sweet little blue-eyed girl,” he said in a half-sung sigh that had nothing to do with her brown eyes.... [Joyce Carol Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”]
DECEITFUL AND MANIPULATIVE
Lying, deceiving, and manipulation are natural talents for psychopaths.
With their powers of imagination in gear and focused on themselves, psychopaths appear amazingly unfazed by the possibility—or even by the certainty—of being found out. When caught in a lie or challenged with the truth, they are seldom perplexed or embarrassed—they simply change their stories or attempt to rework the facts so that they appear to be consistent with the lie. The results are a series of contradictory statements and a thoroughly confused listener. Much of the lying seems to have no motivation other than what psychologist Paul Ekman refers to as a “duping delight.”10
“I’M A VERY feeling person. You can’t help but fall in love with these kids,” said Genene Jones, convicted of murdering two infants and suspected of killing more than a dozen others. A San Antonio practical nurse, she administered life-threatening drugs to neonates in an intensive care unit in order to put herself in the role of hero by bringing them back from the “brink of death.” Her “bewitching presence,” air of supreme confidence, and convincing demeanor, along with a shocking medical cover-up, allowed her to ply her trade in spite of widespread suspicions about her role in many infant deaths and near-fatal emergencies. In conversation with author Peter Elkind, Jones complained that she was “being made a scapegoat because [I] was so abrasive. ‘My mouth got me into this,’ Genene said with a grin. ‘And my mouth’s going to get me out of it.’ “ Like all psychopaths, she showed a remarkable ability to manipulate the truth to suit her own purposes. “By the end of our conversation,” wrote Elkind, “Genene had completed an account of her life that was astonishingly different from what I had gathered from dozens of those who had known her. It clashed with reality not merely on the basis of her guilt but on a thousand details, small and unimportant, except as they loomed in Genene’s image of herself. Genene was contradicting not only during recollections of others and a voluminous written record, but facts she had told me herself four years earlier.... For her, the lines between truth and fiction, between good and evil, between right and wrong, did not matter.” [Peter Elkind, The Death Shift]
Psychopaths seem proud of their ability to lie. When asked if she lied easily, one woman with a high score on the Psychopathy Checklist laughed and replied, “I’m the best. I’m really good at it, I think because I sometimes admit to something bad about myself. They’d think, well, if she’s admitting to that she must be telling the truth about the rest.” She also said that she sometimes “salts the mine” with a nugget of truth. “If they think some of what you say
is true, they usually think it’s all true.”
Many observers get the impression that psychopaths sometimes are unaware that they’re lying; it is as if the words take on a life of their own, unfettered by the speaker’s knowledge that the observer is aware of the facts. The psychopath’s indifference to being identified as a liar is truly extraordinary; it causes the listener to wonder about the speaker’s sanity. More often, though, the listener is taken in.
At the workshops we conduct for mental health and forensic workers, the members of the audience often express surprise when they learn the conviction history of the subject in one of our videotaped interviews. The subject is a good-looking, fast-talking twenty-four-year-old man with a million post release plans and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of untapped talents. In rapid succession he convincingly described having done the following:
• left home at age eight
• started flying at age eleven; pilot’s license at age fifteen
• was a commercial pilot with twin-engine and full instrumentation experience
• lived in nine different countries in four continents
• managed an apartment building
• had his own roofing company
• ran a ranch for a year
• worked as a forest-fire fighter for six months
• spent two years in the coast guard
• was a captain on an eighty-foot charter boat
• was a deep-sea diver for four months
Presently serving time for murder, he has been denied parole four times but still has lots of plans: to get into property development, to sell time-share vacation condos, to get a commercial pilot’s license, and so on. He also plans to live with his parents, whom he hasn’t seen in seventeen years. Referring to psychological tests he had taken, he said, “I IQ’d out, passed all the tests with flying colors. They rated me as superior intelligence.”
For obvious reasons, we’ve nicknamed him “motor-mouth.” His philosophy? “If you throw enough shit, some of it will stick.” It seems to work, because he leaves even sophisticated observers convinced of his sincerity. For example, one interviewer’s notes contained statements such as: “very impressive”; “sincere and forthright”; “possesses good interpersonal skills”; “intelligent and articulate.” What the interviewer learned after reading his files, however, was that virtually none of what the inmate had told him was true. Needless to say, this man’s score on the Psychopathy Checklist was very high.
Given their glibness and the facility with which they lie, it is not surprising that psychopaths successfully cheat, bilk, defraud, con, and manipulate people and have not the slightest compunction about doing so. They are often forthright in describing themselves as con men, hustlers, or fraud artists. Their statements often reveal their belief that the world is made up of “givers and takers,” predators and prey, and that it would be very foolish not to exploit the weaknesses of others. In addition, they can be very astute at determining what those weaknesses are and at using them for their own benefit. “I like to con people. I’m conning you now,” said one of our subjects, a forty-five-year-old man serving his first prison sentence for stock fraud.
Some of their operations are elaborate and well thought out, whereas others are quite simple: stringing along several women at the same time, or convincing family members and friends that money is needed “to bail me out of a jam.” Whatever the scheme, it is carried off in a cool, self-assured, brazen manner.
“Oh, the seventies,” reminisced a social activist interviewed for this book. “I ran a halfway house for ex-cons, and split my time between counseling these guys, finding them jobs, and raising money to keep the thing going. One guy acted like my best friend—I really liked him; he could come on like a pussycat. And then he just up and cleaned us out. Not once but twice he completely emptied the place: typewriters, furniture, food, office supplies, everything. After the first time, he somehow managed to convince me he was ashamed and sorry, and I can’t believe I fell for that remorse bit, but I did. About a month later he forged a check and all but closed out our bank account. This time he disappeared, and that was the end of that venture. There I was standing in the bank clutching a bunch of overdraft notices and talking fast. It still galls me, because I was no easy touch. I was used to being around some pretty tough guys, and I thought I knew my way around the block with the likes of them. I never realized I could be conned so thoroughly, but there I was in a few weeks looking for a job for myself.”
The capacity to con friend and foe alike makes it a simple matter for psychopaths to perpetrate fraud, embezzlement, and impersonation, to promote phony stocks and worthless property, and to carry out swindles of all sorts, large and small. One of our subjects told of strolling along a dock when he spied a young couple looking at a large sailboat with a For Sale sign on it. He walked over to the couple, smoothly introduced himself as the boat’s owner—“a complete load of baloney,” he told us—and invited them aboard to look around. After an enjoyable hour on the boat, the couple made an offer to buy. Once the terms had been negotiated, he agreed to meet the couple at the bank the next day and asked for a $1,500 deposit to seal the deal. After a friendly parting, he cashed their deposit check and never saw them again.
“Money grows on trees,” said another psychopath, a woman with a long history of frauds and petty thefts. “They say it doesn’t but it does. I don’t want to do it to people, it’s just so easy!”
In the same vein, psychopaths in prison often learn to use the correctional facilities to their own advantage and to help shape a positive image of themselves for the benefit of the parole board. They take classes and degree courses, enroll in programs for drug and alcohol abuse, join religious and quasi-religious groups, and adopt whatever self-improvement fad is in favor—not to “rehabilitate” themselves but to look as if they are doing so. It’s not unusual, for example, for a particularly adept manipulator to declare himself “born again” in the Christian sense—not only to convince the parole board of his sincere resolve to reform but to exploit the elaborate and well-meaning born-again community for its support not to mention its material resources. And now that “cycle of abuse” theories have become widely accepted, many psychopaths are eager to attribute their faults and problems to childhood abuse. Although their claims may be difficult to verify, there is never a shortage of well-meaning people ready to take them at face value.
CONSIDER: HOW DO you get people to do what you want them to do? Now add an element: How do you do that when what you want them to do goes against every inclination in their own personalities and everything they grew up knowing was wrong, dangerous, unthinkable—for example, getting into a car with a man you’ve never seen before, especially if you’re a young, pretty woman far from home?
Ted Bundy, perhaps the most visible and widely known serial killer the United States has ever produced—executed in 1989 for the last in a long string of brutal murders of young women—must have pondered that question long and hard from every angle. He must have drawn on all his powers of observation, which were considerable and were sharpened by his study of psychology in college. He must have plumbed the depths of his knowledge and experience of people’s problems and vulnerabilities—these were honed by the time he spent as a peer counselor on a crisis hotline. We can’t know for sure what went on in Ted Bundy’s mind when he began to lure his victims into his car and drive them to the site of their murders. But we can assume that the above suppositions are true based on the solutions he came up with—variations on a theme that he reportedly tried over and over again, to get it right.
Ted Bundy bought himself a pair of crutches and even went so far as to give the appearance of putting his leg in a cast. Thus temporarily “disabled,” he asked for assistance from sympathetic young women who might cross the street to avoid a pass but who apparently readily stopped to lend a hand to a man with a broken leg. Bundy varied the theme—sometimes his arm was in a sling and he found his wi
lling victim on a busy street; sometimes, with his leg the problem, he targeted young women at recreational areas and gained their aid in securing his boat—“It’s just down the road”—to his car. In a terrible way, the ploy was a stroke of genius. Occasionally it failed and the woman he stopped refused to follow him, but, as recounted in Ann Rule’s book The Stranger Beside Me, it worked very often indeed.
Rule’s book is a study of Bundy’s highly refined skill at using his good looks and smooth charm to win the trust of women. In an amazing coincidence, Rule and Bundy worked the same shift on a crisis line for several years before she was called in to write up cases for the police department on a then-unidentified serial killer of young women. As the body count mounted, Rule’s suspicions began to rise. But to surface, they had to worm their way through her memories of Bundy’s sympathetic and—as her prose makes clear—sexually attractive presence at the desk across from hers on the night shift. That Rule left her work as a police writer to become a bestselling crime writer turned this peculiar coincidence into an opportunity for her to show Bundy’s power over others from the inside. The result? A strange and eerie book about a psychopath who said, in answer to a television interviewer who asked whether Bundy thought he deserved to die, “Good question. I think society deserves to be protected from me and from people like me.”
SHALLOW EMOTIONS
“I’m the most cold-blooded son of a bitch that you’ll ever meet.”11 So Ted Bundy described himself to the police following his final arrest.
Psychopaths seem to suffer a kind of emotional poverty that limits the range and depth of their feelings. While at times they appear cold and unemotional, they are prone to dramatic, shallow, and short-lived displays of feeling. Careful observers are left with the impression that they are play-acting and that little is going on below the surface.
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