The Anatomy of Evil

by Michael H. Stone

  When Archie was twenty-three, he met, fell in love with, and married Janice Redington. His family hoped he would now give up his antisocial ways. For a few months he did seem different: he got a regular job, felt proud to be taking home an honest paycheck, and gave up his criminal activities. Unfortunately, the family's hopes went unrealized, for Archie was still abusing alcohol heavily; he began to cheat on Janice and was aggressive toward her. He became obsessed with ideas about killing her and even went to a psychiatric hospital voluntarily to see if he could get rid of his "evil thoughts." But when he was released, his thoughts and his behavior were the same. Still, Archie did love Janice, he told me, and he went a year without getting arrested. He felt even greater love for his infant son, Craig Archibald, who was born in February of 1973. Though still drinking and doing drugs, according to Janice, Archie was gradually settling into family life.?

  Six weeks later, however, the baby died when (if the story is true) Janice rolled over him while she was fast asleep. Craig's death unhinged Archie. As he told me, "I went off the rails. I was taking LSD, Angel Dust, anything I could get my hands on, and I went to the cemetery and felt I could see a light; I saw a twenty-year-old version of Craig talking to me, saying, "Kill seven, Dad, and I'll come back to life!" Archie then gathered a small troupe of teenagers and set about killing strangers, hoping that when they'd killed the seventh, Craig would be resurrected. In a twoweek period (this was the "spree") Archie and the gang had killed their third victim. He was arrested before he could finish his mission. In court he asked for the death penalty, saying, "It was the right thing to do." Instead he got three life sentences. In prison he was still convinced he needed to kill four more people and continued to be violent, so much so that he was placed in a special cell. He was nicknamed Mad Dog McCafferty. For a long time the prison authorities and the psychiatrists who consulted on his case agreed: Archie should never be set free.

  His anger and violence continued for eight years. By chance he then met a woman-Amanda Queen, who'd been visiting another prisoner. There was something about Amanda that, as he put it, "reached my human side." He spoke of Mandy as "an angel: she showed me love and purity, visited me faithfully for sixteen years; with her I was a pussy-cat. I had no more vengeful fantasies." The prison recognized the profound change in Archie and began listening to his requests to be released. He was allowed to participate in work programs and showed himself to be rehabilitated. In 1997 a deal was made with Archie: he was granted release with the proviso he return to his native Scotland, where he could live as a free man. He and Mandy married, she accompanied him to Glasgow, and they eventually had two children. The tabloid press still painted him as the old Archie, printing such headlines as, when his first child was born, "Mad Dog Has Pup." This relentless negative publicity, based on Archie's violent image from the past, made life intolerable for Mandy. After a few years she returned to Australia with the children. His comment: "All she did was love a guy like me. I don't blame her. But I'm not `Mad Dog' anymore." Archie, who is sixty now, has spent the past ten years living peaceably and inoffensively in Scotland-a changed person. As he put it: "I feel regret for the things I'd done, but not great remorse. I can't undo the past. I've been punished severely-those twenty-five years in jail, and the hounding by the press; I'm still angry at what the media put me through. I'm a better person today; I deserve a life."

  Archibald McCafferty taught me that some men whom society dubs as evil and (once incarcerated) "never to be released" are capable ultimately-and in the face of everyone's worst fears-of rehabilitation and redemption. Despite all the minuses in his early life, there were some pluses. As we can sense from his years with Amanda, he had within him the ability to be part of a sustained and loving relationship. And from his brief time with Craig, we know he had the capacity to be a devoted and loving father. When in turmoil after the death of his son, and even before, he had the self-awareness to know he needed psychiatric help; once convicted, he felt guilty enough that he asked the judge for the death penalty. In the hours I spent with him, I found myself impressed by his candor and honesty-and his capacity for self-reflection. He had developed a workable philosophy of life-one that embodied the Serenity Prayer of Alcoholics Anonymous: "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." These are the qualities you see in certain people with "antisocial personality" who show signs of recovery in midlife and who can thenceforth live as respectable citizens in the community. These are emphatically not the qualities you see in the psychopath.

  Compare Archie's life with that of Sante Kimes from the previous chapter. Sante is now a woman in her early seventies, yet she is still out to gull the public, still incapable of acknowledging what her life has been all about, still trying to pass herself off as the innocent victim of a "frameup." The comparison of their two lives shows the power of the Factor-I traits in Hare's measure of psychopathy. With regard to Factor-II traits, both McCafferty and Kimes spent their early years as behavioral train wrecks. But lacking the extreme predatory traits of the full-blown psychopath, McCafferty was able, once the fires of youth burned less hotly, to walk away from lawlessness and violence. Kimes remains as she was.

  If we look for answers to why these two people, scarcely distinguishable in their teens and twenties, took such different paths in their later years, one explanation, I believe, resides in family. McCafferty came from an intact family. His father, punitive though he was, cared enough about his wayward son to move ten thousand miles from home to give him a new chance. It didn't work, but at least some moral values got pounded into Archie that saved the day-even if it took thirty years. Kimes was abandoned by her father and then by her mother; she was left to survive by her wits in the streets of Los Angeles, first by theft, then by prostitution. She passed through her childhood without ever being the object of anyone's unconditional love. Heredity probably made a difference too: she may have started out with a risk to develop along psychopathic lines that was greater than McCafferty's. Spotting such distinctions in young persons who have begun to break the law-especially if they have been violent-is difficult, whether for psychiatrists or for jurists. It is even more difficult for people in ordinary life, who have little experience weighing these different factors. Understandably, they would rather be safe than sorry, like the people who crowded around McCafferty when he was released, objecting vehemently to his winning his freedom after all those murders. After reading Kidd's book, written four years before McCafferty's release and fourteen years before he and I spoke, I would have been opposed to his release too. I'm grateful for the chance to have met him and to have seen for myself that the evil some men do need not last a lifetime.

  Apropos my opportunity to meet with him, here is another odd twist to the history of Archie McCafferty. This one has to do with the idea of "sensitive dependence upon initial conditions," which James Gleick brought to our attention with his groundbreaking book Chaos: Making a New Science.' In this book he speaks about the well-known scenario of a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil "causing" a tornado in Oklahoma, referring to the unpredictable impact of a minor disturbance bringing about a subtle change nearby that causes another change and that ends up as a profound change further down the line. Think of a small town with two mayoral candidates-one crooked, the other honest. They're tied 250 votes to 250-until a laggard citizen comes to the polls just before closing and casts his one vote. Without realizing it, he has cast the deciding ballot that determines whether the crook or the honest man gets elected.

  The flapping butterfly in Archie's case was this: after he and his gang killed their first three people-on the way to the magic "seven" that in his LSD-besotted mind would revivify his dead son-they were on their way to kill Archie's wife Janice and her family, which they would surely have done, except that the car ran out of gas! Archie abandoned that plan and it was then that he got arrested. If not for that faltering fuel tank, Archie would have h
ad his seven murders, and the court might have looked very differently upon a man who killed seven people, including his own wife. The public outcry against his ever being released (it was pretty shrill as it was, with three victims) would likely have been so great that he never would have been released ... hence never be given the opportunity to show that he was capable of redemption. He would have been written off as the incurable psychopath that the detectives and doctors originally assumed he was, and he would have died in prison. I would have tended to agree with Paul Kidd that he should never have been released, and of course I would never have met him and seen the different Archie he later became. I believe there are people who, besides having committed evil acts at some point in their lives, are truly incur- able.9 But my experience with Archie McCafferty made me aware that we cannot rush to judgment about who these "truly incurable" people are.

  Charles Manson

  The spree murders engineered by Charles Manson in Los Angeles in 1969 are unique in that the person primarily responsible for the murders of Gary Hinman on July 31, actress Sharon Tate and four others at her house on August 9, and of the LaBianca couple a day later was Manson himself-in absentia. Manson didn't pull the trigger on any of those eight people. Instead, he amassed a group of followers blindly loyal to his depraved goals and to the cult he organized. His "family" was so loyal that several of them participated unhesitatingly in the executions he ordered them to carry out.

  The spree murders of Manson are different from the more "ordinary" spree murders of Starkweather and McCafferty in another important respect. The motive behind the other two was rage at members of their own families: Starkweather's father and the parents of his girlfriend; McCafferty's wife. As mentioned in chapter 1, the motive behind the Manson murders was terrorism. Self-aggrandizement was probably a secondary motive. Manson-taking a page from the Book of the Apocalypse (specifically chapter 9)-got his followers to believe he was God or Jesus Christ. He also convinced them that the "four angels" mentioned in that chapter were incarnated as the four members of the popular rock band The Beatles. The Beatles wrote a song called "Helter Skelter," which included the words: "Look out for helter skelter ... She's coming down fast, yes she is." Manson purposely distorted these lyrics to fit in with his warped notion of Armageddon, which in his mind consisted of an uprising by the blacks to take over the world. It was when he noticed that this Armageddon wasn't happening all by itself that he decided to jump-start it in 1969 by getting a few of his most loyal, and (like himself) totally amoral, followers to murder some high-profile and noticeably wealthy people in the white community. We can assume Manson was bitten with a consuming envy of the well-to-do whites that made them no less a target of his hatred than the blacks, Jews, gays, and whomever else he hated. One can only marvel-or gasp-at the power of Manson's ability to mesmerize his followers, to infect them with his own hatred so thoroughly that they could no longer think with their brains, only with the brain of Manson. They became his malign robots.

  If we compare the spree murders by McCafferty and those incited by Manson, we notice that the background factors are radically different. Manson was a psychopath and remains so at the age of seventy-five. His early years resemble those of Sante Kimes in certain ways; in other ways they were immeasurably worse. Like Kimes, Manson was abandoned by his mother and never knew his father. But he was never the object of anyone's even distant affection. His birth mother, Kathleen Maddox, was sixteen when he was born. She was either promiscuous or a prostitute or both, disappearing for days at a time and leaving Charlie with a grandmother or with his very strict aunt. Kathleen was later married briefly to a William Manson, whence the last name. His father may or may not have been a certain Kentuckian "Colonel Scott." When Manson was five, Kathleen was sent to prison for armed robbery. Upon release she was unwilling to accept responsibility for him and actually traded him for a glass of beer. Friendless, Manson stole and was sent at nine to a reformatory from which he escaped and spent the last part of his childhood and all of his adolescence in and out of jails and institutions. While incarcer ated, he was sodomized, according to what Manson related, by men much larger than himself, many of them (also according to him) black-which moved blacks to the top of his hate list. Released at twenty-four, he pimped for a time but was rearrested a year later. He was not put back in prison until two years later-for rape, drug use, pimping, stealing, and fraud.10 Manson stated some years later, when he was thirty-two and released from prison again, that he knew he could not adjust to the outside world, having spent all of his life locked up. One commentator added, "The prison guards ignored Manson and unleashed the evil man into society again."" Given what Manson later became, the term evil is applicable, but his premature release is hardly the fault of the prison guards, since they have no say as to whether a prisoner is given his freedom.

  It was shortly after that, when he was thirty-four, that he became the Manson we know: the cult leader and supreme con artist of a group of gullible lost souls whom he corrupted into stealing and scavenging, meantime exercising sexual privileges with the young women whom he had persuaded to join. Admittedly, the formative years in Manson's life were so shorn of all humanizing influences that it is impossible to gauge to what extent heredity may have contributed to his early antisocial behavior and his lasting psychopathy. Put another way, the bad environment (absent father, absent and antisocial mother, violence endured in institutional settings) was enough to make many a young person into a "secondary" (that is, nonhereditary) psychopath. I suspect that these environmental calamities were nevertheless superimposed, in Manson's case, on a hereditary disadvantage-combining to create a picture of unalterable psychopathic traits of the Factor-I egocentric type (grandiosity, glibness, lying, callousness). McCafferty, in contrast, grew up in a family; it's true that his father was more punitive than the average, but it was a family all the same.

  Manson has spent the past forty years in prison. One might think the world had forgotten about him-or at least had placed him on the back shelf of memory, alongside Al Capone, Leopold and Loeb, and Bruno Hauptmann of the Lindbergh kidnap (if indeed he was the kidnapper). But Manson retains his spot in the center of our memory as the embodiment of evil. Prosecutor and author Vincent Bugliosi speaks of our "continuing fascination with the case. The very name `Manson' had become a metaphor for evil.... He has come to represent the dark and malignant side of humanity; and there is a side to human nature that is fascinated by pure, unalloyed evil."12 Manson won this malignant fame through his ability to inspire the weak, the lost, the marginalized-not only to murder at his command but actually to glory in the unspeakable deeds his followers carried out in his name.

  The analogy with Hitler is striking. If Hitler is evil with a capital E, Manson is Hider with a small "h." Both got others to do the killing for them. Both targeted the victims of their blood-deep prejudices. Both rose from obscurity to celebrity through evil. Both were energized by hatred to seek a revolution that would turn the world upside-down. Instead of being "nothings" whom no one would notice, now they would become emperors, noticed and feared by all. Both ensured their fame through the murder of "high-profile" groups: for Hitler, the Jews; for Manson, the rich and the famous. And just as many Germans came to their senses fairly quickly after the death of Hitler, aghast at the horrors they took part in, many of the "Mansonites" were aghast and remorseful for what they had been a part of, once Manson was captured and put in prison. I can testify to this personally, having gotten to know two of the women who had once been in the Manson family. Neither was directly involved in the murders, and both have now been leading useful and blameless lives for forty years.

  Having touched on the subject of spree murder, we turn our attention now to the larger subject of mass murder.

  MASS MURDER

  Of the crimes that move us to say "evil," mass murder is one of the most common. I thought it might be possible to put together from the Internet a complete list of mass murders in the twentieth century, but a
fter the list grew to several hundred, I gave up. Three-fourths of the cases came from the United States, but it was clear that we just weren't hearing about the mass murders in Bulgaria, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Burma, and a host of other countries where, apart from war, and granting that guns are not readily available everywhere as they are in the United States, mass murders are probably occurring with some regularity. Even in the countries where crime statistics are more carefully detailed, the full picture isn't available on the Internet, since only the more "noteworthy" cases from England, Canada, and Western Europe are publicized.

  The sense of evil is mostly in the sheer number of victims, because the men committing the murders seldom survive their one explosion of violence. The mayhem makes the front pages but, except in the most spectacular cases, is soon forgotten. Many cases of mass murder are written up only in local newspapers; those that achieve national attention depend for their wide publicity on such special features as a very large number of victims, killers who are still adolescents (as in the schoolshooter incidents of the late '90s), or predominantly child victims or college student victims, whose deaths stir up the greatest horror in the public and the greatest sympathy for the victims and their families. As it turns out, there have been almost a thousand mass murders (using the FBI's fairly strict definition of four or more victims killed in one brief incident) in the United States between 1900 and 1999,13 with 495 occurring just in the years 1975 to 1996. No public mass shooting was committed by a woman during the whole of the twentieth century; 14 the only one known to me was committed by Jennifer Sanmarco, a postal worker in California, who killed six and then herself in 2006.15