He then concocted a plot to rob a hi-fi store in order to steal its stereo equipment. Dale enlisted the aid of an accomplice, William Andrews, plus that of a third man who was to drive the getaway car. At the end of the workday, Dale and William entered the shop, where they held at gunpoint and tied up the four people inside. When sixteen-yearold Cortney Naisbitt failed to show up for dinner that evening, his mother got worried and insisted upon going out to look for him. Discovering his car parked outside the hi-fi shop, she too went inside-only to be captured and tied up with the others (two of whom were a father and son pair). Dale had watched a movie a few days before, in which the bad guys poured Drano (a liquid drain cleaner) down the throat of a victim, who died immediately. This gave Dale the bright idea of making the captives in the shop do the same, not realizing that "dying " is far from the customary fate of someone forced to drink Drano, which happens to be sodium hydroxide, or lye. He told the victims they were to drink this "vodka" and tried to get his accomplice to make them drink it-but William refused. So Dale took over and forced the Drano down all the victims' throats, which caused immediate burning of the mouth and esophagus and excruciating pain. Dale took a brief "break" at this point to rape one of the employees even though she was vomiting from the effects of the Drano. That done, he returned to the other victims, shooting each in the head. Three died immediately, including the mother who had come to fetch her son. One of the men seemed to move, so Dale shoved a ballpoint pen in his ear, kicking it in all the way until it came out of his throat. Remarkably, the man survived and was able to describe the assailants to the police. The two were arrested quickly as they were trying to escape. The air force, which had been trying to get rid of Dale via a dishonorable discharge now had more than enough evidence, once he and William were convicted of Utah's most heinous crime ever. Both were given the death penalty (not carried out until 1987 in Dale's case; 1992, in William's).36
The labels psychiatrists use to characterize someone like Dale Pierre-"lifelong-persistent antisocial," "psychopathic," "sadistic"-are all accurate in their way, but these are sterile, academic words that fall far short of conveying adequately the callousness of Dale's heart and the depravity of his actions. So the nonmedical phrase used by sociologist Jack Katz in describing the case-"primordial evil"-captures much better Pierre and the Hi-Fi Murders he committed.37 As for the sadistic element, Dale's pushing the pen through the ear of one of the victims meant that he wanted to cause as much pain as possible, instead of simply firing a coup de grace. Unlike the usual mass murderer who chooses a scapegoat group (as Hennard did), hoping to achieve a sense of power by killing as many of the scorned "others" as possible, Dale may have thought that, coming at closing time, he would encounter just the one clerk totting up the day's receipts. As a killer of one, he would not have made history, despite his cruelty.
Jack Gilbert Graham
The mass murder by Jack Graham was different from all the others mentioned thus far. His motive was not the usual one of revenge (as we saw with Hamilton, Farley, and Hennard). Nor was his motive to eliminate witnesses to a crime (as we saw with Dale Pierre). Graham's motive was unique: to create a mass murder in the hope that the intended victim, hidden in plain sight among all the other victims, would not be spotted by the authorities as the one true target of the (thus never-to-beidentified!) murderer. You can get a better idea of the scheme here if you think of the child's game Where's Waldo? A child is shown a picture book; one page has a large cartoon with dozens of people, all next to one another cheek by jowl. The task is to find Waldo, a particular individual nonetheless difficult to identify in the midst of all the other people. That was the task awaiting the detectives when United Airlines Flight 629, taking off from Denver on November 1, 1955, exploded in the sky, the wreckage raining down on the countryside some thirty miles from the airport. The laborious work performed by the airport officials and the FBI is a chapter in itself.
At the end of the day, after each of the forty-four victims were identified and profiled, it was discovered that one of the victims, Mrs. Daisie King, had keys to safety deposit boxes containing newspaper clippings about her son, Jack Gilbert Graham, who had been charged with forgery and was on the "most wanted" list of the Denver district attorney. Search of her home two weeks after the crash revealed an insurance policy of which her son was the beneficiary. He was also slated to inherit a substantial sum in the event of his mother's death. But Jack had recently wrecked a brand-new truck and was hoping to collect insurance from that "accident." Four years before the plane crash, he had been convicted on a forgery charge, though he was given a suspended sentence on the promise of making restitution. As the FBI delved further into the case, they learned that Jack had given his mother a bulky present gift-wrapped in Christmas paper just before her flight. He let his wife believe it was a "tool set" he had wanted to give his mother. With no one the wiser, he sneaked the present into her luggage. Still further probing unearthed copper wires and insulating materials at the Graham house of the sort used in detonating primer caps. From there the route to the true story was short: the present for his mom was not a tool box, but instead, twenty-five sticks of dynamite Graham had recently purchased, and a timing device set to go off shortly after takeoff. Graham finally admitted his guilt in making the bomb that killed his mother-the Where's Waldo in this drama-along with the forty-three "collaterals."38
Graham's half-sister later told the authorities that he had a penchant for violence: he had once knocked her down and broken her ribs; on another occasion, he had threatened to strike her with a hammer. He had also been physically abusive with his wife. Before his execution in the gas chamber fourteen months after his trial, Graham was questioned about his level of remorse. His response: "As far as feeling remorse for these people, I don't. I can't help it. Everybody pays their way and takes their chances. That's just the way it is."39 He added that "the number of people to be killed made no difference to me; it could have been a thousand." There are many psychopaths who feel no remorse for the violence, mayhem, or murders they commit; Graham is one of the very few who shamelessly said as much out loud. In the annals of evil acts, this elevates him to a special perch high above the others. What he did not reveal, and what remains a mystery about this man, is: besides his obvious greed, why he felt such venomous hatred for his mother-a hatred so strong that her destruction and, as it turned out, his own, was a more compelling ambition than living out his life with his wife and two small children.
POSTSCRIPT
The forensic psychologist, Dr. Reid Meloy, brought several points to my attention. Adolescent mass murderers, in his experience, seldom commit suicide or die at the scene, in contrast to their adult counterparts. But because mass murder is a comparatively rare phenomenon, statistics may vary from one series to another. In my collection of sixty mass murderers from magazine and newspaper articles, for example, nineteen of the fiftythree adults committed suicide at the scene (36 percent), as did three of the admittedly small group of seven adolescents (42 percent). In Meloy's series of thirty adults and thirty-four adolescents, the suicide rate was 9 percent in the adolescents, in contrast to 53 percent in the adults. A second point concerns the intentions of mass murderer, Richard Farley.
In his evaluation, Dr. Meloy noted that Farley wanted only to wound Laura Black, ostensibly so that she would live to know the horror that (in Farley's warped mind) she had "caused." Had the bullet gone a centimeter this way or that, however, she could have bled out from an artery-and died. Farley's act still counts as attempted murder, and who is to say what was in his heart of hearts when he shot at her?
Chapter Six
THE PSYCHOPATH
HARD AT WORK
Canto XI, 11. 37-39
Onde omicide e ciascun the mal fiere
Thus homicides and whoever wrongfully strikes, spoilers and bandits, all are tormented in the first subcircle in different groups.
guastotori e predon, tutti tormenta giron primo per diverse schiere.<
br />
n the last chapter we concentrated on individuals who committed either spree murder or the much more common mass murder. Many were psychopaths, but a few proved in the long run not to be (Archie McCafferty) or were instead emotionally unbalanced men with towering rage (Patrick Sherrill). We can already begin to see that there is no neat formula for evil. Some of the risk factors are becoming more apparent, but so is the fact that many people, if we probed their background in great detail, would show half a dozen risk factors-and still lead socially inoffensive lives. Either that, or at some point in their lives, they'd commit a violent act or a profoundly humiliating act that falls short of what the community calls "evil." Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower shooter, had two important risk factors: a physically abusive father and a malignant brain tumor. We can never know whether, if he had only the one without the other, he would not have been a mass murderer. Whitman was not psychopathic and was not a "loner" or a social misfit; people didn't think of him as a "bad person." He seemed to have a good future. His IQ, at 138, was "genius level"; many careers would have been open to him. His final act bore the stamp of evil solely because so many lives were destroyed. If his anger took him only so far as to call his wife Kathy a "slut" (which she certainly wasn't) and to strike her in the face, she might have divorced him, but you and I would never have heard of him.
The people in this chapter had, for the most part, better success socially: they had spouses; a few had children. More than half had good jobs. But what sets them apart-certain notable exceptions aside-is that they spent most of their lives doing terrible things and getting in serious trouble with the law. The majority killed at least one person. Several killed on multiple occasions. Almost all were psychopaths; a few had personality traits that fell a bit short of "full-blown" psychopathy. Those who were psychopaths distinguished themselves by the grotesque and grievous ways in which they hurt or killed whoever stood in their way. Here "evil" had to do with the nature of their acts, not the number of persons they affected. The horror element was uppermost, which became apparent in the words people used, once the "news" came out: words like "fiendish," "revolting," "heinous," and (pretty regularly) "inhuman." This is how we distance ourselves from the acts in question, as if to say, "no human could do these things." We don't like to be reminded that only humans do these kinds of things, that evil is an exclusively human phenomenon. The only comfort we can take is that what we call evil is mercifully rare.
This chapter will also serve to remind us that evil is not a static concept. Since Dante's time, as we saw in chapter 1, the rapist, the child murderer, and the torturer occupy much higher berths in the hierarchy of evil than do heretics, traitors, and the murderers of a guest. The selling of indulgences by the church (simony) that so offended Dante is all but unknown in our day. But in his day, serial sexual homicide apparently didn't exist' and the medical profession didn't have the syringes and needles and drugs that allow a corrupt doctor or nurse to kill patients. In certain ways, evil has evolved. And our sensibilities have altered accordingly.
From the standpoint of the Gradations of Evil scale, many of the persons figured here belong in Category 16: psychopathic persons committing multiple vicious acts, including murder.
ANGELS OF DEATH
Kristen Gilbert
Born Kristen Strickland in 1967, she was the elder of two daughters. She was said to have undergone a change in personality after her sister Tara was born seven years later. Kristen became a habitual liar and stole things belonging to Tara. Outwardly sweet, she was considered manipulative and vindictive by school acquaintances. Toward boyfriends she was even physically abusive. She went to nursing school, where she met her future husband, Glenn Gilbert. They married when she was twenty-one. A month after the wedding she chased Glenn around the house with a butcher knife during an argument.' When she got her first nursing job at a VA hospital in Massachusetts, the number of deaths on her ward shot up precipitously. Her coworkers jokingly gave her the moniker "Angel of Death." In addition, she spiced up her days by staging bomb threats at the hospital or painting swastikas on Kleenex boxes to make it look like there were vandals roaming around the corridors. If she showed up late for work, she would make up fabulous lies such as, she came across a man in coma on the street and stopped to give him CPR. Things at home were not good either. She tried to poison Glenn with potassium, which sent his heart rate way up. Understandably, the marriage faltered and the couple divorced when Kristen was twenty-seven. She had already begun an affair with a married man who worked as a security guard at the hospital. During a phone conversation with him, she confessed to killing patients. Later, three nurses came forward with their concerns, and a police investigation was launched in 1996. Kristen was indicted a few months later and ultimately sentenced to four life terms without the possibility of parole. Though she gave some patients overdoses of insulin, she dispatched most of them with massive doses of the stimulant epinephrine (adrenalin).3 Altogether, she was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder, and one count of second-degree murder-but she is thought to have killed as many as forty patients under her care.
Dr. Michael Swango
Swango was born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1954, to an army colonel who raised his three sons like recruits in boot camp. Michael's father was physically abusive to his brother Robert and his mother, Muriel, but not to him. The home atmosphere was said to be cold and inhospitable.4 The family moved some sixteen times before Michael left for college. By that time, his father was barely involved with the family: he had a Vietnamese mistress and was essentially separated from Muriel.
Ever since childhood, Michael had collected articles about violent death and disaster. Later in college, he started a scrapbook of plane and car crashes, bloody military coups, savage sex crimes, arson, and riots. He even quipped that all this material would prove he was "mentally incompetent" in the event he ever killed someone and he would thus avoid prison. In between these activities, he found time to excel at school, graduating summa cum laude from college. In medical school, his performance was a little less stellar. He would fake write-ups of patients he never examined. He was contemptuous of his patients and of the deaths that followed in his wake. Still, he was allowed to graduate (in 1983) despite strong reservations on the part of the faculty, because only eight out of nine board members voted to expel him. Unanimity was required! He had been fired once before from an ambulance job, when he let a heartattack victim walk to his car.
During Swango's internship at Ohio State, one doctor wanted to fail him because of his indifference to his patients, not to mention his preoccupation with the Nazis and his unprofessional manner. He was suspected of killing a certain patient with poison, and he lied that he had never been in that patient's room. Several more patients of his died for unexplained reasons. Swango also poisoned several colleagues with fried chicken laced with poison. They all became ill; he did not. Later, as an ambulance paramedic, he became very animated about violent events, such as Huberty's mass murder at the San Ysidro McDonald's in 1984; he also praised Henry Lee Lucas, the serial killer. In 1985 he poisoned four paramedic coworkers with arsenic. This time he was caught and sentenced to five years in prison; he served, however, only two.
Upon his release, he changed his name to David Adams, was married for a brief period, forged letters of recommendation on his own behalf, and got another job in a hospital. He even poisoned a girlfriend, Kristin, who later committed suicide. More patients unexpectedly died in Stony Brook hospital, where he was suspected and kicked out. In 1994, after being tracked to hospitals in the South, Swango vanished. He turned up in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where his past could be more easily papered over. In a rural hospital, Swango resumed his killings, extending them even to a new girlfriend and her four children. Caught in Africa, he escaped before trial. Trying to reenter the United States, he was arrested-at first only on fraud charges. Hard evidence was difficult to muster: nurses at his previous hospitals had tossed away the needl
es that would have shown traces of the curare-like drug he had used to kill various patients. Finally, in 2000 Swango admitted to three murders and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. But he is strongly suspected of having killed as many as sixty. One of the sad stories in the Swango case: a young woman, Cynthia Ann McGee, had been struck by a car when she was riding her bicycle. Admitted to Ohio State University Hospitalunder the care of Swango-she died, though her injuries did not seem fatal. The driver of the car was convicted of "reckless homicide" and sentenced to thirty months probation. It is now suspected that her death came from potassium, injected by Swango, and not from her injuries.5
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