The Anatomy of Evil

by Michael H. Stone

  Such appears to be the case with white supremacist Benjamin Smith,12 whose rampage against Jews, blacks, Asians, gays, and other targets led to the murder of two and the wounding of a dozen others during the first days of July 1999-just two months after the Columbine, Colorado, school massacre.13 Smith, who changed his name from Benjamin to August so as not to sound too "Jewish," was a follower of Matthew Hale, founder of the white supremacist hate group the World Church of the Creator. Hale allegedly preached nonviolence, though his incendiary "sermons" could easily serve as springboards to violence. But Smith, who came from a privileged (and nonabusive) background, had problems that preexisted his exposure to Matthew Hale. He got into trouble right away in college-for voyeurism and pot smoking; morbidly jealous of his girlfriend, he struck her and ended up with a restraining order against him. Smith finally quit college in January 1999, just as the administration was about to dismiss him. Somehow he got hold of a gun (because of the restraining order, he was unable to acquire one legally), but at first had no definite intention of shooting any "mud people"-the phrase of choice for the despicable "others," according to Hale and his followers. The stimulus for Smith's impulsive murders was the denial on July 2, 1999, of the Illinois State Bar Association to grant his hero, Hale, a law license on the grounds of moral deficiency.14 Smith's rampage began that very day, with his shooting several Orthodox Jews (who survived), a black basketball coach (who died), and an Asian man (who survived). The next day he shot at several black people and a Chinese man. Then on July 4 he killed a Korean graduate student, finally putting his pistol under his chin and killing himself.

  Mass murderers are a mysterious lot-all the more so in Smith's case, since, as far as we can tell, he came from a good family. Their usual fate is suicide just before capture or to be shot during a showdown with the police. Almost all have a paranoid personality, but how much of that is due to heredity and how much to adverse circumstances in early life can rarely be assessed properly. Smith's category on the scale is 13.

  KIDNAP

  The majority of kidnappings are not impulsive at all: the motive is greed, and the act is planned long in advance. Less common is kidnapping for sexual purposes, for example, abducting a child who may be raped and then murdered or in some cases kept alive as an unwilling sex mate for periods stretching up to a decade or more." This latter variety always involves careful planning. Occasionally one hears of a lonely, childless woman snatching an infant from its pram outside a shopping mall or some other public place. This may at first seem impulsive, but she has likely thought for some time about abducting another woman's child and moves quickly into action when she finds a baby left briefly unattended. All these varieties of kidnapping are among the most detested of crimes, for which reason "kidnap" (the shorter name given to the crime in legal circles) shares with premeditated murder and treason top billing as a death penalty case wherever capital punishment is still enforced. These crimes smack of evil, even when they do not end in death.

  A more "understandable" motive for kidnap (as I shall refer to it) is seen now and again in bitter custody cases, where one parent violates the custody agreement and takes a child away from the custodial parent. It is rare for the child to be killed in these situations. The abducting parent may claim that the child is being "rescued" from an unfavorable environment, though less than honorable motives are often at play-such as the wish to avoid child-support payments. Sheer spite often plays an important role as well. The needle on the evil meter doesn't swing so far in these cases, since the court can usually be relied upon to restore the child to the proper home and parent.

  There are rare instances where kidnap in a custody battle reaches mythic proportions. Even in Greek mythology, when Hades kidnapped Demeter's beautiful daughter, Persephone, she was at least not his daughter: his aim was to marry her. But when in 1976 Eric Douglas Nielsen kidnapped his twenty-one-month-old daughter, Genevieve-on Mother's Day-he promptly disappeared with her the day before the court was to make the mother's custodianship official.'6 The mother, Laura Gooder, was not to learn of her daughter's whereabouts until Mother's Day twenty-nine years later. We don't know what soured the relationship between these high school sweethearts who had married in 1970. We do know that Laura endured incalculable suffering when her daughter and ex-husband vanished. The kidnap appeared at first to be opportunistic and impulsive: Nielsen took Genevieve on what was supposed to be an overnight visit. But he then fled halfway across the country, changed his name-and his daughter's-and avoided using his Social Security number. He was thought to have had the help of his family in California; it is hard to imagine how he could have evaded detection all those years without assistance from someone.

  Thanks to dogged detective work, Genevieve was finally located in Arizona, where her father was in prison on unrelated charges. Nielsen, to compound the evil of the decades-long disappearance, had told Genevieve that her mother had "died in a car accident," so she had no idea her mother was still alive. The case is a monument to selfishness: Nielsen was willing to deny a mother her infant child and to deny the child her mother. As to the crime of kidnap, the story is unique-the kind books are written about. But, to safeguard Genevieve's psychological well-being, no book should ever be written about her story, as she was already quite traumatized to discover she was not who she thought she was; indeed, that nothing about her life was as she thought it was, that her father was a liar and a criminal, and that her identity must now undergo a complete overhaul. It is difficult to find the appropriate place for this father in the Gradations scale, since it was developed primarily to deal with murder cases. But Category 14 is the most appropriate place for him: "ruthlessly self-centered psychopathic schemers," since he planned, for utterly selfish reasons, to take his child permanently away from her mother, at a time when she was still a baby and in great need of a mother's tender care.

  MARITAL CONFLICT

  Psychiatrists who study life events know that divorce and marital conflict rank near the top of all stressful situations, just below that of losing a child. Loss of a spouse or irresolvable marital conflict also create intense stress. The latter can be a breeding ground for violence, as every police officer knows when called upon to answer a 911 call about "domestic dispute." Furthermore, when violence breaks out, it is usually on impulse: a disagreement or a jealous accusation that leads to an argument, an argument that goes from words to lightning-fast action that is unplanned and unforeseen at the beginning. I include under this heading partners in an intimate relationship who are living together, whether married or not. The Australians have a nice term for nonmarried partners: "de facto"- meaning that the two are a couple in fact, though not in law (in other words, not "de jure"). Impulse murders in this group are seldom written up in books, because they do not elicit as much interest as do the more cunningly planned partner murders. This is especially so in cases where the murder is more "diabolical," more "evil" because, say, a hit man is hired or there is staging or some other form of pretended innocence by a partner who is "too clever by half' (and is ultimately caught anyway).

  The New York City case of Herbert and Barbara Weinstein was clearly of the impulsive rather than the planned variety. In January of 1991 Barbara was found dead on the sidewalk by their posh East Side apartment-an apparent suicide. Herbert was sixty-five at the time, his wife, fifty-six.17 This was a second marriage for both, and by all appearances, a happy one. No one who knew them saw any signs of discord, much less fighting. They were comfortably off, even with Herbert's love of gambling, which he was able to keep under control. There seemed to be no reason why Barbara would commit suicide. The autopsy confirmed what the police had suspected: she had been strangled first and was then thrown out the window of their twelfth-story apartment in her husband's effort to make the murder-to which he quickly confessed-look like suicide. Defenestration18 to disguise murder is rare enough, but there was yet another intriguing aspect to the case. Perhaps because of his age and the "out-of-character" qualit
y of the murder, Mr. Weinstein, at the advice of his defense attorneys, underwent brain examination by PETscan (positron emission tomography). The scan showed a large brain cyst that encroached on the front and middle (fronto-temporal) sections of his brain on the left side. I will have more to say about the implications of such an abnormality in the section on neuroscience, but suffice it to say at this point that the damage in that area was believed capable of impairing his function, not to the level of legal insanity (not knowing right from wrong), but to the level of being less able to think properly and less able to retain self-control when irritated. A brain abnormality in that area likely shortened his fuse, which may even have remained otherwise unlit. This was a pretty controversial matter when the case was argued in 1991; the judge allowed the defense team to tell the jury about the cyst, but he could not tell them that it was associated with the violence. The prosecution, worried that the jury-even with that little knowledge-would not convict for murder, opted for a plea bargain down to manslaughter.19 As for what triggered the murder in the first place, this remains a mystery. Because Mr. Weinstein was not psychopathic, his action would correspond most closely to Category 7 on the Gradations scale, granted that his brain abnormality would be a mitigating factor.

  The case of Norman Harrell in Washington, DC, also arose out of marital conflict or, rather, conflict between a woman and her former "de facto" partner. The woman, Diane Hawkins, forty-two at the time of her death, was considered sweet and loving by all who knew her. She had six children: three by her first de facto, and one each by three other men, including Harrell's son, Rasheen. A truck driver with a steady job, Norman Harrell had a checkered past: two arrests for armed robbery in his youth and a rape charge that was later dropped. He was pathologically jealous, and as a man of six feet five (196 cm), he was an imposing and generally intimidating figure. Several of the women he had been with and who had borne his children had left him because of his physical abusiveness. He seemed allergic to the notion of child support, and when one of the women demanded a small sum for their daughter, she ultimately had to take him to court to have his wages garnished. A few years later, Diane found herself in the same situation. In May of 1993, the day before she was scheduled to take Harrell to court where he would be forced to make child support payments, he stopped by her house. A skilled hunter and a man familiar with knives (which he carried with him at all times), Harrell in a fit of rage stabbed Diane to death and then trussed her like a deer eviscerating her and carving the heart out of her chest cavity. One of Diane's daughters, twelve-year-old Katrina, was upstairs and aware of all the commotion in the living room. Harrell went up to the girl's room and killed her in the same fashion, later tossing her heart somewhere in the woods (it was never located). Though Harrell was immediately identified as the suspect, he denied any involvement. The prosecutor in the case, Kevil Flynn, became obsessed with the murders, in no small measure because of the horrifying way Harrell vented his rage and hatred.20 DNA and blood-spatter analysis provided the proof that led to his conviction and a sixty-year sentence. Harrell professes innocence to this day. In his summary of the case, Flynn commented that "Norman Harrell didn't do these murders because he was evil; he was evil because he did them." Here Flynn wished to emphasize that Harrell was not "born" evil-no one isbut rather that Harrell became identified as someone whose actions were evil once the community became aware of their horrifying nature.21 The category for this crime is 16.

  PARENTAL CRUELTY

  Many of the parental cruelty cases arise in homes where there is a stepparent. We know from studies of child murder that the risk of a child dying at the hands of a stepparent is many times higher than the risk of murder by a biological parent.22 Worse still is the situation where a woman has a child by a previous union and now lives with a boyfriend (in a relationship not likely to lead to marriage). The boyfriend's chief interest is in pursuing a sexual relationship with the woman. The child is all too often just a nuisance he has to put up with in order to secure the woman's sexual favors. In this situation, too many of us behave not so differently from other social species. In lion prides, for example, if a new male takes over a pride, he may kill the cubs that had been sired by his predecessor and create a new family of cubs by mating with the various lionesses.23 All the resulting cubs will then be his.24 This is Nature's way. Parents are less likely to harm offspring that carry their DNA than that of strangers. The fairy tales about the wicked stepmother were not written to malign women who took on that role; the stories reflect the unfortunate likelihood that a child will receive worse treatment from a mother (or father) who is not the birth parent.25 By the same token the risk for incest involving a female child is considerably greater (by a factor of 6 or 7)26 when the adult is the child's stepfather with no blood tie to the girl.

  It must be stressed that most couples who go through the steps of adopting a child have a sincere commitment to the welfare of that child and a strong predisposition to love the child as though it were their own biologically. But now and again there are exceptions where grievous harm is done to the foster or adopted child: harm that may be physical, sexual, psychological, or a combination of those. Here, under the heading of parental cruelty, we concentrate on cruelty meted out for some trivial failing or indiscretion on the child's part that would never result in such retaliation from a calmer parent. The methodically cruel parents who enslave or torture their children over prolonged periods without provocation will be discussed in a later chapter, dedicated to evil writ large.

  The Zeigler Case

  One of the more harrowing examples of impulsive parental cruelty is the case in Texas of a beautiful blonde toddler of two whose body washed ashore in Galveston Bay in late October of 2007. The little girl's body itself did not wash ashore as such; rather, it was the storage container in which her body had been placed that ended up on an uninhabited island within the bay. A fisherman chanced to find the bag-and the body within it; he then notified the authorities. The as yet unidentified body, bearing skull fractures in three places, was at first called "Baby Grace." A sketch was made of the girl, which was shown later to the paternal grandmother, Sheryl Sawyers, who lived in Ohio. She recognized the sketch as that of Riley Ann Sawyers, the girl her son, Robert Sawyers, had fathered two years before with Kimberly Trenor-then a girl of seventeen. After filing allegations of domestic violence against Robert, Kimberly, having gained custody, later moved with Riley Ann to Texas. Early in 2007, while still in Ohio, Kimberly had struck up an acquaintance with a twenty-four-year-old Texan, Royce Zeigler, whom she had met in cyberspace in an online game called World of Warcraft. He sent her expensive gifts while she was still living with Robert. It was on the strength of this budding relationship that Kim relocated to Texas, where in the late spring she married Royce, a technician in the oil industry. Come the summer of 2007 no one had seen Riley Ann; Kim told people, including her relatives, that a "social worker" had taken the girl, for reasons never specified, back to Ohio.

  The real story was quite different. Unaccustomed to the norms of fatherly behavior toward a girl of two, Zeigler brought to this new assignment a mindset more appropriate to that of a marine sergeant burdened with the task of whipping into shape a rebellious troop of raw recruits. He demanded that Riley Ann answer him with "Yes, Sir" and "No, Sir"; she was always to preface any request with "Please." But as a girl of two, rather than a man of two-and-twenty, Riley Ann's responses sometimes fell short of her stepfather's orders, on which occasions Zeigler insisted that Kimberly spank the girl with a belt. It appears that Riley Ann's behavior, even after these belt-reinforced lessons, improved only marginally. Zeigler then took matters into his own hands-literally-and set about teaching her a lesson she'd never forget. Or, as it turns out, never survive. We will not likely ever learn what childish peccadillo of Riley Ann's pushed Zeigler over the edge. But on July 24, 2007, he gave the girl what one journalist described as a "savage beating with a leather belt that left welts and bruises,"27 adding that
, "as can be expected from a little girl being beaten by an evil step-father, she cried and cried." That got Zeigler even more furious with the girl. Things escalated. He then filled a tub with water and-perhaps with the mother's participationheld Riley Ann's head under the water until she nearly lost consciousness, then let her up briefly for air and dunked her again. When he finished "waterboarding" the girl, Zeigler lifted her up by the hair and threw her across the room. Riley Ann's head hit hard against the tile floor, fracturing her skull and killing her. Fury-driven reaction-the impulsive torture and murder of a two-year-old girl-now gave way to planned action. Realizing that the old biblical shibboleth "Spare the rod and spoil the child 721 has its limits, and that they had rather exceeded those limits, the two now went to the local Wal-Mart to purchase a plastic tote bag. Placing the girl's body in the tote bag, they then stored it in a shed in their backyard-for two months. It was during this time, in the fall of 2007, that Riley Ann's disappearance attracted attention. At the end of that two-month period, the couple dumped the bag-and its contentsinto Galveston Bay, where it was found on October 29. The rest, as they say, is history.

  At the time of the discovery of Riley Ann, Zeigler, with a belated chivalry, attempted suicide, stating that "my wife is innocent of the sins that I committed."29 As is customary in these cases, his attorney put the blame on Kimberly; her attorney, on Royce. The matter is purely academic, since both mother and stepfather were complicitous in the girl's death. Both face stiff sentences in a Texas court. Once these sentences begin, they will have a long time in which to contemplate how the moment of blind rage that took the life of Riley Ann caused them to throw away the entire span of their remaining years: about fifty in Royce's case; sixty, in Kimberly's .30 To the extent that Riley Ann was a "nuisance" to Zeigler-someone "in the way" of his life-Zeigler's crime would ordinarily fall under Category 10, though we don't know whether he had ever shown such cruelty in the past. But the element of torture actually makes Category 18 more appropriate.