Dante divided the sins and vices of which people could be guilty into three broad sections, also anchoring his system to a "zero point"-of essentially guiltless persons whose only fault, or rather, misfortune, was to have been born before Christ.40 Virgil was in fact the standard bearer of these too-soon-born virtuous pagans: with Virgil as his guide, Dante could look at all humankind of the pre-Christian period as well as all humankind born later-up through the time of Dante's own life. Table 1.2 shows Dante's "Gradations" in schematic form.
There are a number of crucial differences between the graded divisions of Dante's Inferno and the Gradations of Evil I have sketched above. My schema concentrates on evil actions committed in peacetime and throws the spotlight on murder or acts of violence that are a little short of murder. I equate evil with that-which-horrifies. Dante includes wrong actions done either in peacetime or in times of group conflict and war. "Evils" for him also include all the mortal sins emphasized by the church, both the noninjurious and the sanguinary. He does not insist on an act being shocking or horrifying before he will include it among his list of wrong behaviors, though if he were to do so, he would apparently find heresy (in Circle Six) more repugnant, perhaps more horrifying, than anger (Circle Five) or avarice (Circle Four). The values of thirteenthcentury Florence when Dante grew up are not all the same as ours. Also, we know there were rare cases of serial sexual homicide at the time of Joan of Arc in the fifteenth century: her chief lieutenant, Gilles de Rais, the richest nobleman in France, was a pedophile who seduced and killed several hundred boys before he was finally executed.42 And Countess Erzsebet Bathory in sixteenth-century Hungary sexually violated and killed some four hundred virgins in her castle.41 Whether there were such people active in Dante's time, we do not know. It is hard to imagine he would have overlooked them, if they existed. The influence of religion was so strong in Dante's time, that for him the worst person imaginable was Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus. Dante put evils caused by perversions of Reason in a lower circle than the Brutish. Hence he saw the simonists44 as somehow worse than murderers. Compared with our worst murderers, who torture their victims, Dante's worst were those who killed a relative in order to hasten an inheritance. A modern example would be Steven Benson (his case is mentioned earlier in this chapter), whom I placed in Category 14 for "ruthlessly self-centered psychopathic schemers." The impatient legatee that Dante mentions was a Florentine man, Sassol Mascheroni. As so often happened in those days, the punishment was more gruesome than the crime. Sassol had murdered a cousin hoping to inherit from his uncle (Canto XXXII, 65).45 Once caught, he was rolled through the city in a barrel full of nails and then beheaded46-which gives some idea of how seriously such a crime was taken in Dante's era.
We are now ready to take a closer look at the Gradations of Evil as I have outlined them, approximately in the order in which they appear in the scale. I am not so fortunate as to have Virgil as my guide, but I do have Dante as my inspiration.
Chapter Two
CRIMES OF IMPULSE
Murders of Jealousy and Rage
Canto XII, 11. 46-51
Ma ficca li occhi a valle, the s'approccia la riviera del sangue in la qual bolle
qual the per violenza in altrui noccia Oh cieca cupidigia e ira folle, Che si ci sproni ne la vita corte E ne 1'etterna poi si mal c'iminole!
But probe the valley with your sight, for we are approaching the river of blood, in which are boiling those who harm others with violence. Oh blind cupidity and mad rage, that so spur us in this short life, and then in the eternal one, cook us so evilly!
s we have just seen, the Gradations of Evil scale includes a category where evil is not present at all, plus twenty-one others. The higher the number, the more likely people will use the word evil in describing the murders and other acts belonging to that category. We then reduced those twenty-one categories to five groups: the impulsive without psychopathic traits, the impulsive with a few psychopathic traits, those showing malice aforethought and many psychopathic traits, psychopaths committing multiple violent crimes, and finally, psychopaths committing either torture alone or else serial sexual murders that also include torture.
To simplify matters even further, we could speak of just two very broad groups: those with few or no psychopathic traits versus those with many or full-blown psychopathic traits. Another broad division concerns those who acted on impulse and those who planned the hurt or the violence they then committed. Here we will turn our attention to impulsive persons whose evil acts were not accompanied by psychopathic traits, or, if they were, the traits are minor. As always, I am using the word evil here in response to the reactions of the public in general and to the reactions of the people who came to be involved with the various cases, including journalists, members of the court, and relatives of the victims.
In the courts and in books about crime, certain phrases are used over and over that have almost identical meaning. An impulse crime may also be spoken of as a crime of passion or a crime done in the heat of passion. The "passion" may concern a love relationship and sexual passion or may mean no more than a strong emotion of any kind, such as anger or rage. A less commonly used word is expressive-which merely indicates that the act was done by way of expressing some intense feeling. Crimes preceded by planning, and done with malice aforethought-that is, with the conscious intention of hurting another person-are often called instrumental crimes. This does not mean the crime was carried out using an instrument; rather, the crime itself was the "instrument" for achieving some goal. Hiring a hit man to kill a spouse so as to free oneself to be with a lover is, for example, the "instrument" the killer uses to carry out his or her plan of a new life with the other partner. This is quite different from the situation, mentioned in the last chapter, where a woman tells her husband "out of the blue" she is leaving him, and, as she tries to leave the house, he kills her with a blunt object. In that example, the crime is said to be impulsive/expressive/done in the heat of passion.
JEALOUSY AND OTHER CRIMES OF PASSION
People are more tempted to use the word evil when speaking of a crime that not only involves great cruelty but is also preceded by conscious intention. The same is true for acts of cruelty, often carried out within a family, that go unnoticed because the authorities are not summoned. Crimes of intention are placed under the heading of instrumental. The term premeditated is regularly used in the same connection.' Rape, kidnap, and robbery would come under the heading of instrumental crimes. Acts of this sort are most often premeditated, in contrast to crimes or other damaging actions that are called expressive, where the common characteristics are lack of forethought and spontaneity. These acts are said to have been done in the heat of passion.'
Before people regard an event as evil, they are apt to take into con sideration the motive that seemed to have set the harmful act in motion. Certain motives are regarded as more understandable and more forgivable; others are regarded as more vile and inhuman.
To get a better grasp on why we tend in our minds to create a hierarchy of more or less forgivable acts-in effect, lesser or greater evilswe can take a brief page from psychiatry; specifically, from the comments of Sigmund Freud.
Toward the end of his long life, Freud was approached by a journalist who inquired of the great man what life was all about. I suspect the man expected a rather lengthy disquisition-distilled presumably from Freud's half century of exploration into the human mind. What the journalist got was two words. Well, three, if you count the "and." Freud said: "Liebe undArbeit"-Love and Work. When matters go very wrong in the sphere of love, we may find jealousy. And where jealousy is extreme, serious crimes including murder can be the outcome and may occur quite suddenly-literally in the heat of passion. Stalking an intimate partner following a rejection is another act of love-gone-wrong-one that may also escalate to a serious crime or murder, though here there is more conscious planning-making the stalker's actions "instrumental."
In everyday speech people do not al
ways make fine distinctions between jealousy and envy. This was apparently so in Old Testament times, when the term gin'ah was used for both words and also meant "ardor" or "heat," in the emotional sense. The equation between passion and heat goes back to our earliest days. The equation worked (as it still does) in both directions: we burn with passionate love; if the love turns sour, we burn with anger (and the switch can happen in the fraction of a second). The Romans also made little distinction between jealousy and envy, using the word invidia for both. For them, the root meaning was to see (videre) in a negative way; figuratively, to look upon someone with the evil eye. But currently envy is usually reserved for two-person situations-where you have something (your Ferrari) that I wish I had (instead of my Chevy)-in this case, coveting your neighbor's car. Jealousy refers more to a three-person situation: I resent you because I thought you loved me, but now I see you have turned away from me and love another. I have lost you and I hate the other for having taken you from me-or I hate you for having deserted me for that other person. Because each of us can identify with how devastating it is to lose the object of one's love, especially in the context of a long partnership or marriage, we tend to be less shocked when we hear that jealousy was the motive for a murder. We also realize that a loss in a love relationship is harder to replace than loss of a job. This makes us more sympathetic in the case of a jealousy murder (especially if the killer found a spouse in bed with a lover) than with a workplace murder where the killer shot the boss after being fired. The word evil is not so often used when commenting about a jealousy murder, unless the circumstances are extraordinary. Two examples might be: the victim had in reality done nothing to evoke jealousy,' or the victim had indeed cheated on the killer-who nevertheless resorted to extremes of mutilation or torture in exacting "revenge." Absent this kind of excess, jealousy murders seem the least evil and fit into the lowest categories of the Gradations of Evil scale: Category 2, or perhaps a little higher.
There are other types of spontaneous, or "expressive" violence and murder unrelated to jealousy: violence during a brawl or in the course of an argument. Family fights that end in murder belong in this category; we shall see a few such examples in chapter 8. Murders of this type seem more avoidable and often enough closer to what we mean by evil. Many of the spur-of-the-moment murders and other acts of violence committed by people with severe mental illness fall under this expressive heading and are sometimes so spectacular as to smack of evil-until we learn that the person in question was acting under the command of imaginary voices or something similar. This was the case with the young man who threw his father's head out the window-or with another mentally ill person who slit open her mother's abdomen in the belief that the mother's exterior was the devil and that the "good" mother was inside, waiting to be released.
When things go very wrong in the sphere of work, we may find a different set of responses, and different motives for criminal acts. Greed is a common motive, as in arson carried out in the expectation of getting the insurance money, as well as in the more mundane crimes of theft, burglary, and robbery. The motives behind certain work-related murders are to get rid of a business rival or to avenge a real or fancied wrong-of which retaliation for being fired is a common example. Schoolwork is work, too, in the broader sense of the word; many of the mass murders committed on campus are in retaliation for being dismissed from high school or college for failed grades. Mass murders are almost universally regarded as evil no matter the motive (which is almost always revenge), and no matter if mental illness is a factor-given the enormous amount of destruction and loss of innocent life occurring in the wake of such crimes.4 In all but the rarest of cases, these murders are instrumental.
Before we flesh out the theme of jealousy with actual examples, it should be recognized that both an expressive and an instrumental motive may get compressed together in one violent episode. This may happen when someone else's action ignites an overwhelming rage, sparked usually by an intolerable feeling of humiliation and a consuming hunger for revenge (the "expressive," heat-of-passion component). This is quickly followed by a methodical plan to undo the humiliation by a violent act (short of or including murder) that will then "even the score" and restore the person's sense of self-worth. The accomplished forensic psychologist Reid Meloy has written about this reaction, and the crimes that occur in the aftermath, under the heading of catathymic crisis.5 There is a close connection between this violence-inducing crisis and what Jack Katz had spoken about under the heading of "righteous slaughter."6
JEALOUSY-WHERE ITS POWER COMES FROM
An Evolutionary Look
Jealousy is best understood as the extreme of an emotional state for which our brains are wired to safeguard what is most precious to us: a sexual mate by whom we hope to have children who will carry our genes (half of them, anyway) into the next generation. For most of us, this is our best hope of immortality. A few geniuses can manage immortality of a different kind without children-like Michelangelo or Beethoven or Schubert. Most of us, however, rely on our children. Our brain has not changed appreciably from the days long back in the African savannah from which we began to spread out some fifty thousand years ago. In that setting, survival of the group and of the individuals within the group was dependent upon division of labor between the sexes. Women bore children and nurtured them. Men safeguarded the perimeter and hunted and gathered for food supplies to guarantee the group's survival.7 It has been important for men to have assurances that the children they are working to support are truly their own. For women it has been important to have assurances that their mates will be loyal and devoted to them during the vulnerable period when their children are small and need maximal care and protection. Jealousy relates to the resentment stirred up if a man loses his sexual partner and if he is forced to worry that the children he has been working to support really belonged to some other man. For the woman, she, too, will feel threatened if she loses her sexual partner, but she will feel especially threatened if she is abandoned and left without the vital support she needs when her children are young and helpless. It is an elementary fact that women at least know that the children they bear are indeed their own. Fatherhood is a dicey business-for which reason men go to great lengths to ensure that they are truly the fathers of the children born to their mates. Until DNA testing became available the mid1980s to resolve paternity disputes, just about the only men who could be completely certain of their paternity were the Ottoman sultans.' Each sultan had a harem (the word means "forbidden") safeguarded by eunuchs (of a different race than that of the sultan, to further guard against cheating). Girls were brought into the gilded prison of the harem before puberty, to be "harvested" when they reached childbearing age by the sultan and only the sultan. Other men have had to make do with long engagements, preceded by the careful guarding of a girl's chastity via the vigilance of her father and brothers. Marriages in many cultures were arranged. Prior "dating" was unheard of; virginity of the bride was demanded. Sexual cheating by a spouse, that is, adultery, was punished with great severity or even by death. Socially we've come a long ways. But our brains, having evolved to ensure the continuity of our treasured genes, are still prone to react with violence when faced with the fact-or even the hint-of sexual betrayal. There are still many parts of the world where killing a mate caught in bed with another sexual partner is not even considered a crime. Sometimes, even killing when there is no more than a suspicion of infidelity may be tolerated as a "justified homicide." When I was in Bogota, Colombia, many years ago, I read on page 7 of the local paper a two-inch column describing how a judge shot his wife to death at a cocktail party when he saw her "looking at another man" (hard for a wife to avoid when she is hostess at a large party). In that locale the incident was not a crime, nor was the judge reprimanded.
There are still other reasons why either the fact or the worry about sexual betrayal may make jealousy rise to such a fever pitch. One's chances of finding a replacement for an abandoning mate may be
drastically lowered because of one's (advanced) age, disadvantaged social position, or unattractiveness of physique, personality, and behavior. To be young, high in social rank, well to do, good looking, and pleasing in personality is to be less vulnerable (usually) to feeling murderous jealousy. There are exceptions, however. If a person occupies high public office or a prominent social position, betrayal may cause such loss of face, such public humiliation that drastic action (including the murder of the deserting mate) may seem, to the victim at least, the only acceptable solution. This was the situation with Shakespeare's Othello. As a Venetian general and governor of Cyprus, he could easily have found another woman to marry, once he thought Desdemona had cheated on him with Cassio. Of course the audience knows that Desdemona has done no such thing, and that it was the evil, scheming lago who planted the seed of jealousy in his hated superior. But in the culture of that place and time, and because of his public visibility, Othello could not shrug off being cuckolded with calm and grace. To save face, Othello kills his wife. We see this as murder. Othello would see his act as the simple administration of summary justice-until, that is, Desdemona's handmaiden makes Othello aware of lago's treachery. Now faced with having murdered, rather than "rightfully killed," his wife because of his baseless suspicions, Othello commits suicide.
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