Savage Spawn

by Jonathan Kellerman

  Some specific examples: When a sample of emotionally disturbed adolescents in treatment was divided on the basis of sleep patterns, the poor sleepers were more likely to be neurotic, while the sound sleepers tended to be psychopathic (15). A study of the level of stress hormone in the urine of arrested men showed increased secretion in nonpsychopaths as trial date approached, but no such pattern in psychopaths (22). Psychopaths have consistently shown lack of fear when exposed to frightening stimuli, though, as noted, they are quite vigilant about sensing threat and responding with anger (21). Most troubling is that these tendencies show themselves during early childhood.

  Two theories have attempted to explain the connection between a cold nervous system and criminality. The first, disinhibition, emphasizes fearlessness. Relatively unburdened by anxiety, the psychopath fails to respond to the threat of punishment and engages in risky behaviors that draw him into antisocial activities. And indeed, psychopaths often do act in an eerily calm, unflustered manner when doing things that would terrify and shock the rest of us. Ted Bundy continued to smile, mug for the cameras, and lie convincingly throughout his arrest, imprisonment, and trial, with the mask beginning to crack only as execution drew near.

  Strikingly realistic depictions of the blithe psychopath can be found more readily in fiction than in the psychiatric literature, with writers such as Elmore Leonard, Jim Thompson, Ruth Rendell, Charles Willeford, and my wife, Faye Kellerman (check out her novel Justice), capturing this persona with astonishing clarity. Lou Ford, Thompson’s glib, emotionally flat, and pseudoinnocent sheriff protagonist of The Killer Inside Me, may very well be the perfect portrait of unruffled evil.

  The second approach to underreactivity, sensation seeking, posits that chronically low levels of brain stimulation cause the psychopath to embark on a constant search for thrills. And indeed, psychopaths often do display very low thresholds for boredom, as well as high rates of alcohol and drug abuse that can be viewed as intense sensation-seeking behavior, or even self-medication for chronic mental emptiness.

  The variables most commonly used to quantify arousability as it relates to antisocial behavior have been heart rate, skin conductance (the level of electrical activity passing along the skin, often related to perspiration), and brain wave patterns. Ironically, the first two are also components of the polygraph, the so-called lie detector—an apparatus whose practical value is based upon the premise that uttering falsehoods produces bodily arousal. But if psychopaths are indeed less arousable than normal people, they could be expected to beat the machine at higher rates than the rest of us. Furthermore, if there is a direct relationship between degree of psychopathy and “coolness”—the more psychopathic, the less flappable—then those criminals most likely to render the polygraph useless may very well be the most pathological and dangerous liars.

  The findings of arousability research are anything but clear-cut. Skin conductance studies have produced inconsistent results: Some researchers have found a relationship between psychopathy and low skin conductance; others have not (50). Fogging the matter further, no consistent relationship has been found between skin conductance and criminality per se. So if a link between skin conductance and deviance does exist, it appears to explain only antisocial tendencies rather than the actual commission of misdeeds.

  Brain wave research, as noted, has produced mixed results in the opposite direction. There is plenty of evidence that institutionalized criminals—children, adolescents, and adults—display higher rates of learning and attentional problems as well as EEG abnormality (though EEG findings are notoriously difficult to interpret), but no consistent irregularities have been identified in psychopaths (9–13, 51, 52).

  Heart rate appears somewhat more promising. Numerous studies have shown that antisocial individuals exhibit significantly lower cardiac arousability than do normal persons, as measured by relatively low resting heart rates as well as cardiac systems that fail to respond strongly to threatening situations (50, 53). Heart rate, as Adrian Raine, the most prolific researcher in this area, has stated, is the “strongest and best replicated finding in the field of the psychophysiology of anti-social behavior”(50). However, once again, as Raine himself points out, the link seems to be to psychopathy, not criminality. Prisons are full of people with normal and hyperactive nervous systems.

  Part of the problem may be that most heart rate research has been retrospective—selecting a sample of adult psychopaths or criminals and measuring their arousability. This tells us nothing about any developmental or causal process, nor does it control for confounding factors. For example, we know that heart rate decreases steadily throughout childhood, reaching its low point around the age of twenty, before reversing and commencing a gradual rise that may continue throughout adulthood. So perhaps studies of grown-up criminals have missed the boat. Certainly research that doesn’t take age into account should be considered questionable.

  In response to these problems, Raine and his colleagues, as well as others, have carried out prospective studies, measuring cardiac arousability in very young children and following these youngsters into adolescence and adulthood (54–56). This work was conducted in countries with well-established, centralized systems of socialized medicine that allowed access to large-scale data banks, primarily Scandinavia and the United Kingdom, as well as in isolated, easily studied communities such as the tiny Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. So cultural differences may limit the relevance of these studies to American society. But their results are striking and deserve more than casual attention.

  The Mauritius Child Health Study, conducted by Raine and his associates, is especially noteworthy because every child on the island born in 1969 was studied at the age of three, providing a sample of 1,795 (later reduced to 1,130 after a cyclone destroyed many of the island’s homes) (54). Heart rate was studied and measures of psychological adjustment were taken eight years later. The basic finding was that low resting cardiac rate in toddlers predicted aggressiveness and antisocial tendencies at a better-than-chance level even when environmental factors, such as social deprivation and broken homes, and biological factors, such as body size, activity level, physical development, muscle tone, and general health, were controlled for.

  Research carried out by Raine also approached the issue from the opposite end, suggesting the protective nature of arousability. In these studies, youngsters at high risk for criminality because they had criminal fathers were more likely to avoid crime if their resting heart rates during childhood were high. Fear, it appears, can be a highly effective teacher (55–57).

  Nevertheless, these findings lead us to the same kinds of problems we faced when assessing environmental variables: Assuming a link exists between cardiac activity and antisocial behavior, how important is it and what does it mean? A better-than-chance prediction rate may be fine when submitting a paper or playing blackjack, but what practical ramifications does it have for the amelioration of childhood violence? Is anyone suggesting that we segregate preschool kids simply on the basis of low heart rates, offering them antidelinquency training because of their EKG profiles? Even if this were socially acceptable or feasible, it wouldn’t be wise because we’d be wasting plenty of time preaching to kids who didn’t need it while failing to detect a good number of criminals-in-training. Heart rate studies reveal plenty of boys with normal heart rates who subsequently become aggressive, antisocial, even criminal, as well as low-heart-rate kids who don’t turn bad.

  Raine himself may have provided some clarity when he reported that a combination of birth complications, maternal rejection, and low arousability was the best predictor of serious violence in Danish children (58, 59). So optimal protection against criminality may result from environmental factors, such as a mother who takes care of herself during pregnancy and stays married to a nonviolent father in order to maintain an intact, loving family, rather than from a few more heartbeats per minute.

  Yet another insulator against criminality is intelligence, wh
ich has been shown to be strongly negatively correlated with violence, even in children with low arousability and troubled backgrounds. However, there is some evidence that when bright boys from intact homes do turn bad, the link with underarousal is especially strong (50). One thinks of Leopold and Loeb dispassionately plotting the abduction and murder of Bobby Frank as an intellectual exercise, or the Menendez brothers retreating to the driveway of the family mansion in order to reload their shotguns.

  So it’s possible that there exists a small number of children, physiologically predisposed to antisocial behavior at a very young age, for whom a too-quiet nervous system is such a strong behavioral pollutant that it overrides environment. Are these kids true bad seeds, predestined genetically to evil? Or is underarousal not an inborn trait at all, but a learned response to abuse and neglect—a switching off of the child’s nervous system in an effort to blunt psychic and physical pain?

  Even the sterling facade of an intact, intelligent family may camouflage severe emotional neglect and horrendous maltreatment. (This was the Menendez brothers’ precise defense, and it almost worked, despite a total lack of evidence. The circumstances of the murder certainly don’t indicate defensive rage; at the time of her murder, Mrs. Menendez was performing the abusive act of filling out Erik’s UCLA parking application. And several facts of the case—the glibness with which Lyle and Erik protested their innocence, the calculated nature of their crimes, subsequent attempts to deflect suspicion, the rapidity with which they began spending their dead parents’ money on Porsches and Rolexes—indicate more than a bit of psychopathy.)

  Whether or not the Menendez brothers’ defense was nothing more than a creative bit of lawyering—my biases are obvious—is beside the point. What did or didn’t occur in the house on North Elm Drive doesn’t change what I learned early as a psychologist: lifting affluent and middle-class family rocks can reveal some truly revolting stuff. So much for the notion that poverty causes crime.

  We know that many abused kids are more likely to exhibit a specific constellation of psychological problems known as dissociative reactions—symptoms such as withdrawal, amnesia, and, in extreme cases, multiple personality—which involve a literal partitioning of the mind, separating one’s reality into protectively independent segments. Debate rages within psychiatry and psychology as to whether or not these symptoms represent true pathology or some sort of role playing, but either way, dissociation remains an attempt to shut out horror. Perhaps other victims of child abuse adopt a similar method of self-defense—a turning down of the emotional thermostat that cools and comforts by creating a sort of psychic cryogenics.

  The nature of adolescence as it relates to abuse, changes in arousability, and violence also deserves attention. The concomitance of peaks in criminal violence and low heart rate between the ages of fifteen and twenty is striking. During this period, the teenager’s body is being subjected to hormonal fluctuations and physiological changes that can turn adolescence into a period of serious emotional upheaval. Even for normal, well-nurtured, well-adjusted kids, the teen years can be tumultuous, rife with extremes of moodiness, insecurity, narcissism, and an often stumbling trajectory toward independence and autonomy. As any parent knows, even the brightest teenagers often exhibit incredibly stupid behaviors—situational idiocy that transcends mere IQ. How much more chaotic is the transition to sexual and physical maturation in abused kids?

  Perhaps the process goes something like this: Some of the formerly powerless, vulnerable, maltreated children who survive to adolescence by numbing down their autonomic nervous systems find that same system suddenly tweaked and supercharged by testosterone and in dire need of sensual stimulation. One quick avenue of satisfaction is drugs, hence the strong and consistent relationship between narcotics and alcohol abuse and psychopathy and criminality. In fact, drugs play a role on both ends—as cause and effect—for in addition to satisfying pleasure drives, psychoactive chemicals lower inhibitions, facilitating risky, reckless, sometimes psychopathic behavior. When booze and dope fail to satisfy the cravings, the once-numb, now pleasure-craving adolescent may turn elsewhere, including to the power and kick of crime. Having been denied empathy and compassion, he lacks the capacity and the desire to reciprocate with either. He’s learned a long time ago that victimizing others is an effective way to obtain what you want if you’re sufficiently big, strong, and duplicitous to get away with it. Hungry to satisfy inchoate but compelling needs, he goes out and takes what he wants.

  Empirical support for the numbing hypothesis as a consequence of emotional deprivation comes from a study that found children whose parents divorced by age four had lower resting heart rates at age eleven than did youngsters from intact homes (60). And the phenomenon may not be unique to humans: Adrian Raine cites research with fetal rats indicating a link between emotional stress and changes in the frontal lobes of the brain—the area most often implicated in aggressive behavior in humans (61).

  More directly applicable to child criminality, a study measuring dangerousness in a group of delinquents found a triad of factors to be strongly predictive of violence: psychopathy, low IQ, and love deprivation, with the last the single most potent factor. Teenagers in whom all three were present were over four times as likely to engage in violent crime as any other comparison group (62).

  In fact, Adrian Raine, the preeminent researcher on the psychophysiology of violence, is quick to suggest that the coldness exhibited by psychopaths may very well be a learned response to very early trauma (50). Rather than adopt a biologically deterministic model of human behavior, Raine wisely opts for what he terms a “biosocial” approach in which environmental stress causes actual changes in brain chemistry.

  Nature? Nurture? It’s both.

  The numb-child-becomes-angry-adult scenario may also be consistent with the finding that parents who abuse their children show high arousability. We know that abused kids are more likely to become abusive parents, so some of these adults may once have been emotionally suppressed victims who now find themselves in the power role and undergo the transformation to hot-blooded victimizer. Since emotional arousability reaches its low point around the age of twenty, we would expect any upward shift to occur in early adulthood—precisely when most individuals are raising children.

  Yet another indication of the biopsychosocial nature of low arousability is the fact that adult psychopaths are by no means uniformly cool. As mentioned, they show higher attentiveness to perceived threat and are more likely to react defensively and violently. And though they tend to tune out neutral and fearful stimuli, they can be hyperattentive to matters that interest them (63).

  The bottom line regarding biological predictors of aggression, violence, and criminality is that a genuine link most likely does exist between underarousability, as measured by heart rate, and some kinds of psychopathy, but we are a long way from specifying either the precise nature or the strength of the relationship.

  IX

  It’s Both

  From a practical standpoint, a combination of temperament and chaotic environment is by far the best predictor of dangerousness in children, just as it is in adults.

  The strongest empirical support for the interaction between environmental and biological damage comes from studies of children and teenagers who’ve actually killed. Features found repeatedly in young murderers include language disorders suggestive of brain damage; a history of physical and sexual abuse; exposure to frequent, high-level, real-life episodes of extreme violence, primarily within the family; other indications of family chaos, most notably parental promiscuity, incarceration, and substance abuse; low IQ (90 or below); serious school problems; alcohol and drug abuse (mostly cocaine); and documented instances of head trauma. (I will examine later how Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden fit into this picture.)

  A study of fourteen juveniles who committed sexual homicide—youths ranging from thirteen to seventeen years old who stalked, raped, stabbed, impaled, and mutilated their victi
ms—revealed a similar set of precursors: violent, chaotic, abusive families; paternal abandonment or neglect; school problems and truancy; substance abuse; and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. What separated these youths from other killers, much as it distinguishes adult sexual psychopaths from other criminals, was an early preoccupation with violent erotic fantasies. Media violence did play a role in the behavior of two members of this tiny subgroup, but it appears to have been minimal: one young rapist-murderer with long-festering violent impulses reported being inspired by a video game (Dungeons and Dragons), and another linked his method, stabbing in the head, but not his fantasies, to the movie Rambo (13).

  One contrast between these young lust-murderers and other precocious killers was their higher intelligence (mean group IQ was 101.4). This same “criminal intellectuality” is also found in many organized adult serial killers, many of whom tend to score above average on IQ tests. So these precocious lust-slayers may very well have been bush-league Ted Bundys who, fortunately for the rest of us, lacked the sophistication to avoid early capture.

  X

  Warning Signs and Solutions

  It is very rare for teen murderers to be good kids who suddenly turn bad. The exception is a subgroup of abused children who lash out defensively against their tormentors, behavior that might be considered self-defense. However, a study of teens who murdered family members found only a small proportion of killers to be reacting against abuse. On the contrary, rather trivial events, such as being refused the family car, were more common triggers (64).

  Youths who murder strangers and family members who did not abuse them typically exhibit marked and consistent signs of violence and criminality long before taking life. Recurrent factors are fascination with weapons, carrying guns and knives to school, engaging in frequent fights, cruelty to animals, and sexual solicitation of young girls. Most child murderers have also been arrested before, often several times, with common prior offenses being burglary, robbery, assault, battery, grand theft, and trespassing.