The Anatomy of Evil

by Michael H. Stone

  RAGE IN THE MENTALLY ILL

  In people with severe mental illness-schizophrenia or mania, for example-outbursts of violence are more apt to be of the impulsive rather than of the planned type. Because they sometimes suffer from bizarre delusions, schizophrenic persons in particular will on occasion commit acts of a shocking and repellent nature-acts that have a surreal quality, something beyond one's imagination and beyond what one has ever heard of before. This is where the idea of "evil" comes into the picture-until, that is, the public is made aware that the person in question is psychotic (the word crazy will more often be used) and for that reason not responsible for what was done. We have already discussed a few cases of this sort. Here is another example of an impulsive murder, with bizarre characteristics, committed by a mentally ill man.

  In 1996 Kenneth Lee Pierrot Jr. of Beaumont, Texas, bludgeoned to death his sister, who was confined to a wheelchair because of cerebral palsy. He was then sent to a forensic hospital after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. In addition he had been smoking marijuana that had been laced with embalming fluid. He was released four months later, having been treated with appropriate medications to the point where he was no longer in the grips of psychotic thinking. Unfortunately, he was not steadfast about taking his medication, and during a period when he was not on his medication, he killed the six-year-old son of his girlfriend. In April of 2004 he smothered the boy and stuffed his body in an oven. In his haste, he left the oven off, so there were no signs of burning. When caught shortly thereafter, Pierrot yelled at the police that he was "sanctified by the blood of Jesus Christ" and was noted to have a "glaze in his eyes and a smile on his face."31 Pertinent to the standpoint of motive was the fact that Pierrot was the biological father of a son by his girlfriend and was angry at the attention she gave to her older son by another man. The comparison will not be lost on the reader between the "daddy" lion's elimination of cubs sired by a previous male lion and Pierrot's murder of his girlfriend's son by a previous partner. Cases of this sort strain the legal system to the maximum: the prosecution argued (correctly) that Pierrot knew what he was doing and knew it was wrong. He killed the boy when everyone was asleep and then in the "afterthought" of the impulsive murder, fled the scene. Therefore he was not legally insane. Yet he was a chronically schizophrenic man who had been "crazy" (1) to suppose that all his girlfriend's attention should be devoted to their son only, and none to her other son, and (2) to think that the older boy deserved to die. The real issue was not whether he belonged in prison (where he was sentenced to sixty years) or in a forensic hospital, but that his level of dangerousness (previous murder, chronic psychosis, noncompliance with treatment) was so high that he needed to be kept in one or the other type of facility for a very long time; which type really wouldn't make much difference.

  RAMPAGE

  The characteristics of a rampage are violence, frenzy, recklessness, and destructiveness. When such a scenario involves victims, the word is reserved for cases in which several people are hurt or killed, rather than just one. Overturning and setting fire to a dozen cars during a riot (as happened in Paris when two boys fleeing the police were electrocuted after falling on a subway rail in 2005) would be considered a rampage, but the public would not be likely to call that evil, since no people were killed in the ensuing violence.

  A rampage where people were targeted occurred in New York in 2006, when a homeless man, Kenny Alexis, paranoid and high on drugs, went on a crime spree, stabbing four people: two men and two women tourists who refused his sexual advances (and whom he called "whores"). The police mentioned "there is a possibility of him being deranged."32 There was a record of a psychiatric hospitalization at Bridgewater in Boston a few months earlier, after he had committed several assaults. The psychiatrists there had declared him "competent to stand trial," which merely means he was rational enough to be able to cooperate with his attorney. He was mentally ill, but how much his illness had to do with drug abuse and how much with his general mental state independent of any drugs is unclear. The nature and number of the stabbings Alexis had committed in New York were just the kind that inspires headlines with the word evil: in his case: "His Face Was Evil."33 His were impulsive acts of violence with neither premeditation nor attempt to cover up his traces afterward. Because of his severe limitations in function and his mental illness (whether primary or aggravated by drug abuse), his place on the Gradations scale falls in Category 13: Inadequate, rageful psychopaths, some committing murder.

  REJECTED LOVER

  One of the shortest time spans between an anger-inducing event and a retaliatory murder was that of the Happy Land Nightclub massacre that occurred on March 25, 1990-the day of the Honduran equivalent of Mardi Gras. Julio Gonzalez, a thirty-seven-year-old Cuban immigrant and warehouse worker, formerly an army deserter and ex-convict, had been rejected earlier that evening, this time once and for all, by his girlfriend of six years, Lydia Feliciano. Lydia was a hatcheck girl at the Happy Land, a club in the Bronx filled on that evening mostly with Honduran immigrants. To make matters worse, Julio had just been fired from his job and was now broke. Gonzalez, fueled on alcohol and machismo, then went out and bought-for one dollar-a gallon of gasoline, poured it on the only staircase (all other exits being illegally blocked to prevent freeloaders from gaining access), and lit a match. In the ensuing inferno eighty-seven people died-pretty much everyone who'd been in the dance club-except his main target, Lydia Feliciano. She knew of a seldom-used door and managed to escape, along with a few other patrons.

  The firefighters who came upon the scene minutes later-but already too late-felt as though they had stumbled upon a Nazi gas chamber. Standing across the street from the holocaust was Gonzalez himself, watching until the firefighters arrived. Apprehended half a day later, Gonzalez, still smelling of gasoline from his soaked clothes, told the police, "[I]t looks like the devil got into me." The evil of his act, depicted in the tabloid headlines as "Date with the Devil" and "The Monster,"34 was due mainly to the huge number of victims. Mercifully, most died fairly quickly of smoke inhalation. It was the worst fire in New York since the famous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that occurred seventy-nine years before, on the same day. Though Gonzalez walked back to his apartment after the fire, he made no effort to hide from the authorities and was remorseful when confronted-even more so as he imagined at first that he had killed Lydia. At his trial the next year Gonzalez was sentenced to 174 years in prison-a year for each victim and a year for depraved indifference toward each victim.35 Gonzalez's crime is consistent with Category 15 on the Gradations scale: spree or multiple murder. This was mass murder, since the eighty-seven victims all died within minutes of one another during the same incident.

  REJECTION OF FATHERHOOD

  In many of the cases where a pregnant woman is murdered by the father of her child, the public's first guess is that the man's anger was directed primarily at the woman. This is seldom the correct guess. The underlying motive will usually turn out to be the man's dread over accepting the responsibility of fatherhood. This type of reaction is quite unacceptable to the man's ego, so he will offer some less embarrassing excuse ("I just know it wasn't my kid"; "I saw the bitch looking at another guy") or, if the man is also psychotic, he will claim that the devil made him do it or that a "voice" commanded him, and so on. Those "rationales" are also less embarrassing. How rare it is to hear a man openly acknowledge and say with words of contempt that he wanted that child dead. This is what makes the case of Brian Stewart so extraordinary. In February of 1992 he committed an act that defies belief and invoked the judgment of "evil" from every source. What he did on that occasion was the kind of act that moves ordinary people to say "I couldn't think of something like that in my wildest dreams" and "Even if I could imagine such a thing, I wouldn't do it to my worst enemy." Stewart's act of evil was to inject blood positive for the HIV virus-not into his worst enemy-but into his five-year-old son.

  To the extent that some planni
ng was necessary, his was not a purely impulsive act, but by virtue of his being a hospital technician who gave injections (fancy title: phlebotomist) and who worked on a unit with many HIV patients, the opportunity and means were readily at hand. The mother of the boy had met Stewart in 1990 and gave birth to their son in 1991. She ended the relationship the next year and later sued for child support. He attempted to evade this obligation, claiming the boy "wasn't his." But paternity was proven in 1997, by which time the boy had become gravely ill with constant and serious illnesses, whose origin was mysterious. Stewart told the mother, "You won't need to look me up for child support, anyway, because your (notice: not "our") son's not going to live that long."36 He further threatened her that he could have her "taken care of' and that no one would ever be able to trace it back to him. The court ordered him to pay $267 a month. Meanwhile, the boy was discovered first to be HIV-positive and eventually to suffer from fullblown AIDS. Stewart was imprisoned for "first-degree assault" that could be upgraded to murder if and when the child dies. At trial, prosecutor Ross Buehler spoke of Stewart as a "monster," adding that "[i]n the mind of an evil genius, HIV was the perfect disease to inject a death sentence into the child's veins."37 In a related article on evil, psychologist Katherine Ramsland mentioned that the prosecution chose the assault charge "because it carries a penalty of up to life in prison, [whereas] attempted murder is limited in Missouri to 15 years.38 The boy, now in his early teens, is too weak for a full school day or ordinary play and has nightmares that one day his father will get out of prison and kill his entire family. As a ruthlessly self-centered psychopathic schemer, Stewart belongs Category 14 on the scale.

  RELIGIOUS ZEAL

  We would like to think that religiously devout people, the truly Godfearing sort, would be at the furthest remove from evil. Then we rapidly make our descent from the ideal to the real and remember Pascal's cautionary note: "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."39 There is a cultural wrinkle here: certain practices that are sanctioned in one culture may easily strike those in other cultures as barbaric. I would like to think that the incident I am about to describe would be regarded, if not as evil, at least as repugnant -irrespective of culture. Alas, this is not the case.

  On the night of November 6, 1989, listening devices that had been planted earlier by the FBI on the phone of Zein Isa, a St. Louis man who emigrated to the United States from Palestine, inadvertently picked up a family conversation. The three voices were those of Zein, his wife, and their sixteen-year-old daughter, Tina. Her name in itself is of interest. Her original name was Palestina, signifying their Muslim homeland. She Americanized it to Tina, which most would take as short for Christina, signifying perhaps a different religious background. That was already part of the problem: Tina was adopting different ways from those of her father. Worse yet, she was dating a non-Muslim; in fact, an African American boy, which, because of the father's prejudices, offended him in two ways instead of just one. In his interpretation of his culture, this called for an "honor killing," lest the girl disgrace the family by dating a man objectionable to the father. Never mind that he had married for the second time to a Christian woman from Brazil. Tina's defiance signed her death warrant, as we learn from the taped conversation:

  Zein: Here, listen, my dear daughter, do you know that this is the last day? Tonight you are going to die.

  Maria (the mother, after hearing Tina's shrieks, and holding the girl down): Keep still!

  Tina: Mother, please help me!

  Maria: Huh? What do you mean?

  Tina: Help! Help!

  Maria: Are you going to listen?

  Tina: Yes! Yes! Yes! I am! (coughing) No, please!

  Zein: Die! Die quickly! Die quickly!

  Tina: (moaning)

  Zein: Quiet, little one! Die my daughter! Die!41

  Zein stabbed his daughter six times with a boning knife, piercing heart, lung, and liver, killing her. This is what the FBI heard on their surveillance tapes, made because of Zein's participation in the terrorist Abu Nidal group. The autopsy on Tina was performed by Dr. Phillip Burch, who commented, "This was very evil justice."41 Sgt. Guzy of the homicide squad had said earlier, "Zein was an evil son of a bitch." Assistant prosecutor Bob Craddick said, "It's worse than any movie, any film, anything I thought that I would ever hear in my life."42 The Missouri court sentenced both Zein and Maria to death. Zein died of complications of diabetes in prison; Maria's sentence was altered to life without parole. Honor killings in radical Islam do occur. They are hopefully rare, but their numbers are not easily determined, since "killing your child because he or she is disrespectful is not open for discussion in any country."43 Had the honor killing taken place in Zein's native country, nothing would have been said. But he was acculturated enough to realize that it would not go down well in America. So he and Maria pretended that their rebellious teenager had "attacked" them and that they had killed her in self-defense. It was this lie, easily shown in the court for what it was, that particularly enraged the jury, ensuring that they would hand down the maximum sentence.44

  REVENGE

  The theme of revenge runs through many of the accounts of impulsive violence we have touched on in this chapter. The case of Nathaniel Gale is one among hundreds we could have chosen to illustrate this topic. Gale's thirst for revenge grew out of his belief-an unrealistic, probably outright delusional belief-that a famous guitarist, along with the heavy metal band Pantera of which he was a member, had been trying to steal Gale's identity and the lyrics he had supposedly composed. For a long time Gale had been Pantera's number-one fan. At some point he snapped, and in December of 2004 Gale leaped onto the Columbus, Ohio, stage where Pantera had been performing, and shot to death guitarist Darrell "Dimebag" Abbott and three others, before Gale himself was killed by the police. Jeramie Brey, a former friend of Gale's, told the authorities that Gale seemed to have copied his lyrics from Pantera and then somehow imagined that he was the original author. At first he threatened to sue the band, but then he impulsively chose that evening to kill "Dimebag" and whoever was nearby. Not much is known about Gale, but his motive appears to have been revenge for what he considered "intellectual property theft." People described him as a tall and imposing "keep-to-yourself" type of person41 who had become increasingly argumentative and paranoid. Andy Warhol once quipped that people will do anything for that "fifteen minutes of fame." That was true of another paranoid loner, Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon-a man much more famous than "Dimebag," and whose murder did earn fifteen minutes of fame for Chapman, and then some. But fame was not Gale's ambition. Still, the evil exhibited in the Pantera case related more to the murder of a celebrity-plus the number of "collateral" victims-than to with the way in which the victims were killed .41

  SCHOOL SHOOTING

  Though mercifully rare, school shootings by adolescent students gain enormous attention both because of the number of fatalities and because of the nature of the crime: children shooting to death other children, usually their own classmates. Sometimes teachers are targeted as well. These two aspects account for the public's reaction of horror and the response of "evil." This was very much the case in the massacre in April of 1999 at Columbine High School near Denver in Colorado, perpetrated by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Before committing suicide, the two teenagers killed twelve students and one teacher, wounding twentyone others. Although Eric Harris, the dominant figure in the Columbine massacre, was considered a psychopath, most school shooters are not. Instead, they are depressed young persons (like Klebold) or, more commonly, disgruntled students who are "loners," "misfits," or simply kids who don't fit in with the majority of students more adept at making friends. Some school shooters felt bullied and rejected by their classmates, either because they were indeed loners and misfits or because of other reasons: being part of a minority, being rude, or gay, or short, or obese, or ugly, or dumb, or awkward, or dishonest, or whatever else gets one margi
nalized by adolescents clamoring for acceptance by the respected "in-group." School shooters are in many ways like younger versions of adult mass murderers: paranoid, grudge-holding, alienated individuals who, before their one impulsive and final burst into violence, usually haven't had prior run-ins with the law.

  This was certainly the case with Robert Steinhauser, the nineteen-yearold school shooter in Germany who put Erfurt on the map a second time in history. Erfurt, located just east of Germany's geographical center, has a more treasured native son: Johann Sebastian Bach, whose father, violinist Johann Ambrosius Bach, and grandfather, court musician Christoph Bach, were both born in Erfurt. Like the other school shooters, Steinhauser was a loner and a misfit, but he had several other strikes against him as well. He was considered lazy and slovenly, physically and socially awkward, described by those who knew him as "notably un-noteworthy." 47 He was caught cheating and forging excuse notes, and then got expelled before his final exams. He pretended to go to school so his parents would be none the wiser. This was shortly before that day in April, when, having legally acquired a Glock- 17 pistol, he entered the school and singlehandedly shot to death seventeen people: thirteen teachers (his main target), one administrator, two students, and a policeman-before killing himself. As with their older counterparts, we know little about these young mass murderers because they usually die by their own hand or by police action. There is no court trial and little probing into their family life, mental health records, or situation at birth. The public's reaction of "evil" softens quickly in many instances because the killers are indeed children, sometimes mistreated or neglected children whom we do not hold to the same standard as we do the mass murderers who have reached adulthood. (As we shall explore in a later chapter, the brain in adolescence is still immature in many important ways; self-control is less efficient-and these are mitigating circumstances.)