The Anatomy of Evil

by Michael H. Stone

  We are not dealing with embezzlers and graft takers here but with violent psychopaths, persons, that is, who usually made a good impression on their neighbors (because of the superficial charm), could fool people and talk their way out of tight spots (their glibness and calmness when lying), and lived, until caught, seemingly successful and morally upright lives. Theirs was a morality, however, that was only skin-deep, a camouflage. And when it suited them, violence was an acceptable option, even if the violence engulfed people in their closest, intimate life. Sometimes life circumstances-wealth, an indulgent family-can throw a protective cloak around the psychopath, who, unless pushed too far, manages to stay out of trouble. Even under the best of circumstances, the psychopath is incapable of meaningful and enduring relationships with others-especially love relationships. A predator at heart, he can say, "I love you," if it suits his purpose, but he can walk away in a heartbeat if something better, or someone more appealing, comes along. Here is an example.

  A man in his mid-twenties had not worked since dropping out of college after two years. He lived off an ample trust fund and had recently inherited an additional sum, a little under half a million dollars, from a grandfather. Within a year he had gone through the inheritance money by traveling back and forth every few weeks to Europe for parties with the "jet set." Quite reckless in his teen years, he had gotten in several drunk-driving accidents but managed to avoid serious consequences with the law, thanks to the influence of his family. At his high school graduation he was given a new car, which he promptly totaled three days later. Anxious to avoid punishment for his carelessness, he went to the dealer and purchased through his trust fund a new car of the same make and color. He guessed that his father, who was predictably in a cloudy state from drinking, would never notice the difference. He had carried on a few brief affairs with various women, sometimes several at once, whom he would charm with boasts of his prodigious, albeit make-believe, exploits. One of them urged him to get a job. He lacked any marketable skills but had no shortage of unrealistic pipe dreams: becoming a "top movie producer," or a "world-class tennis pro," and the like. A distant relative gave him a position in his real estate company. After only several weeks, he already boasted that he had sold a big commercial building in downtown New York for "a hundred million dollars." But this was pure fantasy. His job was really a both-feet-on-the-desk sinecure during which he mostly read the sports section of the paper and rarely ventured outside the office. This man had never been violent, so it seemed likely that he would not become so in the future. But if the course of his life were to take a drastic change for the worse, he might be more capable of a violent act than someone with solid scruples.

  There is no telling whether people who have been nonviolent but who have displayed psychopathic tendencies would rise to the level of doing something evil. That depends on the coming together of many unforeseeable circumstances. The persons in this chapter did rise to that level. For most of them, we have enough pieces in the mosaic of their life to create a convincing portrait. This highlights the salient aspect of evil that represents "excess." Because we can begin to understand the why question-why did they end up doing what they did?-they will appear less as incomprehensible freaks of nature and more like twisted-very twisted-versions of you and me at our worst moments. This idea was captured well in the title of a book by an eminent forensic psychiatrist: Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream.3

  Information about the persons described in the previous chapter was sometimes sparse, and it was not always easy to place them with any accuracy in the Gradation of Evil scale. Because this chapter is based on full-length biographies, assigning their acts to a particular category is easier. For that reason I have arranged the accounts according to what seemed the most appropriate category.

  CATEGORY 9: JEALOUS LOVERS WITH MARKED PSYCHOPATHIC FEATURES

  Richard Minns

  When they met on the ski slopes of Aspen, Colorado, in 1977, Richard Minns was forty-seven, a successful and multimillionaire health-spa tycoon, and she, then known by her maiden name, Barbara Piotrowski, was a stunningly beautiful model of twenty-three. She was also a straight-A pre-med student at UCLA. Minns, obsessed with youth and masculine prowess, worked out fanatically at his own spas and made himself into as much of an Adonis as a man of forty-seven can be. He was smitten with her and begged her to come with him to Houston. Reluctant at first, she eventually accepted. They began a torrid affair, and she then moved in with him. Whatever he told her about his life, he omitted one detail: he was married and had four children. By and by he revealed that he "had been married" but was now separated. Not only was he still married to his wife of twenty-five years; she was his business partner. His wife, Mimi, eventually learned about the affair and sued for divorce. The impediment to marriage now removed, Barbara expected that Richard would propose to her. He was in no hurry to do so, though he put her up in a fashionable townhouse. They began to argue. Minns became increasingly possessive and jealous, though he still refused to marry her. He struck her on several occasions. Barbara had had enough and broke off the relationship. She remained in Houston and returned to her studies.

  A short while later, in October of 1980, Barbara was at a doughnut shop when a man drove up beside her and shot her four times in the back. She was taken quickly to a hospital, where the doctors saved her life, though she was now paralyzed from the chest down. There were layers of hit men involved: Minns had hired A who then hired B to pay C and D to do the actual shooting. All (except Minns) were caught and sentenced. As for Minns, he was never formally charged and anyway escaped to Europe, where he went from one country to another (including Israel, where for a time he served in the army) and assumed at least five aliases and a collection of seven passports in different names. At one point he had been living in the Bahamas as "Richard O'Toole" and posing as a tax lawyer.4 Always the real suspect, he was finally apprehended in 1994 as he tried to fly from Mexico to Vancouver via DallasFort Worth, where he was arrested at the age of sixty-four under the name Harlan Allen Richardson. At that point he served a four-month sentence for fraud (the only crime for which the police had sufficient evidence at that time), and was then deported to Ireland where he had established residence.5 Back in 1987, district judge William Elliott had ordered the court in a civil trial to accept that Minns was responsible for the shootings, and then charged him to pay $28.6 million to Barbara in damages.6 By that time, she had changed her name to Janni Smith and had moved to California to avoid any more attempts on her life. She won another civil suit in 1991, in which the jury awarded her $32 million. She has yet to see penny one of these awards.

  What you read in the last paragraph was based on the headlines of this case. To grasp what Richard Minns is all about, you need to read some of the fine print. Minns was brought up in a middle-class family in Texas in unremarkable circumstances. He had a sister, Janice, seven years younger. By age eight, he was already sadistic and violent-beyond his parents' control. He made his baby sister swallow a penny, which required a visit to the emergency room. When she was learning to crawl, he placed her near an open window, from which she fell out, as he stood by laughing. When Janice was two, he forced her finger against a movie-projector lightbulb "because he wanted to find out what skin smelled like when it burned." 7 At other times he tossed lit matches at her.' He boasted that when he was fourteen, he was booked for aggravated assault. The truth of this is uncertain, but it is in line with his emerging character that he saw fit to make such a boast. He emerged in his adult life as a supercharming but supervindictive man, bursting with energy, needing little sleep, harddriving, and entrepreneurial, but dishonest, volatile, manipulative, and combative. On one occasion he broke the noses of his wife, Mimi, and his younger daughter, and, when things soured between him and Barbara, of Barbara herself. After he punched her, he said, "I didn't do it! Something came over me! "9 Charismatic and thrill seeking, Minns was described by some as the flame next to whom others like to dance.lo

 
Early in their relationship, when Barbara had become pregnant, he forced her to have an abortion against her will. She miscarried shortly afterward but still went on with their affair. Minns was also a bully in his business dealings and extremely litigious, suing anyone who dared to oppose or object to his numerous shady and unethical dealings. He was not above threatening his business associates with blackmail about their mistresses, if that's what it took to get his way." He cajoled and threatened his wife when she moved to divorce him. She backed down for a while, but when she made another attempt, he tried to get a friend to swear in court that he had had an affair with Mimi. The man refused. Minns spoke of hiring someone to kill her, or else to blow up the plane on which Mimi and the children were flying to San Antonio. These things never happened, but his threats paint a lurid picture of how he thought and what he was capable of.

  Minns had many of the qualities that come under the heading of "hypomanic," by which is meant a personality makeup just short of fullblown mania. It consists of traits reminiscent of mania, though in a less exaggerated form. He was, for example, socially extraverted, grandiose, hard driving, well beyond average in his sexual needs, risk taking, intense, arrogant, and boastful. Many of his other traits, however, were not hypomanic but were what one sees in the typical psychopath. He was a habitual liar, exploitative, unscrupulous, and dishonest to the extent of swindling his children out of their trust funds. He was totally opposed to divorce because he could not tolerate the idea of Mimi's ending up, under Texas law, with half their estate. When all his efforts to suborn witnesses and defame Mimi failed, the judge awarded her 60 percent of their assets; Minns, only 40 percent. This was his "Waterloo," after which he spiraled downhill, still refusing to marry Barbara even after he had divorced his first wife.

  As he became increasingly cruel and controlling toward Barbara in the aftermath of his divorce, her love turned to contempt. She left him for good-and ended up at the wrong end of the hit men's guns. Minns, as was mentioned, hid behind three layers of intermediaries, like the Mafia don who decides to "whack" a rival, so he could claim what is quaintly called in the secret service "plausible deniability." We must credit him with a measure of success here, since the little justice Barbara has been able to garner has been only in civil, not in criminal, court. Minns, having been deported to Ireland, is perhaps still there living free, at age eighty as of this writing.

  Later I will have more to say about what is known of situations that negatively affect the brain and that may contribute to violence. What is interesting about Minns is that, to the best of our knowledge, none of these conditions seem to have been operating in his case. There is no record of his having suffered head injury with unconsciousness in childhood. We don't know if his mother smoked or drank alcohol excessively when she was pregnant with him-either of which might have increased the risk for later antisocial (though not necessarily violent) behavior.12 His parents never divorced. He was if anything much brighter than average. There is no evidence that Minns developed what has been called acquired sociopathy (or "pseudopsychopathy") from adverse conditions during pregnancy or in one's early years.13 This leaves us with the more likely explanation that heredity played the major role. In other words, Minns was most likely born with a strong tendency to a driven, intense, and extremely self-centered personality, insensitive to the feelings of others, along with a need for "thrills"-to the point of risk taking and even sadism (as was present in his behavior toward his little sister when he was just eight or nine). Add his hypersexuality, possessiveness, and "midlife crisis" into the mix, and you have a recipe, not inevitably for murder, for murder is rare under these circumstances, but for a much greater risk for murder than exists in the average person. Minns was not a man who could admit or accept defeat (divorce, a judgment against him in divorce court, rejection by a lover, and so on). Once these events turned on his vengeance engine, there was no stopping until he could put the sources of these defeats out of the way, permanently. He had serious thoughts of killing Mimi. With Barbara there was no stopping him. But he was "cool" enough to work through hirelings and has escaped justice (apart from the brief stint for fraud in 1994) for almost thirty years. Now eighty, Minns will most likely die outside the United States, but also outside prison.

  Ira Einhorn

  The story of Ira Einhorn reads like a carbon copy of the Richard Minns story, almost as though he were Richard's eleven-years-younger brother. He, too, had a hypomanic temperament, needed little sleep, was hypersexual, egomaniacal, grandiose, charismatic, amoral, and given to explosive outbursts of aggression. Einhorn became a locally famous figure as an anti-Vietnam orator and hippie guru in Philadelphia during the 1970s. Before that, however, his dark side was already making its appearance. When he was twenty-two (in 1962), for example, he was carrying on a passionate romance with a dancer, Rita Siegel. She found him irresistible yet weird and frightening in the way he would expound grandiloquently on famous mavericks like Friedrich Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, and the Marquis de Sade.14 He liked to torture cats by taking them into the shower and listening to them scream.15

  What he wrote that year was equally frightening: "Sadism-sounds nice-run it over your tongue-contemplate with joy the pains of others as you expire with an excruciating satisfaction.... Beauty and innocence must be violated because they can't be possessed." 16 That July he strangled Rita until she passed out, and then wrote: "To kill what you love when you can't have it seems so natural that strangling Rita last night seemed so right.," 7 Four years later in a plus ca change, plus c'est la mime chose moment, he committed aggravated assault on another girlfriend, Judy Lewis, whom he attacked with a broken Coke bottle and then choked until she passed out. As with the first assault on Rita, Einhorn wriggled out with no more than a warning; neither girl pressed charges. Although Einhorn had turned violent only when a woman threatened to leave him, these incidents were just a foretaste of what was to come.18

  In 1974 he met a beautiful woman seven years younger than he: Holly Maddux. Like her counterpart in the Minns case, Holly was as bright as she was stunning: class salutatorian as well as cheerleader at her Texas college. As with his other relationships, Einhorn was possessive, stifling, and, on several occasions, combative to the point where Holly's bruises were observed by friends. Finally, after three years she left him and went to New York, beginning a relationship with a new man. When Einhorn found out, he demanded she return to Philadelphia. Unfortunately she did and was never seen again. Einhorn murdered her and stuffed her body in a steamer trunk, which he then put in his closet. Neighbors complained about foul odors coming from his apartmentbut not until two years later in 1979. Police investigated, found Holly's mummified body, and arrested Einhorn. Bail was set at $40,000 and was paid by a gullible supporter, Barbara Bronfman, who had married into the Seagram distillery family. Einhorn fled to Europe and settled for a time in Ireland under the name "Ben Moore." Once Irish authorities discovered who he was and were closing in for the capture, he fled to England and later to Sweden, where he changed his name once again and charmed a wealthy Swedish woman, Annika Flodin, into becoming his girlfriend. Still unaware of his identity, Annika left with Einhorn for France and later married him-a man then in his sixties whom she knew as "Eugene Mallon." By 1988, Barbara Bronfman had read Steven Levy's true-crime biography of Einhorn, learning of his cruelty to the other women and the facts about the steamer trunk. Disenchanted finally, she tipped off the police as to his whereabouts in Sweden-whereupon he and his Swedish inamorata abruptly left for France.

  Finally, through laborious detective work and struggles with the French authorities, Einhorn was extradited back to the United Statesafter twenty years of freedom and high living. Time had changed many things about him: his beard was gone, his hair was gray, he had lost fifty pounds, but his fingerprints, alas, were the same.l9 He was sentenced in October of 2002 to life without parole for the murder of Holly Maddux. As with the Minns case, the Maddux family had won a pyrrhic victory in the courts a few
years earlier, when Einhorn was convicted in absentia in civil court, yielding an award of some $907 million, not a penny of which the family will ever see. Einhorn continues to deny his guilt.

  Among the many parallels between Minns and Einhorn-advantaged social class, high intelligence, pathological jealousy, Hare's Factor-I personality traits with very little of the Factor-II behavioral traits-is the act of killing during an act of impulsive violence. But then they cover up the crime with astonishing coolness and cleverness, even managing to win allies to their cause to bankroll them during their years of hiding from the law. Unlike Royce Zeigler (see chapter 3)-who acknowledged the "sins I have committed," marking him more antisocial than psycho- pathic-Minns and Einhorn lie and deny to their dying day. These psychopathic traits, especially the cold-bloodedness, the callousness, and the scheming, make the impression of "evil" more readily applicable than it was with the persons sketched in the earlier chapter.

  CATEGORY 10: KILLERS (NOT TOTALLY PSYCHOPATHIC) OF PEOPLE "IN THE WAY"

  Unlike the stories in the previous section, the following stories concern individuals who shocked the public with murderous acts that were not impulsive. We are dealing instead with violent acts that were carried out in a cold and methodical way from the beginning-followed by equally methodical ways of trying to escape justice. The same amorality and psychopathic personality traits (the "Factor-I" traits) were just as evident, but here they occur without the flashes of rage and intemperate behavior. Furthermore, the motive behind the scheming was quite different. Minns and Einhorn killed because the women they had once loved to distraction rejected them. Neither saw any other solution to his loss and wounded pride than to murder the woman who had hurt him. That each of these men had driven the woman away because of his abusiveness was clear to everyone else; they remained steadfastly blind to the obvious and thus felt "justified" in exacting revenge. In this next section, the killer's motive was to get rid of someone in order to be free to be with someone else, or to escape a deteriorating life situation. Certain people, as they saw it, were just "in the way."