The Anatomy of Evil

by Michael H. Stone

  STALKING

  The obsessive, often secretive, pursuit of another person-an act we place under the heading of "stalking"-usually refers to people who are tied by some love relationship, whether real or imaginary, to the object of their longing. The term is borrowed from the habit of certain animals that sneak up quietly on their intended targets-as when a cat crawls slowly and silently toward its prey. The common motives behind stalking are thwarted or unobtainable love. There are other motives, such as anger at a boss after having been fired or the quest for sexual domination of a stranger, as in the case of a predatory "serial killer." (We will have occasion to look into those varieties in later chapters .)41

  Once stalking is set in motion, there is considerable intention and planning. But the stage for this activity may be set and the impulse unleashed in an instant, following rejection in a love affair or the sudden collapse of a marriage. This is especially true when the stalker is of a possessive and morbidly jealous nature, convinced that the love object is "the only person in the world who matters" to him. In this case there is a lifeor-death quality to the relationship: the stalker must have that person back-or else! It is easy to see how this morbid preoccupation can lead to the persecution of the former loved one or spouse; it may be a short step from persecution-to murder. Psychopathy is the order of the day in serial killers, but in the garden-variety thwarted lover, psychopathy is not part of the picture. Instead there are feelings of insecurity, selfcenteredness, entitlement-the qualities, in a word, of the sore loser.

  Pernell Jefferson fits the description of the rejected-lover-turnedstalker. Though he was physically strong and outstanding at sports, he abused anabolic steroids in his late teens to make himself even stronger. Already of a demanding, bossy, and controlling disposition, he was morbidly jealous; he actually fainted when his first major girlfriend left him. He had gotten her pregnant and they had a son, Pernell Jr., in 1982.49 As with many athletes who abuse steroids, Jefferson became aggressive and assaultive. He acted violently toward his next two girlfriends, both of whom left him because of his anger and possessiveness. The second woman he later stalked, terrorized, abducted, and raped.

  In 1984 he was about to try out for a position on a professional football team but was warned against steroid use. Stopping the drug abruptly, he fell into a depression and threw away his chance to be on the team. He took up with another woman, toward whom he was even more controlling and abusive than he had been with the others. She, too, left him and began seeing another man. Telling her, "If I can't have you, nobody's going to," Jefferson stalked her and found out wherever she was.

  In 1989 he abducted her and shot her to death, and then buried her body with the help of one of his friends. Later the friend had a pang of conscience and told the police. Her body was located but could be identified only by forensic examination of tooth fragments. Although he was sadistically controlling of his girlfriends, Pernell was not psychopathic. He did not, for instance, have the extreme narcissistic traits of remorselessness, callousness, deceitfulness, and so on, that are the hallmark of psychopathy. Pernell's condition falls more within the realm of obsessive love.50 Given a life sentence when eventually convicted, he became a model prisoner once the steroids were out of his system. Later on, he taught the other prisoners a course on how better to manage anger and aggression. The impulsive aggression and the evil acts of his late twenties were now behind him. Eligible for parole in 2011, it remains to be seen whether he will be able to put these tendencies behind him permanently-especially his jealousy and his overreaction to being rejected. Pernell's crime fits best in the Gradations scale at Category 7: highly narcissistic persons who murdered loved ones.

  THEFT OF FETUS

  There is something about the murder of a near-term pregnant woman, followed by the theft of her fetus, that raises the specter of evil more assuredly than most other crimes. The reasons are obvious. This is one of the few crimes committed exclusively by women, who are ordinarily much less prone to violence than men are. It is therefore all the more shocking when they do resort to violence. Then there is the murder of a pregnant woman, whose life and hopes are held sacred by people the world over. And finally, the kidnap-and since death is often the resultthe murder of a baby, whose life and hopes are held equally sacred.

  I have been able to locate nine such cases, all involving American women-five approaching menopause, and four of those coming from hamlets of very small population. The earliest case was in 1987: Darci Pierce, the youngest (age twenty) and the only one with distinct psychopathic features.51 Darci had conned her boyfriend into marrying her by claiming she was pregnant. She then killed nine-months-pregnant Cindy Ray in a remote area near Albuquerque, slicing open her belly with a car key to extract the baby (who survived).

  Another woman, Michelle Bica,52 was pregnant at thirty-nine and in anticipation of the birth had decorated the baby's room, outfitting it with baby bottles and all the other paraphernalia for the newborn. But she miscarried. Announcing to her husband that she was pregnant again, she later presented him with a healthy baby boy in late September of 2000. Rather overweight anyway, she was easily able to fool her husband. There were two problems. She hadn't been pregnant this time, and she had killed a pregnant woman who lived a few blocks away-from whom she then removed the fetus. A week later it became clear to the police that Michelle had shot and killed the missing Theresa Andrews and that the baby had belonged to the Andrews couple. Michelle had buried Theresa in her garage. As she was about to be confronted, Michelle used the same gun to commit suicide. Oddly, her husband was a corrections officer. When evaluated by his superiors, he was called "simple-minded," "lacking in good judgment," and "gullible." Nor was this Michelle's sole foray into theft: Thomas Bica had met his wife in 1994 when she had been serving time for receiving stolen property.

  Arguably the most well-known of the theft-of-fetus cases is that of Lisa Montgomery from the village of Melvern, Kansas (population 423).53 Although she already had four children by her first marriage, she seems to have wanted to "solidify" her second marriage by having another child. This, although she had had her tubes tied at the end of her first marriage. With a husband as gullible as Mr. Bica, she went ahead and connived to meet pregnant Bobbi Jo Stinnett from the even smaller village of Skidmore, Missouri (population 342), under the guise of buying a puppy. The baby she stole after killing twenty-three-year-old Bobbi Jo survived. One would think that these women murderers, besides being unspeakably evil in the eyes of the public, were all psychotic. But none of them was. If anything, they seemed terminally naive, socially and psychologically "out of the loop," and of course massively self-centered yet not crazy. There are plenty of small villages around the world, and no lack of women desperate to have a child. Why this fetus-snatching phenomenon is confined to America, I cannot answer, nor am I certain there are not other cases in other countries that have simply not as yet come to light. It is not easy to find appropriate spots for these women on the Gradations scale. Darci Pierce was psychopathic and therefore belongs most likely to Category 11: killers of people who are "in the way" (in her case, this was the real mother, whose baby Darci was intent on stealing). Michelle Bica had remorse (she committed suicide) and could be placed perhaps at number 5. Lisa Montgomery is not a fullblown psychopath, yet she killed the Stinnett woman in cold blood in order to steal her fetus. She acted like a ruthless schemer (14), though with only a few traits reminiscent of the psychopath.

  THRILL-KILL

  There are some impulse murders that seem not to fit into any common category. As far as anyone can tell, the murders are done purely "for the hell of it." Some refer to such incidents as thrill-kills; the perpetrators are usually adolescents or young adults. Presumably, there is a powerful "rush" associated with such murders-as great, perhaps greater, than one might get from cocaine or from high-risk, daredevil acts such as riding a motorcycle over a (not too wide!) chasm or riding a hot rod car in a "chicken race. 1154 In Detroit, in November 2007
, seventeen-year-old Jean-Pierre Orlewicz lured twenty-six-year-old Dan Sorenson, a bouncer, into the garage of the younger man's grandfather and stabbed him in the back, killing him. It seems that Jean-Pierre had made a deal with his friend, eighteen-year-old Alexander Letkemann, that Alexander would help clean up after the murder. As Alexander said in his statement later on to the police, "Me and JP hung out at his grandpa's house.... All I had to do was clean up. I would have no part in the actual act. He would call it even for the hundred dollars I owed him. I don't know why he had it out so bad for that guy." 55 The teens sawed off Sorenson's head and then burned his hands and feet with a blowtorch to hamper any attempts at identification. To make absolutely sure, they transported the torso to a remote spot, set it on fire, and then took the head and dumped it in a river fifteen miles away from the torso.

  But with the stupidity and rashness that are the hallmarks of adolescent murder, Jean-Pierre asked yet another friend to help them haul the body. That friend notified the authorities, and the two were quickly caught. Even Dan's girlfriend knew he was going to the Orlewicz house to collect a debt. Unlike the murder of a stranger, which has the best chance of remaining unsolved, everyone who knew Dan could point to Jean-Pierre. The media and the Internet blogs were quick to pick up the case and enter it into their list of the "most evil people of the month" or create headlines like "Greater Evil: A Thrill-Kill in Michigan. 1156 What shocked the public particularly was the absence of any discernible motive. Some people, grasping at straws, thought perhaps the teens looked down on Dan because he was a "registered sex offender"assuming they even knew. But Dan's so-called offense was to have had sex with a fourteen-year-old girl when he was only seventeen. In the "Romeo-and-Juliet" laws of most states, that is not an offense at all. JeanPierre and Alexander may well have had the characteristics described recently under the heading of the adolescent psychopath.57 They behaved like the persons of Category 11 (psychopathic killers of people "in the way"), though why they wanted their victim "out of the way" is unclear. The mutilation of the corpse was a postmortem act that is, for that reason, not sadistic (in the sense of causing great suffering to someone still alive), even though it is shocking and grotesque. As it is, the murder alone consigned both teens to mandatory life sentences, to which were added yet another ten years for mutilating a corpse.

  Impulsive murder takes but a minute but can cost a lifetime.

  Chapter Four

  MURDER ON PURPOSE

  The Psychopathic Schemers

  Canto XXXI, II. 55-57

  Che dove l'argomento de la mente

  For where sharpness of mind is joined to evil will and power, there is no defense people can make against them.

  s'aggiugne al mal volere e a la possa nessun riparo vi puo far la gente.

  any of the case histories from the last chapter hinged on .sudden outbursts of destructive behavior, usually ending in murder. If the judgment of "evil" was ascribed to these outbursts, the reason for it had more to do with the act, in most examples, than with the perpetrator. If there was any planning ahead of time, the interval between thought and deed was brief; where there was intention, the intention was to do the act, not so much how to do it in such a way as to get away with it. Even that intention-to-do sometimes counted as "malice aforethought," but not to the degree of what I would call the more genuine and overt cases of malice aforethought, as we will confront in this chapter. Here we will encounter the real schemers, who, you might say, worked hard to earn the label of evil. They did so by conjuring up complicated plans and intrigues, long in advance of the act itself, and by resorting at times to the use of hit men, lovers, or other accomplices with the ultimate goal usually of getting rid of a spouse or lover or, in rarer instances, of killing a stranger for money. Almost all the people we will meet here had sterling reputations in the community until their acts became known. Because of this, the huge disparity between public image and private deed created much of the shock value that gave meaning to the label of evil. Almost all of them came from privileged social classes: some of great wealth, the majority from the upper-middle class. Only a few had ever had brushes with the law before the dramatic murder that turned them into notorious celebrities. These people did not languish for a few days in the inner pages of the tabloids; they all merited, if that is the right word, a full-length biography. There is another characteristic that sets them apart from the violent individuals we have encountered so far. Whereas the others had at most a few psychopathic traits from the traits mentioned earlier, here we are in the domain of psychopathy proper. To be more accurate, the persons in this chapter show chiefly the egocentric personality traits of psychopathy and fewer of the behavioral features present in the impulse killers. This is an important point, and to understand it more fully requires a bit of an explanation.

  The most widely used measure of psychopathy today is a instrument questionnaire developed by Robert Hare called the Psychopathy Checklist (introduced in chapter 1). His scale is divided into two main factors: one for personality (and emotion), the other for behavior. The checklist was the outgrowth of thousands of interviews and records from persons in prisons and forensic hospitals. Many of these incarcerated people were habitual criminals with long rap sheets, often reflecting a wide variety of offenses. The majority came from socially disadvantaged backgrounds and were about as likely to show the behavioral qualities as the personality qualities. Many, that is, were con artists and had been juvenile delinquents; they were compulsive liars and they had poor behavioral controls. If they scored 30 or higher out of 40 on the scale (the maximum score and the number necessary for the label of full-blown psychopath), chances are the points were evenly divided between the two parts of the list.

  But the persons in this chapter were not delinquent in their teens nor did they ever violate their parole-because they had never had any brush with the law in the first place. A few had done some outrageous things in their teens, but coming from affluent homes and indulgent parents, their acts were covered up. They might have been arrested once or twice, but they were never convicted, and they seldom stole even for drugs, because they had no need to. What these people had instead was the full menu of personality and emotional traits. As mentioned above, these traits were categorized by Hare into two factors:

  Factor-I Traits

  1. glibness and/or superficial charm

  2. grandiose sense of self-worth

  3. pathological lying

  4. conning or manipulativeness

  5. lack of remorse or guilt

  6. shallow affect (shallowness of emotional display)

  7. callousness, lack of empathy (also includes lack of compassion)

  8. failure to accept responsibility for one's actions

  The second factor concerns behavior and consists of nine qualities:

  Factor II Traits

  1. parasitic lifestyle

  2. poor behavioral controls

  3. lack of realistic long-term goals

  4. impulsivity

  5. irresponsibility

  6. juvenile delinquency

  7. early behavioral problems

  8. need for stimulations, boredom

  9. revocation of conditional release (in the case of incarcerated persons)

  There are three additional items that do not fit neatly into the two main factors:

  1. sexual promiscuity

  2. criminal versatility (by which is meant a history of committing a large variety of different types of crimes, such as assault, fraud, theft, escape, kidnap, vandalism, rape, etc.)

  3. a history of many short-term marital (or "de facto") relationships.

  But even if a person showed all eight of the Factor-I traits to the maximum, his score would be only 16-far from the 30 required for the psy chopath label. Yet it so happens that these personality qualities (glibness, grandiosity, deceitfulness, manipulativeness, callousness, lack of remorse or empathy) are the ones least likely to change throughout one's life. Not only that, but
if someone is callous, totally lacking in remorse or compassion, and is a habitual liar and a con artist, he (and it will much more often be a he than a she) is far less likely to outgrow his dangerousness over the years, in comparison with those who are impulsive and hottempered. Many outgrow those behavioral traits as they enter middle age. And if such traits were their only problem, they tend to stop acting in these "antisocial" ways.' For example, if alcohol fueled their bad behavior, they might join Alcoholics Anonymous and learn to stop drinking. In contrast, the personality qualities listed by Hare remain throughout one's life. This means that there are psychopaths in the community who never (or almost never) end up in jail, who score well under the radar for the Hare scale, and-if one relied just on that scale-would seem not to be psychopaths. Hare himself refers to some of these people as "white-collar" psychopaths; these people are known to us as crooked businessmen, corrupt politicians, and the like.' And some murder. The Factor-I traits, then, can best be pictured as the essence of psychopathy: the part, if present when you first get to know someone, that doesn't go away with time.