Without Conscience

by Robert D. Hare

  Obligations and commitments mean nothing to psychopaths. Their good intentions—“I’ll never cheat on you again”—are promises written on the wind.

  Truly horrendous credit histories, for example, reveal the lightly taken debt, the shrugged-off loan, the empty pledge to contribute to a child’s support. “That little girl means everything to me... I’d do anything to see that she has everything I never had in my childhood.” A social worker and ex-wife would receive such remarks with justifiable skepticism when their efforts to collect court-ordered child support from the psychopath have failed from day 1.

  The irresponsibility and unreliability of psychopaths extend to every part of their lives. Their performance on the job is erratic, with frequent absences, misuse of company resources, violations of company policy, and general untrustworthiness. They do not honor formal or implied commitments to people, organizations, or principles.

  In her book on Diane Downs, Ann Rule described a pattern of irresponsible parental behavior that is typical of psychopaths.5 Downs would often leave her young children alone when there was no babysitter available. The children, ranging in age from fifteen months to six years, were described by neighbors as hungry, emotionally starved, and generally neglected (they were seen playing outside in winter without shoes or coats). Downs professed to love her children, but her callous indifference to their physical and emotional welfare argues otherwise.

  This indifference to the welfare of children—their own as well as those of the man or woman they happen to be living with at the time—is a common theme in our files of psychopaths. Psychopaths see children as an inconvenience. Some, like Diane Downs, insist that they care a great deal for their children, but their actions belie their words. Typically, they leave children on their own for extended periods or in the care of unreliable sitters. One of our subjects and her husband left their one-month-old infant with an alcoholic friend. The friend became drunk and passed out. When he awoke he forgot that he was babysitting and left. The parents returned some eight hours later to find that their child had been apprehended by the authorities. The mother was outraged by this violation of her parental rights and accused the authorities of depriving the child of her love and affection—a position she maintained even after she was told that the baby was severely malnourished.

  Psychopaths do not hesitate to use the resources of family and friends to bail them out of difficulty. One of our subjects, a woman with a long history of disappointing her parents, induced them to put up their house for her bail following a charge of drug trafficking. She skipped bail, and her parents are now fighting to keep their home.

  Psychopaths are not deterred by the possibility that their actions may cause hardship or risk for others. A twenty-five-year-old inmate in one of our studies has received more than twenty convictions for dangerous driving, driving while impaired, leaving the scene of an accident, driving without a license, and criminal negligence causing death. When asked if he would continue to drive following his release from prison, he replied, “Why not? Sure I drive fast, but I’m good at it. It takes two to have an accident.”

  A physician in a western state recently called to inquire about using the Psychopathy Checklist in a study of patients who tested positive for the HIV virus, a precursor of AIDS. In his experience some patients with the HIV virus continued to have unprotected sex with healthy, unsuspecting partners. He wanted to evaluate his clinical impression that many of these people were psychopaths who cared little about the horrendous implications of their irresponsible behavior.

  An industrial psychologist commented to me that nuclear power plants carefully screen prospective employees, for obvious reasons. However, he volunteered, the usual screening procedures—interviews, personality tests, letters of reference—do not always succeed in detecting a class of individuals notorious for their unreliability and irresponsibility—namely, psychopaths.

  Psychopaths are frequently successful in talking their way out of trouble—“I’ve learned my lesson”; “You have my word that it won’t happen again”; “It was simply a big misunderstanding”; “Trust me.” They are almost as successful in convincing the criminal justice system of their good intentions and their trustworthiness. Although they frequently manage to obtain probation, a suspended sentence, or early release from prison, they simply ignore the conditions imposed by the courts. That is, even when directly under the yoke of the criminal justice system, they do not meet their obligations.

  PSYCHOPATHS USUALLY DON’T get along well with one another. The last thing an egocentric, selfish, demanding, callous person wants is someone just like him. Two stars is one too many. Occasionally, however, psychopaths become temporary partners in crime—a grim symbiosis with unfortunate consequences for other people. Generally, one member of the pair is a “talker” who gets his or her way through charm, deceit, and manipulation, whereas the other is a “doer” who prefers direct action—intimidation and force. As long as their interests are complementary, they make a formidable pair.

  Some examples from my files illustrate the point. In one case, two young male psychopaths were introduced at a party. One—the talker—was trying to con a minor drug dealer into letting him have some cocaine on credit, without success. The other—the doer—overheard the conversation and, as he put it, “grabbed the pusher by the balls and convinced him to provide a free sample for me and my friend.” Thus began a year-long drug-dealing partnership. The talker made the contacts and arranged the deals; the doer broke legs. When the talker was caught, he immediately made a deal with the prosecutor and turned his partner in.

  In another case, a young woman, a smooth-talking, parasitic psychopath, constantly complained to her friends that her parents were not contributing enough to her already lavish lifestyle. She met a middle-aged man, an aggressive, hostile psychopath, who said, “Why not do something about it?” Together, they hatched a plot in which the man would break into the woman’s house and kill her parents. The woman, meanwhile, would be out of town with friends. The plot fell apart when the woman bragged to her friends that she would soon be rich. Word got to the police, who tapped the woman’s telephone line and gathered enough evidence to charge the pair with conspiracy to commit murder. Each tried to plea-bargain by testifying against the other.

  Sometimes a psychopath and a borderline psychotic join in a bizarre but deadly partnership, with the former using the latter as a killing tool. A well-known example was provided in Truman Capote’s account of Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, executed for murdering four members of the Clutter family in 1959 (In Cold Blood). Hickock had all the markings of a smooth-talking psychopath, whereas Smith was diagnosed as “nearly ... a paranoid schizophrenic.” As reported by Capote, Hickock viewed Smith as a natural killer and reasoned that “such a gift could, under his supervision; be profitably exploited” [p. 69], True to form, Hickock put the blame for the murders on his partner: “It was Perry. I couldn’t stop him. He killed them all.” [p. 260]

  EARLY BEHAVIOR PROBLEMS

  Most psychopaths begin to exhibit serious behavioral problems at an early age. These might include persistent lying, cheating, theft, fire setting, truancy, class disruption, substance abuse, vandalism, violence, bullying, running away, and precocious sexuality. Because many children exhibit some of these behaviors at one time or another, especially children raised in violent neighborhoods or in disrupted or abusive families, it is important to emphasize that the psychopath’s history of such behaviors is more extensive and serious than that of most others, even when compared with those of siblings and friends raised in similar settings. An example of the psychopathic child is one who comes from an otherwise well-adjusted family and starts to steal, take drugs, cut school, and have sexual experiences by age ten or twelve.

  Early cruelty to animals is usually a sign of serious emotional or behavioral problems. Milwaukee serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, for example, stunned classmates and neighbors by leaving a trail of grim clues to his preoccupations:
the head of a dog impaled on a stick, frogs and cats staked to trees, and a group of animal skeletons kept as a collection.6

  Adult psychopaths usually describe their childhood cruelty to animals as ordinary events, matter-of-fact, even enjoyable. A man who scored high on the Psychopathy Checklist chuckled as he told us that when he was ten or eleven he shot “an irritating mutt” with a pellet gun. “I shot him in the ass and he cried and crawled around awhile and died.”

  Another subject, serving time for fraud, told us that as a child he would put a noose around the neck of a cat, tie the other end of the string to the top of a pole, and bat the cat around the pole with a tennis racket. He said that his sister raised puppies and he would kill the ones she didn’t want to keep. “I’d tie them to a rail and use their heads for baseball practice,” he said, smiling slightly.

  Cruelty to other children—including siblings—is often part of the young psychopath’s inability to experience the sort of empathy that checks normal people’s impulses to inflict pain, even when enraged. “The shocking things he did to his baby sister’s doll felt like warnings, but we brushed them aside,” one mother told me. “But when he actually tried to smother his sister in her crib and snipped the skin of her neck with a pair of scissors, we realized with horror that we should have trusted our worst intuitions from the start.”

  Although not all adult psychopaths exhibited this degree of cruelty in their youth, virtually all routinely got themselves into a wide range of difficulties: lying, theft, vandalism, promiscuity, and so forth.

  Interestingly, however, the media frequently report that witnesses and neighbors are taken completely by surprise in reaction to some senseless crime: “I just can’t believe he was capable of doing a thing like that—there was absolutely no hint that he would do it.” Reactions of this sort reflect not only psychopaths’ power to manipulate others’ impressions of themselves but the witnesses’ ignorance of their early history.

  ADULT ANTISOCIAL

  BEHAVIOR

  Psychopaths consider the rules and expectations of society inconvenient and unreasonable, impediments to the behavioral expression of their inclinations and wishes. They make their own rules, both as children and as adults. Impulsive, deceitful children who lack empathy and see the world as their oyster will be much the same as adults. The lifelong continuity of the self-serving, antisocial behavior of psychopaths is truly amazing. To a large extent, this continuity is responsible for the findings, by many researchers, that the early appearance of antisocial actions is a good predictor of adult behavioral problems and criminality.7

  Many of the antisocial acts of psychopaths lead to criminal convictions. Even within prison populations psychopaths stand out, largely because their antisocial and illegal activities are more varied and frequent than are those of other criminals. Psychopaths tend to have no particular affinity, or “specialty,” for any one type of crime but tend to try everything. This criminal versatility is well illustrated in the television program, described earlier in this chapter, in which Robert Ressler interviewed G. Daniel Walker.8 Following is a brief exchange from that interview:

  “How long is your rap sheet?”

  “I would think the current one would probably be about twenty-nine or thirty pages.”

  “Twenty-nine or thirty pages! Charles Manson’s is only five.”

  “But he was only a killer.”

  What Walker meant was that he himself was not only a killer but a criminal of enormous versatility, a fact of which he seemed very proud. He openly boasted of having committed more than three hundred crimes in which he had not been caught.

  Not all psychopaths end up in jail. Many of the things they do escape detection or prosecution, or are on the “shady side of the law.” For them, antisocial behavior may consist of phony stock promotions, questionable business and professional practices, spouse or child abuse, and so forth. Many others do things that, although not illegal, are unethical, immoral, or harmful to others: philandering, cheating on a spouse, financial or emotional neglect of family members, irresponsible use of company resources or funds, to name but a few. The problem with behaviors of this sort is that they are difficult to document and evaluate without the active cooperation of family, friends, acquaintances, and business associates.

  THE COMPLETE PICTURE

  Of course, psychopaths are not the only ones who lead socially deviant lifestyles. For example, many criminals have some of the characteristics described in this chapter, but because they are capable of feeling guilt, remorse, empathy, and strong emotions, they are not considered psychopaths. A diagnosis of psychopathy is made only when there is solid evidence that the individual matches the complete profile—that is, has most of the symptoms described in both this chapter and the preceding one.

  Recently, an ex-con offered me his opinion of the Psychopathy Checklist: he wasn’t too impressed! Now middle-aged, he had spent much of his early adult life in prison, where he was once diagnosed as a psychopath. Here are his responses:

  • Glib and superficial—“What is negative about articulation skills?”

  • Egocentric and grandiose—“How can I attain something if I don’t reach high?”

  • Lack of empathy—“Empathy toward an enemy is a sign of weakness.”

  • Deceitful and manipulative—“Why be truthful to the enemy? All of us are manipulative to some degree. Isn’t positive manipulation common?”

  • Shallow emotions—“Anger can lead to being labeled a psychopath.”

  • Impulsive—“Can be associated with creativity, living in the now, being spontaneous and free.”

  • Poor behavioral controls—“Violent and aggressive outbursts may be a defensive mechanism, a false front, a tool for survival in a jungle.”

  • Need for excitement—“Courage to reject the routine, monotonous, or uninteresting. Living on the edge, doing things that are risky, exciting, challenging, living life to its fullest, being alive rather than dull, boring, and almost dead.”

  • Lack of responsibility—“Shouldn’t focus on human weaknesses that are common.”

  • Early behavior problems and adult antisocial behavior—“Is a criminal record reflective of badness or nonconformity?”

  Interestingly, he had nothing to say about Lack of remorse or guilt.

  In a recent article for The New York Times, Daniel Goleman wrote, “Data suggest that in general about 2 to 3 percent of people are estimated to be psychopaths—with the rate twice as high among those who live in the fragmented families of the inner cities.”9 However, this statement, and others proclaiming an increase of psychopathy in our society, confuses criminality and social deviance with psychopathy.

  While crime—and the socially deviant behavior that helps to but doesn’t completely define psychopathy—is already high among the lower class, and is rising in society as a whole, we don’t know if the relative number of psychopaths among us is also on the increase. Sociobiologists take the view that behavior development is influenced by genetic factors, and they might argue that the number of psychopaths must be increasing, simply because they are very promiscuous and produce large numbers of children, some of whom may inherit a predisposition for psychopathy.

  I’ll examine this argument and its chilling implications in later chapters on the roots of psychopathy. Before doing so, however, it is necessary to discuss the known aspects of the enigma. The next step into the heart of the matter brings us to the role of conscience in the regulation of behavior.

  Chapter 5

  Internal Controls:

  The Missing Piece

  When a rogue kisses you, count your teeth.

  —Hebrew proverb

  Elyse met Jeffrey in the summer of 1984, and she was never to forget that day. She was at the beach with some friends when she spied him and was completely charmed by his huge, bright smile. He walked right up to her and asked for her phone number, and his effrontery somehow disarmed her—she just gave in to his smile and his
utter lack of self-consciousness. He called her the next day and then somehow showed up at her job. So it began... with a smile.

  She was working at a daycare center then. Jeffrey began meeting her at work for her coffee breaks, then for her lunch breaks, for her bus rides home; every time she walked out of the building, Jeffrey was there waiting. He told her very little about himself—said he was a cartoonist trying to get his own strip. Sometimes he carried large amounts of cash; at other times he was dead broke and used her money. He didn’t live anywhere in particular, and all his clothes were “borrowed.” He was funny—hilarious, Elyse thought. When it was all over, she realized that the humor had been both the draw and the distraction. The whole time he had been cannibalizing her life, she’d been laughing her head off at his jokes.

  He talked nonstop, describing all his ideas, schemes, and plans, but none ever amounted to anything. Whenever she asked him about some plan he’d described, he seemed annoyed. “Oh, that! I’m onto something much bigger, much bigger now.”

  One day while they were at lunch, he was suddenly arrested. The next day Elyse went to visit him in jail. The police said he’d spent the night at a friend’s house and the next day had sold the man’s camera equipment. She didn’t believe it, but the judge did. It turned out that Jeffrey was wanted by the police on a number of matters. Jeffrey went to prison.

  Despite his incarceration he never lost his grip on Elyse. He wrote to her from prison at least once every day, sometimes as many as three times. He wrote of his talents, his dreams, his plans. He wrote of her and the life they would have together. He nearly drowned Elyse in words—“verbal vomit” was the phrase one writer used in describing a similar case. If only Jeffrey could find the right channel for his energies, he’d be on top of the world, he’d be able to do anything, he claimed. And he would give her the life she deserved—he loved her so much. She was so dazzled that the phrase “send money” at the end of one of his letters didn’t even faze her.