On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  13

  Criminal Monsters

  Psychopathology, Aggression,

  and the Malignant Heart

  You’re presenting him like a monster, and he wasn’t. He was anything but a monster.

  JESSICA BATY, REFERRING TO STEVEN KAZMIERCZAK, HER

  BOYFRIEND, WHO WENT ON A SHOOTING RAMPAGE AT NORTHERN

  ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY IN 2008

  MONSTERS IN THE HEADLINES

  AS CHANCE WOULD HAVE IT, the week I sat down to write this chapter my alma mater, Northern Illinois University, was all over the national news. On Valentine’s Day 2008 I turned on the TV and immediately recognized the building where I had once had an algebra class. Now people were being carted out of it on stretchers. A CNN news crawl at the bottom of the screen reported that eighteen or more people had just been shot in Cole Hall at NIU.

  Over the next few days some facts came to light. The shooter’s name was Steven Kazmierczak. He entered a geology lecture carrying a pumpaction shotgun in a guitar case and three handguns in his belt. From the stage he began shooting into the audience, killing five people and wounding twenty others. Then he shot himself.

  Kazmierczak was a former student of criminology at NIU, and he had impressed his instructors with his sophisticated research and writing. By all accounts, he was an exemplary student. Apart from some relatively tasteless tattoos based on the horror movie Saw, Kazmierczak bore no marks in his personal life of any impending deviance. His girlfriend, Jessica Baty, whom he lived with, was so unaware of any threat that she perceived the early report of his heinous deed as the result of mistaken identity. “He was anything but a monster,” she said a few days later. “He was probably the nicest, most caring person ever.”1

  In 1999, after Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed thirteen people and injured twenty-three others at Columbine High School, Time magazine published a cover with photos of the killers and the headline “The Monsters Next Door.” Harris and Klebold saw themselves as avengers, paying back jocks and princesses for a high school career of humiliation and persecution.

  In December 2007 Willie Kelsey was charged by authorities in Dekalb County, Georgia, with breaking into a home and shooting two children in their beds while they slept. “Willie Kelsey is one of these individuals that when you look at his record and you look at who he is, he’s just a monster among us, and thank God we got this monster off the street,” said Police Chief Terrell Bolton. In the face of such appalling inhumanity, one can’t help but grow philosophical, and Chief Bolton continued, “Anytime you live in a society where you can’t shut your doors at night and expect peace and tranquility while you sleep and somebody come in and shoot two of your children, I don’t know how else to describe anybody like that. He’s a monster among us.”2

  While we’re touring some staggering examples of deviance, consider the appalling aberration of the British sex offender Paul Beart, who in April 2000 sadistically tortured to death a waitress, Deborah O’Sullivan. Beart first assaulted his victim on the street and dragged her behind a wall, where he bit off her face and ripped open her torso with his bare hands. He also burned her with a lighter, smashed her with a trash can, broke her arm, strangled her, and sexually assaulted her.3 For the likes of Paul Beart, even the horrible label “monster” seems much too polite and dignified.

  The same revulsion seems appropriate for the Austrian Josef Fritzl, whose crime was discovered in the spring of 2008. The Austrian newspaper Die Presse called it the “worst and most shocking case of incest in Austrian criminal history.”4 Seventy-three-year-old Fritzl had begun raping his daughter Elisabeth when she was only eleven, and when she was eighteen he imprisoned her in his basement fallout shelter, where he kept her for twenty-four years. Worse yet, he fathered seven children with Elisabeth, three of whom (ages nineteen, eighteen, and eleven) lived their entire lives locked in the basement with their mother; three others lived upstairs and one died at birth. He did all this while living normally upstairs with an unknowing wife; Fritzl claimed that the upstairs children had been left on his doorstep by their long lost “runaway” daughter Elisabeth. Newspapers referred to Fritzl as the “monster who kept his daughter in a dungeon.”

  The “monster” epithet is applied liberally these days to a wide variety of criminal deviants, but there is no entirely accurate profile of the modern criminal monster. By all accounts Steven Kazmierczak was nothing like the socially inept, megalomaniacal loner Cho Seung-Hui, who killed thirty-two people at Virginia Tech in 2007. And while Cho apparently claimed some sick solidarity with the Columbine killers, it seems that only the “monstrous acts” themselves unify the otherwise diverse members of the psychopathic club.

  Still, the parameters of the monster epithet are not infinitely malleable, and one can assume that ordinary language users are somewhat coherent in their application of such labels. Often the label is applied to those criminals who transcend the usual or traditional motives for violent crime. Sometimes the criminal is difficult to understand because his rageful behavior is so extreme, but sometimes our bewilderment is based on the absence of any motive whatsoever. A criminal who kills for economic gain or for romantic revenge is odious to be sure, but at least he’s understandable in principle. Such a villain is certainly a tragedy, but still a distant relation in the human family. The label of monster, on the other hand, is usually reserved for a person whose actions have placed him outside the range of humanity.

  LEOPOLD AND LOEB

  On the south side of Chicago on May 21, 1924, Nathan Leopold, age nineteen, and Richard Loeb, age eighteen, abducted Bobby Franks, age fourteen, and murdered him with a chisel. They drove to a swampland near Hegewisch and stuffed the boy’s body into a conduit pipe under a railroad embankment. After the thrill kill, Loeb, the respectable son of the vice president of Sears and Roebuck, toyed with unsuspecting detectives by volunteering all manner of helpful theories and possible suspects. Eventually the body was discovered, as were Leopold’s nearby glasses. The glasses, together with the discovery of a matching typewriter used by Leopold to create a bogus ransom letter, led to the arrest of the affluent boys. In the introductory essay for Leopold’s later book, Life Plus 99 Years, the writer and creator of Perry Mason Erle Stanley Gardner explains, “Society looked upon Leopold and Loeb with revulsion and horror. Coming from good homes, they had committed a murder apparently just for the thrill. The two boys were considered monsters.”5

  Nathan Leopold (1904–1971) and Richard Loeb (1905–1936). Pencil drawing by Stephen T. Asma © 2008.

  When Leopold reflected back on their murder, he tried to convey the complex and contradictory nature of his friend Loeb. Leopold idolized the charismatic Loeb and marveled at his dual capacity for generosity and warmth on the one hand and cold-hearted brutality on the other. “How could a contradiction like that,” asked Leopold, “live in one body? I’d read Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, of course. And with his literary wizardry, Stevenson had made it sound almost plausible, at least while you were reading it. But even Stevenson had made the personalities alternate. Here [in Loeb] was a man in whom Jekyll and Hyde coexisted at one and the same moment.”6 It is a testament to the evocative power of the monster metaphor that even the murderer himself must appeal to it in order to explain his partner.

  In Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885), Jekyll creates a potion that, once consumed, separates the good and evil inside him. Stevenson gives us a melodramatic scenario of a split personality, but one that presages the alienated or fractured Freudian self. Jekyll represents the socialized ethical self, while Hyde emerges like the Id incarnate to engage in aberrant lust binges and murder sprees. Stevenson explains, “Even as good shone upon the countenance of the one, evil was written broadly and plainly on the face of the other. Evil besides (which I must still believe to be the lethal side of man) had left on that body an imprint of deformity and decay.”7 Eventually the monster inside Jekyll overcomes the good doctor, and Hyde’s d
eviant debauchery becomes uncontrollable. In the end, facing discovery and the threat of justice, Hyde kills himself. But Stevenson bequeathed a powerful allegory that would provide a dramatic formulation of the psychoanalytic ideas to come.

  A promotional poster for the 1931 film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Universal Pictures). Image courtesy of Jerry Ohlinger.

  In 1924 the publisher of the Tribune offered Freud $25,000 to come to Chicago to analyze Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, but Freud declined. The invitation was certainly sensationalistic, but even if it was only partially sincere we still recognize the infant stages of forensic psychotherapy and a cultural validation of the belief that a science of the mind can tell us how human monsters are formed.

  Freud’s refusal did not dissuade the defense team, led by Clarence Dar-row, from enlisting a small army of “the brand-new Viennese psychiatry” experts, five principal analysts and about a dozen auxiliaries. It is no accident that professional mental pathologists of this era were called “alienists,” trading on the notion that insane people were especially estranged or alienated from themselves.8 But in Freud’s conceptual secularization of evil, all of us, not just Leopold and Loeb, are only so many steps away from the extreme cases of monstrous killers. All of us are a little alienated. Darrow strategically chose to plead the boys guilty instead of the expected plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, and he built his argument around the idea that the precocious boys were tragically confused by the heady intellectualism of amoral Nietzschean philosophy and other such dangerous medicines, imbibed too young for healthy result.9

  The psychoanalytic approach to Leopold and Loeb’s crime stressed the continuity rather than dissimilarity between the healthy and the unhealthy psyche. Erle Stanley Gardner’s first sentence in the introduction to Leopold’s book makes a boldly unifying declaration of boyhood narcissism: “There comes a time in the history of every bright boy when a constantly increasing influx of knowledge, the recognition of growth in his own powers of reasoning make him feel he is able to outwit the world if he chooses.”

  Would Freud’s own analysis of Leopold and Loeb have produced a different outcome? Doubtful. The judge, John Caverly, claimed that the entire brilliant defense, with its elaborate psychiatry, had no real influence on his decision to spare their lives in the sentencing phase; they were simply too young to hang. But the whole scenario gives us an opportunity to reflect upon a new kind of psychologized monster. How do Freud’s ideas about aggression and psychopathology explain certain kinds of twentieth-century monsters?

  RAGE AND AGGRESSION

  A highly imaginative artist, according to Freud, might give expression to deep psychological truths, even in the form of jokes and humor. In a sinister but playful mood, Freud quotes the Romantic poet Heinrich Heine’s description of the good life:

  Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before their death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one’s enemies—but not before they have been hanged.10

  This bit of gallows humor helps us, Freud thinks, to recognize a true aspect of ourselves, an aspect that usually lies submerged under the surface of the more sunny socialized image. He argues that “men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who can at the most defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.” My neighbor, Freud says, is not just a potential helper or sexual object, but also a prospective target for my aggression. I am tempted to “exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus (man is a wolf to man).” With neighbors like this, who needs monsters?

  Freud derived his pessimism from experience via the headlines of current newspapers, plus his own personal familiarity with anti-Semitism, and also from a Darwinian view of the human animal.11 We must have a fair share of aggression in our “instinctual endowments,” else we would never survive the severe challenges of living to adulthood (e.g., avoiding predators, outstripping competitors, fighting enemies). In his structural model of the psyche, Freud calls this selfish, instinctual, amoral aspect of the self the “it,” the Id (das Ich).

  Rage is a powerful force that, along with other socially deleterious impulses, lives like a frustrated virus in the dark cellars of the Id. The Ego (the “I”) emerges slowly in the postuterine life of the baby and forms a node of conscious awareness, a locus of self-identity. Later, the toddler internalizes the values and mores of the external society (the nuclear family), regulating its own behavior by internal conscience rather than parental punishments. But unfortunately it all goes wrong sometimes. When conditions are right, the viral rage escapes the usual Superego subjugation and vents its terrible energy on hapless victims.

  Freud explains that we all have a “policeman” in our head if our parents do a decent job of raising us. A child’s basic mix of love and fear toward the parent is utilized in the earliest forms of discipline. If the parent scolds the child after some infraction, the child will feel the direct fear of the parent (especially if struck), but also the fear of the loss of parental love. These two fears combine to form a powerful motive to accommodate the wishes of the parent. The move from external control (parent) to internal (conscience) happens when a more mature child encounters reasonably consistent and just punishments from the parent. The natural aggression that a child points outward toward his or her external punisher can turn back upon the self when the parent remains a lovable (nonabusive) and consistent force in the child’s life. When the child’s aggression turns on his or her own behavior and desires, it provides the repressive force requisite for self-mastery and the formation of conscience. If a child is brought up by an unloving and overly strict parent, the child’s own aggression stays trained outwardly on the abuser and subsequent surrogates, failing to turn inward. But if the parent is overindulgent and too lenient, the child’s aggression has nowhere to go but inward, causing an overly severe Superego.12 Thus abusive parents create outwardly rageful offspring, and indulgent parents create inwardly rageful, self-punishing offspring. In reality, of course, human character formation is much more complicated than this, but Freud’s explanation continues to be highly influential in our understanding of psychological pathology. After Freud, monstrous murderers and abusive people could be theoretically dissected and understood through an examination of their own childhood. Metaphorically speaking, one’s childhood is the parent of one’s adulthood.13

  Given our aggressive nature it’s a miracle we don’t have more violent crime and even extreme serial-killer pathology. Most of us manage to acquire a second nature, which writes a new program over the original caveman program. Monstrous crime such as rape and murder can be seen as the unfortunate byproduct of failed socialization, failed psychological accommodation to social realities. In the history of ideas it is not long after this psychologizing turn that criminal responsibility or agency begins to seep out of the individual and into the larger societal context, but that discussion will come in the next chapter.

  I noted in part I the monstrous nature of rage in the case of Medea, who killed her own children. In some ways Freudian theory only modernized and formalized the penetrating insights of the ancients, but no one has yet successfully moved this discussion out of the metaphorical domain of knowledge. Indeed, the arts, rather than the sciences, still are more accurate in their treatment of powerful emotions such as rage.14 Psychologists remain divided, for example, about a clear taxonomy of alienating emotions. Is rage always an impulsive expression, without calcul
ation, planning, forethought? Is it explosive, like a mysterious animal that bursts out of a human being? Or is it merely the last culminating violent gesture in a long series of mental meditations on one’s own wounded pride? Is ego consciousness quietly fomenting rage for long stretches before rage finally sheds its cognitive tutor and makes its own terrible way?

  In many monstrous crimes the cognitive picture that an offender has of himself is a significant component in the pathological emotionally charged behavior. In 2004 a British teenager, Brian Blackwell, used a claw hammer to beat and stab his parents to death in their Merseyside home. Then he went on a £30,000 holiday spending spree using his parents’ money, including a three-night stay in the Presidential Suite at New York’s Plaza Hotel. In his mind, he somehow deserved this. His defense argued successfully that Blackwell suffered from narcissistic personality disorder, claiming that he had a grandiose sense of self-importance and suffered from fantasies of limitless power, brilliance, and success. The radical cognitive misperception of his own status in the world was used as a lever by the defense to get Blackwell a lesser charge. Rage is intimately connected with indignation, which is intimately connected to subjective notions of justice. The emotional shades into the intellectual, and vice versa. One aspect of narcissistic monsters is their inability or unwillingness to confront existence and accept it on its own terms. Healthy, socialized human beings learn to live with and even accept some degree of anxiety, frustration, hostility, and aggression in their lives (in their romantic lives, their role as parents, children, siblings, schoolmates, office colleagues, etc.). Of course, even for a healthy person, there’s a limit to the amount of frustration one can and should bear, but the poorly socialized person finds that limit very nearby.