The Anatomy of Evil

by Michael H. Stone

  The first example concerns a Massachusetts man, David Paul Brown, who began showing violent behavior when he was six: he choked a sixyear-old female pupil. He grew massively obese and was a social misfit, mocked in school for his awkwardness and obesity. At fifteen he tried to lure two boys to a cemetery for lewd purposes. He was not able to carry through his intentions, and the boys' mother did not press charges.21

  Later he took to impersonating policemen in order to lure young boys, and at eighteen almost choked one to death. For that offense he was given merely a year's probation. At twenty he lured two adolescent boys, with the same ruse of being a "cop," and, using a knife and handcuffs, attempted to kidnap and sodomize them. One was able to play dead, and later ran off and summoned the authorities. Both survived. Brown was arrested and sent to a prison for sex offenders with the recommendation from a psychiatrist that he be retained indefinitely. While at that facility, he changed his name to "Nathaniel Benjamin Levi Bar- Jonah."22 After fourteen years, during which time he showed himself to be treatment-resistant, refusing to participate in the various therapeutic programs, he was nevertheless released. This was in part thanks to efforts of his mother. By that time he weighed 375 lbs (170 kg). His mother managed to find two independent psychiatrists from outside the prison who testified that he was no longer a risk to the community. Based on their testimony (made without delving into Brown's criminal record), the judge was persuaded-bamboozled would be a better word-into granting Brown's release. Scarcely a month and a half later, he was rearrested, this time for entering a parked car and sitting atop a seven-yearold boy who was awaiting his mother to return from shopping. Brown's mother pleaded with the boy's mother not to pursue the charges, on the promise that her son, now thirty-four, would relocate to Montana. Not long after he moved to Montana, Brown was arrested for pedophilia involving an eight-year-old boy; for this he spent only five months in jail. A year later, again impersonating a policeman and standing outside a school, Brown lured a ten-year-old boy, immobilizing him with a stun gun. Accused of molesting the boy sexually, killing, and cannibalizing him, Brown could not be convicted of murder, since no body was ever found, and the boy's grief-stricken mother, still unable to accept that her son was dead, would not cooperate with the prosecution. Convicted instead of child molestation among other offenses, Brown began serving a life sentence.23 He remained to the end in denial of the crimes he committed and incapable of telling the truth about the least controversial things. When I interviewed Brown a few years before his 2008 death in prison, I asked him why he had moved to Montana. He said, "Oh, I was getting sick of Massachusetts." To my reply, "And I guess Massachusetts was getting sick of you," he had no answer.

  As I will show in a later chapter, this picture of incarceration for a violent crime, followed by imprudent release and then the commission of still more-and more shocking-crimes is actually common in the literature on men ultimately convicted of serial sexual homicide.

  The second example centers on a man, Ronald Luff, who got swept up in a small Ohio cult whose leader was a con man-turned-preacher. The leader, Jeff Lundgren, was a self-styled prophet of a Mormon offshoot called the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. A stranger to modesty, Lundgren claimed that he was a prophet of God, heard God's voice, and-toward the end-that he was God.24 Lundgren set up his base of operation near one of the holy places in Mormonism: Kirtland, Ohio (some forty miles east of Cleveland). There, a church had been erected by the early Mormons during their westward trek in the nineteenth century. Among the two dozen people he mesmerized into joining his cult was a devout man from a more traditional Mormon background, Ronald Luff. Married with children, Luff had been a deeply religious, hardworking, industrious man with a ster ling record in his Missouri hometown. He fell under the spell of Lundgren, taking him for the prophet he claimed to be. In time he became the second-in-command member of the cult. Another Missouri family that felt the same enchantment with Lundgren's grandiose and controlling qualities was Dennis and Cheryl Avery and their three children. The Averys fell afoul of Lundgren, who was trying to con them out of their savings. Lundgren would not tolerate such "disobedience" and ordered the whole family to be executed. Luff, whose moral values had been swamped and overridden by Lundgren, participated, with an obedience worthy of Hitler's henchmen, in this murderous plan. One evening, in April of 1989, Lundgren commanded Luff to lead the members of the Avery family, one at a time, from the main house to a farmhouse farther off on the grounds. Once the entire family was in the farmhouse, Lundgren shot each one so that the bodies fell into a pre-dug pit that was then sealed over.25 Lundgren and his flock then fled. Arrogating to himself the privilege of marriage and sex with whoever struck his fancy, Lundgren tried to make one of his married flock's members into his "second wife." As a result, this woman's husband broke down and revealed the murders to the authorities. Lundgren was executed for the massacre in 2006. Ron Luff was given a life sentence-actually a "170-year" sentence, which is very much the same. An intellectual, thoughtful, and remorseful man who had never been remotely in trouble with the law before, Luff has already served over twenty years. He shows every sign of being able to resume his place in society as a worthy and law-abiding citizensomeone who could be of special use, given his experience, in warning other susceptible people against submitting to power-hungry cult leaders. But it is not likely he will ever be released.

  The difference between these two men is that the dangerousness of the one was ignored until it was too late, and the non-dangerousness of the other was not taken fully into consideration. The great judge Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, "May Justice triumph over Law." Ron Luff has felt the full weight of the law but was not served the full cup of justice. At least that is my opinion. There was, of course, no miscarriage of justice here: he was unquestionably guilty as an accomplice to a massacre. It is appropriate that he serve a long sentence for that crime: perhaps the twenty years he has thus far been in prison. But from the standpoint of our main topic-evil-it is clear that evil was quite evident in the pedophile and equally so in the cult leader. Lundgren, in fact, was one of those rare individuals who behaved atrociously on a day-in day-out basis throughout most of his adult life. (We will have more to say about him later.) Clearly, Ron Luff also participated in an evil act. But since we are interested in gradations in the domain of evil, Luff belongs at a lower level than the utterly callous leader, Lundgren, who dominated him."b Luff did know ahead of time what Lundgren was planning. This means that Luff might have somehow found the courage to escape and tell the authorities about Lundgren, perhaps even saving the Avery family. So our sense of the level of evil here, in Luff, is still quite high. A more dramatic example of a "lesser" evil is a man who has had the opportunity to demonstrate his rehabilitation: Billy Wayne Sinclair.27

  Briefly put, when he was twenty, Billy Sinclair killed a store owner in a bungled holdup in Louisiana. It was an impulsive and unintentional murder. He had fired his pistol over his shoulder without looking where it was pointed as he tried to escape the owner. Through terrible luck, the bullet struck and killed the man. Billy was arrested, spent seven years on death row and twenty-eight more years there when the death penalty was temporarily abolished. He eventually became the editor of the prison newspaper, exposed the pardons-for-sale scandal at the infamous "Angola" (Louisiana State) prison, and was befriended by a journalist whom he later married. A man of unusual integrity, he refused the offer of early release if he paid the pardon price and so spent more years in prison, until he was released on merit when he was approaching sixty. He and his wife now live in Houston, where I interviewed him and got a chance to learn how he has been working at a law firm, helping other inmates who have had to struggle with the kinds of unfairness that for so long had characterized the criminal justice system in his area. The book he and his wife have written is a testimony to the possibility of selftranscendence and redemption in some men and women who have committed an evil act-a stark contrast to
the life of Jeff Lundgren and others like him, for whom redemption is unthinkable, whom age does not mellow, and whose propensity to evil actions remains at full tilt throughout their life span.

  THE GRADATIONS OF EVIL SCALE

  This would be a good point to show the Gradations of Evil Scale in its expanded form with twenty-two compartments. Since murder cases formed the inspiration behind the creation of the scale, its focus remains on murder. There are a few exceptions for cases involving multiple rapes and a strong suspicion of murder, the latter never proven in court. Some of the cases concern people regarded as evil by the community-people who were exceptionally cruel to a spouse, to children, or to other family members. Their actions fell short of murder, though they sometimes precipitated a suicide. Some cases involved spouses (usually husbands) whose evil consisted of "gaslighting" their wives. The term gaslight comes from the famous play Angel Street, by Patrick Hamilton, later made into the novel Gaslight, by William Drummond."g The word has now become a verb, meaning to drive someone mad (usually one's wife) through malicious acts designed to make that person doubt her own perceptions. As it says on the back cover of Drummond's book: "Trapped in the evil mansion on Angel Street, Bella suspects that her own husband, sinister Mr. Manningham, is driving her mad." If the victims of gaslighting survive, as they usually do, no murder has been committed. Hence the evil in these cases does not fall within the scale. But these and other examples of prolonged cruelty, deserving perhaps a separate scale, fall readily under the larger umbrella of Evil-with a capital "E"-cov- ering every known variety.

  The terms psychopathic traits or psychopath occur in most of the descriptions of the categories from number 9 on. A century ago the word psychopath meant little more than its root meaning of "mental illness."29 But about the time of World War II the meaning changed: it was now reserved for people who used deception to "con" others (like the confidence men who sell fake Rolex watches on the street), people who are socially irresponsible and who show no remorse for the offensive or, often enough, violent, things they habitually do.30 The definition got much more specific after 1980 when the renowned Canadian psychologist Robert Hare and his colleagues refined the original description, creating a scale called the Psychopathy Checklist. This checklist consists of twenty items, some dealing primarily with personality; others more with behaviors. Since each item can get a score (depending whether it applies considerably, only a little, or not at all) of 2, 1, or zero, the maximum score would be 40. Anyone scoring 30 or more is considered a psychopath proper. Others with lower scores-in the teens or twenties-are said to show psychopathic traits (but not the fullblown condition). For our purposes, the most important items are those having to do with personality. Taken together, they paint a picture of extreme egocentricity, or "narcissism," with ruthless disregard for the rights and feelings of others. These personality items are: glib speech or superficial charm, grandiosity, conning or manipulativeness, pathological lying, lack of remorse or guilt, callousness or lack of empathy, and a failure to accept responsibility for one's actions. Some of the behavioral items include impulsivity, sexual promiscuity, poor behavioral controls, and a parasitic lifestyle." The characteristics seen again and again in people whose actions rise to the level of evil are those extreme narcissistic traits, especially conning, callousness, and lack of remorse. Armed with those dreadful qualities, a person is capable of just about anything.32

  A brief example that brings this point home is that of the serial killer Ted Bundy.33 When Bundy would troll for likely victims, one of his tricks was to put his arm in a sling, pretending it was broken. Standing outside a shopping mall with a bag of groceries, he would then ask a young woman if she could help him get the bundle in his car. Once she got into the car to place the grocery bag on the seat, Bundy would then snap the lock on her side and drive off to some remote place, where he would proceed to rape and kill the woman, with no more regret than if you were to step on a roach in your kitchen.

  As we go through the descriptions of the various men and women who occupy the higher-number categories in the evil scale, we will see psychopathy, or at least some of its key traits, over and over again. Some of the worst offenders-those whose actions prompt the word evil most quickly and uniformly-also show "sadistic" traits. The terms sadism and sadistic come from the life and writings of the infamous eighteenthcentury Marquis de Sade, whose novels contained much more cruelty than did his actual deeds.34 Having been caned and whipped a good deal in the private schools he was sent to as a child, he took to whipping many of the "loose" women he later associated with. But he murdered no one and would have found our serial killers of today revolting. The essence of sadism, as we now use the term, is the taking of enjoyment in hurting others. Two other main qualities of sadism are humiliation and controleach carried to an extreme. As it happens, a person can be psychopathic without being sadistic (as in the fake-Rolex salesman who is nice to his wife and children), or one can be sadistic without being psychopathic. We see the second type in families where a parent may be verbally or even physically cruel to others in the family, yet behave decently at work and in most other social situations. Robert Jahnke Sr., from the example given earlier, was such a person: abusive toward his whole family but honest and reputable in his work with the IRS. At the most he may have had a few psychopathic traits, but he did not come up to the level of the full-blown psychopath.

  The common thread that runs through almost all of the categories from number 9 to number 22 is the element of malice, or "intentionality." Even some of the rageful and impulsive murderers of Category 13 had the intention of maiming or killing others, although they had no idea in advance who the victims might be-or they were ready to kill anyone who tried to resist them as they committed a robbery. Richard Speck, the alcoholic drifter who killed eight nurses in a Chicago hospital dormitory, had broken into the dorm intending to cadge money from the nurses.35 He then bound them and held them at gunpoint. When some of them resisted, he killed all eight that he could find, though there was another nurse who had hidden under a bed and who survived.

  Since the Gradations scale was built only from published biographies, it represents just a fraction of all the people who have committed a murder. Americans make up 89 percent of the men and women in the biographies I've studied, but compared with the different murderers in the United States each year, not even one in a thousand achieves the notoriety that leads to having a biography written about them. This means that the members of the "biography group" are quite special: their murders were spectacular in some way, either because of the cunning they used to conceal the crime, or the horrific nature of the crime, or the large number of victims (as in the case of a massacre). The great majority of murders would register much lower on any scale of evil and are usually impulsive acts, like barroom brawls that went too far or spousal murders that resulted from a passionate argument. The latter often occur at the very moment when the wife with packed bags is about to leave the house and divorce her husband. The tearful husband then calls the police and tells them he'd done a terrible thing. Thus the element of malice aforethought is not nearly as often present in murders of the more "everyday" type.

  AN EARLIER ATTEMPT TO CREATE A SCALE OF EVIL

  I first published the Gradations of Evil Scale in 1993, essentially in its present form.3" Occasionally I come upon a case that does not fit neatly into one of the original categories, especially when there was severe mental illness in the picture. In those cases I have given a lower number to the case, acknowledging that the act was widely considered evil but that the offender could not really be held fully responsible for what he had done. Murderous cult leaders are also difficult to place on the scale because they have often persuaded their followers to do the killingwithout the leader firing a shot. Charles Manson, for example, did not participate physically in the murders he authorized. Jeff Lundgren was the exception, since, although he used an accomplice, he personally murdered the Avery family.

  My efforts
in creating such a scale were not, however, the first. Though there have been very few such attempts, there was an earlier one that earned considerable-and lasting-fame. Without having meant to, this earlier scale shows us quite vividly how society's values as to what is absolutely evil, fairly evil, or not so evil are subject to change over time. I refer to the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, the first book of whichthe Inferno-was composed seven hundred years ago (in 1310)."

  Dante's vision of hell (his Inferno) was inspired in good part by the biblical references to the Seven Deadly Sins, outlined some two thousand years before Dante's time in the Book of Proverbs. There we read: "These six things doth the Lord hate; yea, seven are an abomination unto him: A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, / a heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running unto mischief, / a false witness that speaketh lies; and he that soweth discord among brethren."38 The Seven Deadly Sins, as they were spoken about in early Christian times were, and remain, Pride, Envy, Greed, Sloth, Lust, Anger, and Gluttony. As with the longer list in the Epistle to the Galatians of the New Testament, the Seven are also merely a list, with no ranking as to which might generally be worse, more partaking in evil, than some of the others.39 Anger, for example, spawns hatred, vengeance, the wish to do evil or harm to others, sometimes in the forms of assault or murder. Whereas Proverbs mentions murder per se, the Seven Deadly Sins are not actions, let alone evil actions in our modern sense. They are only attitudes or emotions that happen to nudge those who harbor them in the direction of committing certain actions. The Seven do not lend themselves to any scale, though one would like to think that Anger, to the extent that it is associated with murder, would merit far more social disapproval than would Sloth or Gluttony. But obviously the overlap between Anger and Evil is only partial. Anger, in less vehement forms, also motivates us to protest against social injustice. That said, Dante, as he journeys down through his Nine Circles of Hell in the company of the great Roman poet Virgil, does offer us a ranking, or a scale, of bad attitudes and actions, going from the mildest (and to our way of thinking, the least akin to "evil") to the most abominable or repugnant (and thus closer to what we now mean by "evil").