I chose to focus on murder initially, not just because the case I was asked to comment on for the jury happened to involve murder, but because people are quicker to use the word evil when they hear about a murder than if they hear about a civil crime such as fraud. And the more diabolical the murderer (meaning the more scheming and malice involved) or the more intense the suffering of the victim, the more readily we tend to add the word evil to our description of the event.
There is plenty of evil "out there" that has nothing to do with murder. We already saw that in the Jahnke case. If there had been a passerby who witnessed the Jahnke boy raise his shotgun and kill his father, that person might conclude there was "evil" present, as personified by the son. But if the passerby's curiosity were piqued and he looked into the matter further, he would learn that the father had beaten every member of his family repeatedly, had intimidated them all with the pistol that he toted around the house, on top of which he also committed incest with his own daughter. Now where was the evil?! It would strain most people's sense of justice to "honor thy father" in the Jahnke case, and indeed, the term evil is often applied to cruel parents, vicious bullies, and bosses who humiliate their employees to the point of mental breakdown and even suicide. This is not the complete list, but I will devote a later chapter to uncommonly cruel parents (whose actions sometimes fell short of murder).
By the time I had read a few hundred true-crime biographies, it became clear that more points on the gradation scale were needed to do justice to the variety of murders that have occurred. The number of categories began to expand, eventually reaching twenty-two. This does not mean that there exists in nature altogether twenty-two distinct types of evil involving murder-or actually twenty-one, since Category 1 is set aside for cases that appear at first to be murder but are better understood as justifiable homicide. The number is really arbitrary: someone else reading the same literature might decide there were fewer or even more varieties. And now that I have read over six hundred such books and have interviewed many violent criminals in hospitals and prisons, I now and then encounter persons who don't fit neatly into the original categories. Some have committed shocking acts of violence but were obviously mentally ill-so much so that they were scarcely aware of, and not legally responsible for, what they had done.
By "mentally ill" I refer to people who suffer from a psychiatric condition (often called a "psychosis") that grossly impairs their sense of reality. This impairment might come in the form of delusions: rigidly held beliefs that are contrary to all reality and impervious to reason. For instance, thinking that airplanes flying overhead are capturing your thoughts by special sensors and then broadcasting them to the world would be such a delusion. Hearing imaginary voices (hallucinations) would be another symptom of a psychosis. Some people who have committed violent crimes have done so under the false belief that God's voice or the devil or the voice of some powerful "leader" was commanding them to kill a certain person, and that it was right and necessary to obey this voice.
A brief example: a young man from a home where the father had been cruel toward both him and his brother became acutely delusional. In this state he grabbed a large knife and severed the head of his father, throwing it out the window. His fear was that if he did not do so, the head might somehow become reattached to his father's body, and the trouble would start all over again. This was a dramatic crime, and it was called "evil" in the newspapers. But the young man, before his mental breakdown, had been a good student, caring and supportive toward his younger brother, and had never been in trouble with the law. There was no matchup, in other words, between the act and the person. His was an impulsive murder occurring in a psychotic state: a kind of "one-off' totally at odds with the man's character before he became mentally ill.
Other exceptional cases that didn't fit neatly into the scale I had developed involved men, in no way mentally ill, who had made lifelong careers of subjecting others to excruciating tortures, using complicated machinery of their own devising, and whose acts begged for a category that went beyond even my "extreme" number of 22. For reasons of simplicity I have left these cases at number 22, acknowledging that even among torture-murders, some are seen by the community as considerably more evil than others. In other words, these cases are similar in type, but different in intensity. Torture-murderers-basically serial killers who are sexually stirred up by inflicting torture-are almost never mentally ill, meaning they are not delusional, do not hear voices, nor do they show any other signs of a radical departure from reality. In large part, the public does not readily grasp this distinction, assuming instead that anyone acting in such a way must be "crazy." Put another way: the public is just about unanimous in defining certain acts as evil. But it requires a measure of familiarity and sophistication about mental illness to distinguish between those evil acts (the vast majority) that are committed by people whose mental faculties are intact and other evil acts (much less numerous, but often quite spectacular) that are committed by the mentally ill. The opinion of the public is quite trustworthy as to what acts can be considered evil. But the act is more directly visible than is the nature of the person committing the act. One of my goals in fashioning the scale was to fine-tune the estimation of evil, taking into consideration not only the quality of the act and the degree of suffering it imposed on the victim, but also the nature of the offender. Was the offender mentally ill? If not, was the person impetuous, or instead calculating and coldblooded? I regard these nuances as important in creating such a scale, which means accumulating information that is not always immediately apparent to the public when the news of a murder or other extremely violent act is first made known through the media.
Here is an example that illustrates this point:
Many years ago a man was arrested for having assaulted and castrated another man. When the case came before the court, the judge assumed the man must have been mentally ill (specifically, schizophrenic) to have committed such an act. This was years before there was a better understanding by either psychiatrists or legal experts about sexual sadism, and about how the men carrying out acts of sexual sadism are rarely mentally ill. All involved-the public, the media, the professionals concerned with the case, including the judge-had the reaction: this was evil. But the judge understandably (in that era), yet incorrectly, concluded the assailant was mentally ill and recommended psychiatric treatment in a special hospital, rather than placement in a correctional facility.
We would like to think that people who learned of prolonged torture, whether or not it ended in murder, would all react the same waythat this was an evil act. The closer the public's reaction approaches the unanimous, the less "subjectivity" there is. There are nevertheless certain situations where the public reaction to a murder, and its assessment of how "evil" the crime was-depends more than we might care to admit on the characteristics and on the social status of the victim. Our Constitution laudably says that all men are created equal; our religions tell us that all are equal in the eye of God. But we do not always react as we assume God and our noble Constitution would have it. This leads to a measure of confusion as to where certain acts belong in any scale of evil.'4 Here are two examples that highlight the problem. The first concerns a veteran who, on his return to the United States, stabbed to death a homeless black man who had been sleeping in the street. The veteran, relating this incident to me while in his prison cell, said, "I was mad because the blacks are taking over the country" (he expressed himself in much coarser language than I have indicated here). His deplorable act-a racial hate crime-earned the label "evil" in a brief note on one of the inner pages of the local paper. And that was all. Contrast this with another murder, this time the murder of Sharon Tate and her friends at her Los Angeles home in the summer of 1969 by the followers of Charles Manson. This was no inner-page murder. The Tate murder was not only headline material for an extended period, but it electrified the whole nation and spawned books and articles for years afterward.I` Sharon Tate was white; blon
de; eight months pregnant by her husband, the famous movie director Roman Polanski; and was in addition an extraordinarily beautiful woman and by all accounts extraordinarily sweet. No one hesitated to call her murder evil, and, judging from the public reaction, an evil of greater magnitude than the unheralded murder of the anonymous black man. Both murders were, viewed from one perspective, equally senseless and despicable. This would be the supremely fair perspective of God and the Constitution. But from the more subjective reaction of the public, the murder of a beautiful, pregnant celebrity weighed heavier in the balance of evil. There was of course the element of terror in the Tate case, and indeed Manson had meant to strike terror in the public. That was the meaning underlying his "Helter Skelter." Manson, no more a friend of the blacks than was my veteran, had imagined in his crazy vision that the blacks were going to rise up and kill all the whites (except Manson and his followers, that is). And then-because the blacks were, in Manson's jaundiced view, incapable of governing, he-Mansonwould assume leadership of the remaining population. So in a way, one can understand how the Tate murder seemed to belong to a higher notch in the scale of evil than the murder of the homeless man. Yet-when you take full stock of the veteran's bigotry and cowardice in killing a sleeping black man, just as innocent and defenseless in his way as Sharon Tate was in hers, the scales of evil are not so far apart.
WHY "CATEGORIES" OF EVIL?
One may well ask, what is the point of breaking up the concept of evil into all these categories in the first place? Once we accept the new way of defining evil-taking it outside the realm of religion and philosophy, that is, and reexamining it in the light of everyday speech-then we all see that some violent crimes, some forms of cruelty to women and children in particular, are worse than others. The measure of these differences might be a stronger gasp when we hear certain stories, our jaw dropping lower, our eyebrows raised higher-the changes in facial expression that accompany our hearing an "evil" story. Those changes in expression correspond quite closely with the degree of shock, the reaction of horror that we register when we first hear such a story. But this alone would not justify making twenty-two categories of evil acts.
My argument for making distinct categories rests on the fact that in other areas of human behavior, something useful often emerges from making these distinctions. There are several important questions that might be more easily answered if we take this approach to evil as well. If all the individual cases that get labeled "evil" are simply lumped together, it becomes harder to discover the origins of the different varieties of evil behaviors. If we are dealing with prisoners who have committed horrific crimes, how can we best decide which ones are salvageable-and which ones can most safely be restored to the outside world as functioning members of the community? Which of these criminals are best kept under lock and key for extended periods, or even for the rest of their lives? Can one inherit certain tendencies or be marred by certain experiences early in life that heighten the risk for cruelty? The first step toward answering such questions is to find common features-of background, of behavior, of personality-shared by one group of individuals who have committed evil acts but not often found in some other group. Those fitting into the halfdozen categories already mentioned ought to differ from one another in ways that go beyond the mere differences in the types of murder. My guess at the outset is that serial killers are not the same as the kind of men who lie awake thinking up schemes to kill their wives, and that the latter are probably quite different from those who kill on impulse in some dramatic but once-in-a-lifetime way. It is only when we separate the groups that show these outer differences that we can then take the magnifying glass and look for subtle differences and, ultimately, inner differences. By "inner differences" I mean the various hereditary, early-background, and even brain-structure differences that would not be at all apparent when the people behind the evil actions were first identified.
This is the same process that has already begun to pay big dividends in psychiatry. The system of classification in psychiatry was still so broad in America even fifty years ago that most patients who showed a break with reality were lumped together as "schizophrenic."16 Worse yet, the supposed "causes" of this loosely defined condition were narrowed down (mostly) to one: destructive mothering. There were a few patients in that era whose breakdown took the form of grandiose delusions so flamboyant ("I am Napoleon," "I am the Virgin Mary") as to be labeled "manic." There wasn't much one could do for either type of patient, so an accurate diagnosis wasn't a high priority. Once medications like chlor- promazine17 were developed in the 1950s, that was what the patients were prescribed. Not many types of psychotherapy were available either, so most patients who were called schizophrenic were given a form of therapy based on psychoanalysis. This one-size-fits-all treatment didn't change much until lithium was found to be useful in the treatment of mania. In mania one sees such symptoms as an abnormally elevated mood, often with grandiosity or irritability (or both), along with excessive rapidity of thought and speech. The delusions of manic persons may take the form of believing they are some exalted figure, like the Messiah, the Queen of England, Napoleon, or the Virgin Mary. At this point it became important to make careful distinctions in diagnosis: many patients who had been labeled schizophrenic were finally recognized (in the 1950s in Europe but not until the late 1960s in the United States) as manic and given an effective medication.18 Alongside this improvement, better forms of psychotherapy for both schizophrenic and manic patients were also developed. As more was understood about causative factors for these conditions, the role of inheritance came to overshadow improper parenting. Mothers were no longer blamed for making their children schizophrenic. In recent years magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques have made it possible to show in an even more dramatic way the differences in how the brain works in these two separate conditions, not so long ago thought of as just one condition.19
It is by applying a variety of methods to the area of severe mental illness that we have developed a better understanding of its dynamics. By applying similar methods to the shadowy realm of evil, I hope to develop a better way of understanding the complex forces that lead to it: What are the varieties of evil? What are the underlying factors peculiar to each of these varieties?
In the search for a violent criminal who has so shocked the public as to call his act evil, the police are mainly concerned with the questions: who, when, where, and how. As a psychiatrist, entering the picture well after there has been a capture, and well after those four questions have been answered, my interest is: why? In the case of murder, to the police, to the prosecutor, and even to the judge, the why question is usually of less interest. To the defense attorney, the why question is of interest, since the defense will try to show "mitigating circumstances," based on such things as having suffered a grievous loss, or being the object of bigotry, or having had a history of terrible abuse or neglect in childhood. Where psychiatry and the law come together-in "forensic psychiatry"-there is the allimportant question of dangerousness. This outweighs even the issue of treatability, as significant as that is. With the focus here on murder, we want to know whether the persons in a particular category of the scale are likely to harm others again if they were released. That is, after all, one of the major reasons why the categories were created: in which persons, having committed an evil act, does dangerousness remain a compelling issue? In which persons, who have committed a violent act, can we expect eventual rehabilitation and the reduction of dangerousness to a minimum?
By looking at the histories, and the subsequent fate (in the case of released prisoners) of persons in different categories, we can begin to answer such questions as this: is a person who has committed so gruesome a murder as to place him in one of the more extreme categories of the scale-but who has done so only once-more dangerous than someone who has performed less shocking crimes of violence but has done them more often? Another relevant issue concerns the legal tradition. There is a centuries-old custom of sha
ping the length of sentencing purely on the nature of the crime and whether it is a first-time offense. Of course many judges are more sensible and more strict. But there are plenty of examples in the crime literature where someone committing a seriously violent act, such as rape of a stranger with mutilation, is given something like "ten years with three years off for good behavior." What if a young man of nineteen commits rape, and he is freed at age twenty-six? Still in the prime of life, that is, with all of his masculine juices flowing as ardently as before? We know from studies what happens with rapists in the years after release from prison: they have high rates of re-offending ("recidivism"). Depending on the report, a third, perhaps a half, will commit another rape or another violent crime within two or three years.20 Viewed in this light, "ten years with three off for good behavior" looks pretty generous. Too generous. Especially, when in the all-male environment of the men's prison, there are no women with whom the rapist's "improvement" can be put to the test. Prisons nowadays, incidentally, are often called correctional facilities, a phrase built on the hope that during their incarceration prisoners will emerge "corrected" of their tendency to behave in antisocial, let alone violent, ways. And this does sometimes happen. The older term for prisons was penitentiary-implying that prison was a place where you were to feel sorry (from the Latin paenitet, "to make sorry") for what you did. And that sometimes happens, also. But there are many exceptions to these hopeful beliefs. One of the aims of making more accurate categories of serious crimes, including the ones people call "evil," is to improve the guidelines about whom to keep in prison, and for how long, versus whom to release back into the community. In all fairness, I would have to say that there are incarcerated men and women who, despite having committed acts widely felt to be "evil," have become truly both penitent and "corrected." They are no longer dangerous, yet they are ironically serving immensely long sentences because of the same kinds of technicalities that released some dangerous persons prematurely. Before presenting the Gradations of Evil Scale in its currently more expanded state, I would like to share with you two examples: one of a man who should never have been released, but was, and another of a man who will never be released (as far as I can tell), but who I believe now deserves return to society.
The Anatomy of Evil Page 4