Savage Spawn

by Jonathan Kellerman

  His eyes were back on mine now. Blue, still. The grin had also returned.

  Definitely smug.

  I said, “Your grandmother raised you because your parents passed away.”

  “Yeah!” he exclaimed, as if I were a quiz show contestant who’d guessed right.

  That threw me. Were his defenses so calcified that he’d moved a universe beyond hurt?

  I said, “What do you remember about your parents?”

  “My dad was a pilot.” He pantomimed a swooping jet. “Cool guy.”

  “And your mom?”

  He shot to his feet, as if on cue. “Want to see a picture?”

  Ah, he carries a snapshot. So he does care.

  “Sure.”

  Out came an expensive-looking leather billfold from which he withdrew a small, creased photo that he handed to me.

  A good-looking couple in their twenties stood hand in hand against a backdrop of greenery.

  “That’s her,” said Tim, pointing to the woman. Smirking. “Major piece of ass, huh?”

  I had one more session with Tim during which he boasted of having had sex with over a dozen girls. In several cases he claimed to have collected their panties, which he sold to other boys. He produced a packet of condoms as evidence. He also crowed about trafficking in a variety of other “found” goods but would offer no further details. He denied using drugs but winked when I asked if he ever sold dope.

  All of this was delivered in an even, strangely unmodulated voice that nevertheless managed to brim with self-satisfaction. His braggadocio assumed a prurience that clogged the room. I steered the conversation to his schoolwork. He dismissed me with a wave of his hand. Improving his grades was out of the question because school was stupid and wouldn’t help him attain his goal of being a “big businessman.” No, he owed nothing to his grandmother for taking him in. It had been her decision, he still thought she was a stupid asshole.

  He never displayed a whit of anxiety, rarely blinked.

  I realized I’d been wrong. There was no wall of defenses. He had nothing against which to defend because he was truly untroubled.

  Completely different from the other noncompliant boys I’d seen.

  It was as if I were sitting across from a member of another species.

  Toward the end of the second session I did witness a single flare of strong emotion. He asked again if he could smoke, and when I turned him down, his eyes narrowed to slits. Then he favored me with another kind of smile—knowing, focused. Hateful. His body remained loose, at ease, his voice flat, but the anger coalesced in his eyes. He spread his legs. Touched his inner thigh briefly. Winked.

  Occupying the office as if he owned it.

  I reminded myself he was only thirteen.

  When he left, I made sure he exited first. He knew I was watching his back. Stopping at the door to the waiting room, he made a sudden move with his shoulder, as if about to butt me. I recoiled. He checked the movement, a classic bullying technique. Faked you out!

  Then he turned to me. Winked again.

  Before I could say anything, Grandma was opening the door. I asked to talk to her, but she said she had to rush somewhere.

  Tim chuckled and saluted. “Bye, Doc.”

  He swaggered down the hall ahead of her. Pulled out his cigarettes. She said something to him. All I could make out was a whining tone. He lit up and increased the distance between them.

  That night i phoned her at home. She was out, didn’t return the call or the three others that followed. Two days before the next appointment, she reached my answering service and canceled, citing a time conflict. I called her again. No answer. She never rescheduled.

  I reached Tim’s pediatrician, filled him in, venturing that Tim might very well be a budding psychopath.

  “Really?” he said. “Yeah, I can see that. He was kind of slick.”

  “You might want to talk to his grandmotherabout it.”

  “Think so? And tell her what?”

  “At the very least, to be careful.”

  “That sounds scary, Jon.”

  “He’s a scary kid.”

  A few weeks later he’d received a message of his own from Grandma. She and Tim had moved to another city, where she planned to put him in military school.

  Over the next few years I scanned the papers for mention of the boy with the glossy black business cards, wondering if he’d show up in the crime blotter, or perhaps—and this was my therapeutic optimism at work—on some roster of heroic soldiering.

  As time went on, I encountered a few—mercifully few—other boys like him. All displayed the same emotional flatness, lack of conscience, grating bravado, inflated self-esteem, ambitious pleasure seeking. All disparaged those who loved them. All had engaged in criminal behavior. Some had already been incarcerated.

  None cared to change. None changed.

  I don’t know what happened to Tim, but I have plenty of fantasies on the subject.

  Maybe he was smart enough to avoid a life of crime. Perhaps he even buckled down sufficiently to become an entrepreneur whose worst offenses involved no bloodletting. Maybe he went into politics as a behind-the-scenes manipulator.

  Probably not, though. He had no appetite for any kind of work.

  Most probably he’s done terrible things.

  III

  A Species Apart

  There are two important reasons for taking a hard look at antisocial children.

  First, youthful offenders pose a serious social problem by themselves. There is strong evidence that although the level of violent crime may be dropping in some parts of the United States, it continues to rise among the young. As a recent epidemiologic study stated, “Adolescents are now experiencing the highest and most rapidly increasing rates of lethal and nonlethal violence. The increase in violence among youths 10 to 14 years of age is especially important and alarming”(1).

  Second, and perhaps more important, are the disquieting findings that antisocial behavior in childhood often lays the foundations for a durable pattern of adult criminality and that the older the child is at the time we reach him, the less likely we are to be able to modify his behavior (2). If kids like Tim changed their ways miraculously upon completing puberty, we would have little interest in them. It is the matriculation to chronic criminality—the natural history of habitual evil—that concerns us.

  Unfortunately, when it comes to crime, the child is, indeed, father to the man: the most seriously antisocial children share a constellation of personality traits with the most seriously adult criminals—psychopathy (3–6). In order to appreciate fully the magnitude of childhood criminality as a social destructor, it is best to begin at the endpoint—the terrible people that violent, antisocial kids are likely to become.

  This is not to say that all children with violent tendencies are psychopaths. But young psychopaths comprise a substantial proportion of the children who devolve into serious, habitual criminals. And what criminals they become! The cruelest, most calculating felons. Blithe killers, strong-arm virtuosos, industrious career miscreants viewing crime as their profession, unfettered by conscience or convention or the threat of distant punishment as they wreak misery and pain on the rest of us. They’re not spurred by poverty or rage against one machine or another, though these factors may play a role in their development.

  They do it because they love it.

  They do it because they can.

  Prison keeps them away from the rest of us, but once they get out of prison, their recidivism rate is significantly higher than that of other released convicts (7). They don’t stop being bad because they don’t want to stop being bad. If they live past the age of fifty, their criminal behavior tends to taper off, but more for lack of energy than because of any moral repair. They are capable of dishing out some nasty surprises at any age.

  What turns them on is the kick, the high, the slaking of impulse—pure sensation. Power, dominance, subjugation of the rest of us.

  The fun of
crime.

  They commit the outrages that we mislabel as “senseless crimes.” We’re wrong about that, just as we are about most of the assumptions we make about psychopathic criminals. Because we view their behavior through the lens of our normalcy, apply our moral logic to their amoral world.

  Their crimes make perfect sense to them.

  Not all gang members are psychopaths. Some are just stupid kids drifting along with a bad crowd, adolescent conformists in lockstep with mean-streets norms, cowards seeking the shelter of group protection, or lonely, neglected, abused kids craving the structure of a surrogate family.

  But gang leaders almost always are psychopaths.

  Psychopaths may not always pull the trigger—though they have no compunction about doing so. Sometimes it’s simply more convenient to get an underling to do the job. But inevitably they’re the architects of the drive-bys and the holdups, the devisers and contractors of drug scams, con games, protection rackets, killings for hire.

  At the peak of their game, if they’re relatively intelligent, they can attain major positions of leadership—cartel kings, Mafia dons, violent cult leaders, genocidal dictators.

  Think of a cocktail party with Ted Bundy and Vlad the Impaler at the top of the guest list. And, hey, there’s Al Capone sharing trade secrets with Pol Pot, Carlos the Jackal bending elbows with Jack the Ripper and Pablo Escobar, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Gacy discussing art. Wow, look at all those politicians and studio heads, and good old Charles Keating with his Cheshire grin, unperturbed by all those old people plunged into financial ruin. All of them sharing an unbridled lust for power, control, and sensation, as well as a blithe lack of regard for the feelings of others.

  Of course, that would be a psychopathic A-list. The very smartest psychopaths from the most privileged backgrounds often avoid violence, because they know it’s likely to get them into trouble and they have safer means of exploitation at their disposal. Garden-variety psychopaths, lacking the brains, luck, will, and attention span for criminal celebrity or legitimate enterprise, comprise a high proportion of the criminal bourgeoisie, going about their business like any other bunch of working stiffs.

  Conning, robbing, stealing, killing, getting busted, going to jail, getting out, conning, robbing, stealing, killing, getting busted . . .

  Psychopathic tendencies begin very early in life—as young as three—and they endure. The same goes for pathological aggressiveness. One study of coldly, cruelly aggressive children produced clear evidence of violence beginning around the age of six and a half (8). Several reviews of childhood murderers revealed strong patterns of prehomicidal violence by early adolescence, with some kids manifesting frightening tendencies as young as two (9–13).

  Violent sexuality and psychopathy don’t always go together, but when violent sexual imagery is tossed into the psychic mulch that twists the roots of an antisocial youngster, the strangler vine that pokes through often sprouts into a monstrosity well beyond the blackest nightmares created by Dr. Moreau.

  Sexual psychopaths learn to manipulate and victimize early, sniffing out vulnerability and weakness with the acuity of heat-seeking missiles. They begin with victims who can’t complain—animals, and hone their skills tormenting, killing, and mutilating, before moving on to human prey (14).

  They’re the bullies, the stalkers, the malicious sneaks, smooth victimizers like Bundy, able to morph from disarmingly charming conversationalists into purveyors of violence so suddenly that it stuns and incapacitates their victims well before the horror of what’s really happening sinks in.

  We’re rarely, if ever, prepared for them, because their capacity for cruelty stretches far beyond the limits imposed on our imagination by civilization. We don’t think as they do.

  When confronted by spectacularly grotesque expressions of psychopathy, we engage in armchair psychiatry, mouthing seemingly logical platitudes such as “They’re crazy. You’d have to be crazy to cut off someone’s head and freeze it, or mutilate a ten-year-old, or shoot up a schoolyard.”

  Defense attorneys capitalize on this.

  But it’s a lie. You don’t have to be crazy.

  Psychopathic killers are anything but crazy.

  Insanity, a legal term rather than a medical diagnosis, varies in definition from state to state. But all concepts of insanity have in common the notion that the insane criminal suffers from a biologically mediated inability to distinguish right from wrong and/or an inability to assist in his own defense.

  Psychopaths know exactly what they’re doing.

  Sometimes their motive is nothing more than the alleviation of boredom.

  They get bored easily.

  Sometimes a psychopathic child’s cruelty tops off at the level of schoolyard bullying. But often it doesn’t, because domination, like any other narcotic, breeds satiation and habituation. When first shoving, then hurting, and then raping cease to provide a sufficiently potent thrill, the game can swell, peaking at the ultimate control scheme.

  That’s when psychopaths try out murder. If they like the taste of it, get away with it, they try to relive the thrill of domination using memory, but that rarely works because they’re not good at coaxing forth mental imagery. So they tend to collect souvenirs, anything from trinkets to body parts. And when those mementos no longer work, the obvious solution is to do it again. And again.

  When impoverished imagination limits them to repetition, we end up with that cliché of bad TV: the serial killer.

  Psychopaths are the villains who perpetrate a certain type of serial killing—what the FBI with its penchant for classification calls “organized.”

  The other side of the coin is the disorganized serial killer, who is crazy: a malnourished, low-IQ madman tormented by delusions (distorted thoughts) that drive him to murder: Mrs. Jones next door is the Antichrist, and for the last three months she’s been sneaking into my room and implanting electrodes that hiss “666” into my brain.

  Disorganized serial killers run amok without warning, often slaughtering wildly, making little or no effort to conceal their crimes or to clean up the evidence, simplifying the policeman’s lot: just look for the filthy ectomorph in bloody clothes lurching down Main Street muttering to himself.

  Organized serial murderers are quite another bunch: crafty, meticulous planners of death, they often come across as attractive and personable. Conventional-looking, they are often involved in outwardly stable relationships, though they are only faking intimacy. Not as smart as they think they are, but bright enough to have decent job skills, they may accumulate the trappings of a normal life, with steady work and a decent income—often augmented by crime. They like their quiet time, though. Enjoy driving empty roads. The thrill for them is as much in the planning as the outcome. Frequently sadistic, they are utterly remorseless.

  Anyone who stalks, rapes, murders, decapitates, and disembowels without feeling must be crazy, right?

  Wrong.

  No hallucinations clutter their heads. Any sort of mental picture comes hard for them.

  Psychopaths sleep well at night. Unusually soundly (15).

  If they’re caught, they often try to fake madness, because crime evokes punishment while illness draws forth sympathy. Back in the sixties and seventies it worked quite often. Nowadays jurors are more skeptical, so it seldom does. Psychopaths aren’t as clever as they think they are.

  At least the ones who get caught aren’t. Then again, jailed psychopaths are failed psychopaths, so all of our data on criminals may be drawn from a biased sample of incompetents. The best and the brightest serial slayers might be racking up triple-digit victim tallies no one even knows about.

  That’s part of what creates a problem for the FBI’s much-vaunted psychological profiles of psychopathic killers.

  Profiles are based upon information gleaned from crime scenes and interviews with imprisoned psychopathic killers. But what about crime scenes that are never discovered? Killers who live out their lives undetected? And psychopath
s are expert liars, so even the data they feed inquisitive special agents need to be regarded with a good deal of skepticism.

  That’s why certain of today’s “facts” derived from psychological profiles degrade into tomorrow’s revealed misconception.

  Such as the “rule” that serial killers never murder outside their race. Till they do. Or that women are never serial killers. Till they are.

  Profiles are most effective as career builders for retired FBI agents seeking to be best-selling authors and consultants to the film industry, but they miss the mark as often as they hit. Profiling rarely, if ever, catches killers in big cities, though in smaller communities it may help direct the police toward a suspect pool.

  When organized psychopaths are apprehended, it’s almost always due to plodding police work, a mistake by the bad guy, or a combination of the two. Once the authorities have a killer in tow, the profile may be examined. If the facts fit the prophecy, a press conference is held. If not, no one talks about it.

  It’s not the FBI’s fault. They’re doing the best they can with the skimpy knowledge stored in their hard drives. No one really understands psychopathy.

  Biological theories of antisocial behavior abound, but no medication has been found that alters antisocial behavior. Conventional psychotherapy is useless, because therapy depends upon insight and a desire to change, and psychopaths possess neither. For the same reason, penal rehabilitation of habitual criminals based upon teaching job skills is a dismal failure and will continue to be so.

  Applying the concept of voluntary social change to well-developed psychopaths has all the value of sweeping the ocean with a whisk broom to prevent pollution.

  Rehabilitation, like most of our mistakes in dealing with psychopaths, stems from our viewing them through the lens of our own psyches and experiences, as we empathize, analyze, search for common ground, assume humanity where none exists.

  They’re different.

  Though they may engage in savagery, they can appear anything but unrefined. Nor does a cold soul imply lack of artistic sensibility. Psychopaths may be creative, talented, even gifted—one has only to view a prison art show or listen to a prison band to appreciate this. But that has nothing to do with their psychopathy. I have written previously about numerous gifted artists who murdered, including bona fide geniuses such as Caravaggio, and others, such as Gauguin, who knowingly infected young girls with syphilis with an aplomb that suggests psychopathic cruelty (16).