The Anatomy of Evil
Page 10
Chapter Three
OTHER CRIMES
OF IMPULSE
Emphasis on Antisocial Persons
Canto XI, Il. 79-84
Non ti rimembra di quelle parole con le quai la tua Etica pertratta le tre disposizion the `1 ciel non vole incontinenza, malizia e la matta bestialidade? E come incontinenza men Dio offende e man biasimo accatta?
Do you not remember the words with which your Ethics treats so fully: the three dispositions that Heaven refuses -incontinence, malice and mad bestiality? and how incontinence offends God less, and acquires less blame?
e just examined cases of impulsive violence prompted primarily by motives such as jealousy, fury arising between sexual partners, or rage at specific individuals. Jealousy does not always involve a sexual triangle: men can sometimes be so jealous, within a family triangle, of the attention a new mother devotes to her child, as to kill either child or wife or both. In some of the examples, it was mental illness that had helped release the brakes on self-restraint.
Here we will turn our attention to crimes of impulse, particularly violent crimes carried out by people with a more distinct antisocial twist to their personalities. The persons we will confront here will be more likely than those we met earlier to stretch out their actions to include some planning after the fact, often to hide the evidence of what they have done. Hence their violence was born of an ungovernable impulse but was followed by what we might call malice afterthought. It's as though they were surprised and alarmed at their own violence and realized they could get into deep trouble if found out, so they do their best to hide their crime and escape jus- tice.i Their actions, that is, are not "purely" impulsive, such as we might see in the typical barroom brawl. Picture two strangers in a bar. One man might insult another; the second man breaks a chair over the first man's head-obviously with no malice aforethought: they didn't even know each other. And there are dozens of witnesses, so there's no way to drag the victim to a shallow grave and pretend innocence. In the absence of malice aforethought, what raises the specter of evil in the cases to be discussed here will be evil's other key ingredient: the horror evoked at the nature of the act-which will nearly always be one of violence. There is something wildly excessive, "over the top," about the violence described in this chapter. Often enough, our sense of shock will be a reaction to the gruesomeness of the violence, as, for example, in the dismemberment of a child. Occasionally, we will be shocked at the sheer number of victims (as in a mass murder case), even if each died a painless death via a bullet to the head. In still other cases, what we respond to is the innocence, the beauty, or the social importance of the victim, as in the murder of a nun, well-known actresses like Rebecca Schaeffer and Sharon Tate, or a prominent and revered figure like Martin Luther King Jr. The attempted murder of Pope John Paul II by hired gun Mehmet Agca in 1981 had the same effect.
Although the term impulsive captures the essence of these crimes, some authors prefer the term reactive;' they also speak of proactive, where we might prefer words like premeditated, cold-blooded, "with malice aforethought," or instrumental. All the latter seem preferable to proactive, which is usually reserved for positive actions, such as reading the state driver's manual before taking the written licensure test. Another distinguishing feature of the persons described in this chapter is that they are not career criminals, even though they have some antisocial traits. The crimes are "one-offs" (unique acts, that is, occurring once in the person's lifetime) that struck all those who knew them as totally out of character. Neighbors and acquaintances will be quoted in the media as saying, "I can't believe he did that," or "That isn't the person I've known all these years," as though the evil that lurks in the minds of men-a phrase we are fond of saying about those who repeatedly violate social norms-has no relevance to the kindly man next door who took an axe to his wife, or to the sweet, churchgoing adolescent cheerleader who one days shoots to death her whole family. I believe we say these things partly because it is truly bewildering that seemingly ordinary folk can in a moment of intolerable stress commit mayhem, mutilation, or murder-where Nature and all the rules we live by can be turned upside down in a millisecond.
The other reason we find these acts inexplicable is, I suspect, because we need to reassure ourselves that not even under the greatest imaginable stress could we descend to violence of that sort. And so with this reaction, we put an earth's diameter of distance, psychologically speaking, between ourselves and "those" people. In the sections that follow I will offer examples of these impulsive or "reactive" acts, acts that inspired many to pronounce them "evil"-where the underlying motives vary over a wide range: marital conflict, hate crimes, parental cruelty, school shooting, romantic rejection, and the like. In contrast to attacks on strangers, as in rape or serial sexual homicide, the bulk of the crimes in this chapter concern violence against known persons, especially intimates.
To find the stories that illustrate this theme of reactive violence in (primarily) antisocial persons, I have had to rely mostly on articles in newspapers and magazines. The short-tempered men and women depicted here are not evil enough long enough to have stimulated some true-crime author to delve deeply into their lives and make a book out of their nefarious exploits. Besides, the very impulsive nature of the violence in these cases usually coincided with carelessness, one might even say sloppiness, in any attempt at concealment. Either that, or the perpetrator simply made no attempt at concealment. Most were easily caught, so that there was little in the way of the laborious and ingenious detective work that lends itself to an absorbing book-length account, even if the crime itself was not so spectacular. Instead, these stories easily made the front pages of the tabloids, held the public's attention for three or four days, and then vanished from the press altogether, to be replaced by a still fresher horror story from the day before. As we would expect, the driving forces behind reactive violence are emotions carrying a short fuse: passion and hatred. Translated into the language of the Seven Deadly Sins, this means Lust and Anger. Pride and Envy can sometimes ignite anger intense enough to set off a violent impulse. In crimes of passion, Greed will only rarely be a motive.
There was an incident in March of 2008 where radical environmentalists calling themselves ELF (for Earth Liberation Front) torched three homes, burning them to the ground. Each home was valued at about two million dollars. Supposedly the homes were not sufficiently "green" (that is, environmentally friendly). Whether or not the radicals were aware of it, all of the newly constructed homes were built with all manner of heatconserving and other environmentally respectful devices. As a psychiatrist, I cannot help thinking that the "green" problem here was being green with envy. If we could tap the innermost layers of these selfrighteous torchbearers, I have a hunch that their ecoterrorism was covering up a secret desire to live in such beautiful (and environmentally friendly!) houses themselves. Luckily, the homes were not even occupied and no one was hurt, so the crime stopped short of being called "evil"; merely, "outrageous."3
In the next section I will give examples covering a broad range of impulsive/reactive crimes of violence. Because, as noted earlier, the material is derived more from the media than from full-length biographies, less is known about the early lives of the participants in these actions. Most appear not to have had previous encounters with the law. For these reasons it is not easy to assign them confidently to one or another category in the Gradations of Evil scale. The categories that seem relevant to the majority of these examples are 6 (impetuous hotheaded murderers, yet without marked psychopathic traits) through 10 (killers of people "in the way"; marked egocentricity). The adjectives evil, depraved, heinous, and monstrous were used by many of the journalists and reporters whose accounts I relied on for my information. Since a numerical grading is less reliable for these examples, it seemed more useful to present them alphabetically according to motive or type of crime.
ENVY
There are not so many examples of spur-of-the-moment murders prompted
by envy, but one that stands out in my experience is that of a secretary in London who killed her employer. The secretary had emigrated from Canada to accept the position of administrative assistant. Cecile, a woman of no mean attractiveness herself, was thirty-three at the time and was considered "bewitching" by the reports, and able to "wrap men around her little finger." She was prettier than her employer, a woman in the banking industry who was seven years younger. But her advantages did not extend beyond her looks, for she had come from humble circumstances and was working for a wage she regarded as meager, whereas her employer had gone to the best schools, came from a prestigious family, and now had a very lucrative position. We know mostly Cecile's side of the story, but she is said to have been filled with "hatred and envy" toward the younger woman, her boss. The final confrontation, in the spring of 2003, was apparently sparked by a disagreement about her salary. Cecile felt she deserved a substantial raise; her boss firmly refused. Cecile then grabbed a heavy brass paperweight and bludgeoned her boss to death, fracturing her skull in several places. The younger woman had some broken fingers at autopsy, which were believed to be defensive wounds from trying to fend off the blows. Even the pathologist was moved to comment that the wounds were "monstrous." The large number of fracture sites, representing a kind of "overkill," suggests an attack precipitated by rage. The rage factor raised the question of possible "diminished responsibility" or "temporary insanity." By the time of her trial, however, Cecile was described as "ice cold" and in full possession of her senses. The absence of any previous brushes with the law, let alone outbursts of violence, was a mitigating circumstance.
Cecile's defense attorney succeeded in winning a reduction of the sentence to manslaughter partly because of her "clean record" in the past and also on the basis of "irresistible impulse." This type of defense is similar to that in certain US states in which the sentence falls short of an outright insanity plea and relies instead on an argument for "diminished responsibility" with the presumption that the impulse was impossible to control. In a famous 1994 case, Lorena Bobbitt was found not guilty after her defense attorney argued it was an irresistible impulse that led her, in June of 1993, to cut off her husband's penis. Lorena was able to marshal evidence that her husband had been unfaithful, as well as being physically, sexually, and emotionally abusive toward her, which meant that her violence had followed great provocation.4 There was no indication Cecile had been so provoked, which made her a less sympathetic figure at trial. Granted that the attack was particularly brutal, the notoriety of the case and the readiness of the press to use the term evil (depraved, monstrous, savage) may have reflected in part the social prominence of the victim. Cecile belongs in Category 8 on the scale, showing "smoldering rage but without psychopathic personality."
FAMILICIDE
The murder of an entire family is more often a crime of impulse than of long premeditation; the motive will likely be a smoldering anger at one key member of the family that ignites into violence over some "last straw." Sometimes, the motive is to protect the perpetrator from some deep humiliation, such as the exposure of an embarrassing secret. The case of Eugene Simmons is an example. Simmons was a marine sergeant who killed twelve family members when the news surfaced of his having sired a child by his own daughter.' This puts Simmons in the category of 10 on the Gradations of Evil scale.
Rarer still is the motive of greed in a familial crime of passion, as in the case of Jeremy Bamber, the adopted son of a wealthy British family, who hoped to be the sole remaining legatee.' A more typical case is that of Brian Britton-an adolescent of sixteen, who in 1989 killed his parents and younger brother in upstate New York. The inciting incident seemed to have been a quarrel over his schoolwork. Brian had never been in trouble with the law, though he did have a reputation at school for his obsession with guns and death. He had written an essay about his summer vacation, mentioning that he shot a bird out of a tree and ran his bicycle over a cat. His girlfriend insisted he was a "nonviolent kid and didn't really like guns," 7 but others remembered him differently. At one point, his parents had taken him to a psychologist. His father used to come home for lunch to make sure nothing was wrong with "Rambo"-the name Brian took for himself after watching Sylvester Stallone in the movie of that name, where Stallone played the part of a gun-toting tough guy.
An extraordinary, if not unique, case in the annals of familicide is that of Jean-Claude Romand. The only child of a couple from the Lyon area in France, Jean-Claude took great pains to conceal any bad news from his emotionally fragile mother. If he did poorly on an exam, he lied and said he did well. Somehow he got into medical school, but kept failing the third-year exam for ten years in a row, all the while making up fantastic excuses to the school authorities (that he had cancer, for example) and never actually finishing. He then lied to his parents, saying he had gotten his MD and now had a post across the border in Geneva with the World Health Organization. This was Act One in the bizarre tragedy of Romand's life.
Act Two: Now married, he told his wife he had a "top secret" job, such that she could not phone him at work. The money he brought home didn't come from work but rather from the money his parents gave him to invest for them-which he simply used for himself. He would drive off each morning as if to go to work, but he would park his car near the woods, read until the late afternoon, and then return at a time that would not arouse suspicion. By swindling money from his parents, inlaws, and friends to "invest," he kept the charade going for twenty years, with no one the wiser. All this came tumbling down when he began an affair with a woman in Paris. That set the stage for the third and final act.
Jean-Claude persuaded his mistress to let him take care of the proceeds from the sale of her property-money he instead used to buy a Mercedes and expensive baubles for her. When he eventually went broke, she worried something was amiss. She asked for her 900,000 francs, but he had gone through it all. He tried to strangle her, but she survived. Jean-Claude's wife began to realize he had lied to her about another matter. When his father-in-law demanded the money he had lent him, Jean-Claude pushed him down the stairs, killing him. He then got hold of his father's rifle and shot to death first his two children, then his wife, and finally his parents. After the impulse murders, the "malice afterthought" kicked in. He used accelerants to burn down his house to make it look as if his family had simply died in a fire. Curtain closed.
His imposture discovered, he made a half-hearted attempt at suicide by swallowing a few sleeping pills that were way beyond their shelf life. Sentenced to life without parole, Romand's earliest release date is 2015. Romand emerges as the consummate con artist, able to live the high life for two decades before his recklessness brought the curtain down. Never vicious until the end, he lived like the elegant jewel thieves in the movies of the 1930s: suave, charming, and, as far as his friends could tell, a good host, good husband, and good father.'
I put Romand's case under the heading of "familicide," but it was not easy to categorize, since it touched on so many other themes. The most appropriate category on the scale would be 10. From the Seven Deadly Sins alone, almost all were relevant: Pride (in maintaining a false front for twenty years), Envy (of those who really were capable of work), Greed (in swindling huge sums from everyone he knew), Sloth (never earning an honest franc in his life), Lust (the disastrous affair), and Anger (at the mis tress and father-in-law demanding their money back). From what I read, he was innocent of Gluttony.
FELONY MURDER
Though murder is already a felony, a murder committed during the act of another crime (usually robbery) is often called "felony murder." Murders of this sort may earn the maximum sentence, including the death penalty. In November of 2006 actress Adrienne Shelley was found hanging in her Greenwich Village office in New York. Her death looked at first like a suicide, though there seemed to be no reason at all for this successful actress and mother to take her own life. The true story came to light within a few days. A nineteen-year-old illegal immigrant, Dieg
o Pilco, had been renovating the apartment below Shelley's. He was making a lot of noise, which led to Shelley to come downstairs and complain. Pilco became panicky that she would complain to the police and he would be deported back to Ecuador.9 Hot-tempered and in a fury he strangled Shelley and then staged the crime to make her death appear to be a suicide, hanging her body from a shower curtain rod. He confessed after police found Pilco's footprint in the victim's bathtub. The murder was clearly not premeditated: he never knew the woman existed until she came down to complain about the noise. But that act led to a spur-of-themoment murder, followed by staging, as an afterthought. The murder became "high profile" because of the victim's fame, which in turn gave the murder an extra measure of shock, a greater appearance of evil. The appropriate category on the scale is 6.
HATE CRIME
The exclamation "evil!" will most readily be pronounced when the violence done to a celebrity or other highly respected figure10 is done by a similarly well-known figure." It is also used when there are many victims (as in the case of mass murder or serial homicide), or when the violence is extremely brutal, especially if the victim is a woman or a child. Hate crimes are similarly repugnant, perhaps because of the wide gulf that separates the malevolence of the perpetrator from the innocence of the victim, not to mention the total violation of our most cherished values of fairness and equality. Impulse is seldom a part of hate crimes, since premeditation and considerable planning are usually preludes to the final act. But occasionally a bigot with plenty of hatred built up over a long time hasn't really contemplated actual violence, until, that is, he (it is always a "he") is faced with an unanticipated event, at which point he swings into action.