In the Angel of Death type of serial killing (a nonsexual variety of serial homicide), the killer's secretiveness is one of the most striking qualities. Psychopathy in these cases is predominantly of the Factor-I type; that is, showing extreme narcissistic traits-especially grandiosity. These nurses and doctors usually come from middle-class homes and show little behavioral abnormalities except perhaps an intense need for thrill seeking and stimulation. In their younger years, family life may not have been ideal, but it was not dreadful-as it so often is in cases of perpetrators of serial sexual homicide. It is not easy to explain how these Angels of Death developed as they did. It is said that Swango's father upbraided him when his son criticized the Vietnam War by calling him a "commie faggot." Yet Swango was his mother's favorite, and he had two brothers who did not get into trouble-evidence that his home life was not completely miserable. Still, one of the reasons for Swango's later acts might be revenge: getting back symbolically at the parents who "wronged" him during his early years. In addition, it's easy to see how the secret poisoning of patients can make one feel like God-who has the power of life and death over mortals. Perhaps this explains Swango's fascination with Hitler6 and the Nazis; Swango was not alone in this fascination. Others include serial sexual killers Ian Brady and Jason Massey, serial poisoner Graham Young, and wife killer Glen Engleman-to mention a few. For the rest of us, the Nazis were fiends; for these folks, they were heroes. In some cases the trait of grandiosity took the form of showing the world how fantastically competent the nurse or doctor was by first poisoning and then "miraculously" rescuing a patient. This was the game plan of nurse Genene Jones, who gave a curare-like drug to newborns in the hospital nursery.7 She would then prove herself a supernurse by reviving them, to the admiration of all. Unfortunately, a fair number of the babies died.
The psychopathic element in Michael Swango and Genene Jones was not evident during their adolescence. They had not been juvenile delinquents. Compared with the other individuals we will be discussing in this chapter, these two were the exceptions.
They would have been hard to spot as persons headed for trouble. Because of their slyness and cleverness, they were hard to spot even when, as adults, Swango and Jones had begun their careers as Angels of Death.
CHILD MURDER
In our culture children are cherished and protected, girls no less than boys; the community is quick to regard as evil anyone who kills a child of any age. Strangers who kill a child are regarded in a still worse light, especially if they kill a child who is still in the "innocent" years-roughly the preadolescent years-when it is highly unlikely that the child could have done anything so offensive as to warrant ill treatment, much less serious bodily harm or murder.
There is a kind of hierarchy of evil even in the realm of child murder. Judges tend to be more lenient with unmarried young women, often enough teenagers, who dispose of a newborn in a Dumpster. These mothers are usually not mentally ill; instead, they are usually poor and not prepared, emotionally or financially, to care for a baby. Mothers rarely kill a child older than age one; those that do are often found to be mentally ill.' Many of these mothers are scorned by the public as evil women-until the full story comes out that the mother was psychotic and thus not fully responsible for her actions. Where the idea of evil seems most apparent are the cases in which a parent or stepparent kills a child not only with malice aforethought but for some base motive such as greed (the parent would benefit from the child's insurance policy) or convenience (the parent would be free to enter a new relationship without the "burden" of a small child). Evil in its most uncontested form is associated with the torture of a child-as we saw with the Zeigler case in chapter 3-or the rape-murder of a child (which is much the same thing). The murder of children for spite (Hamilton, Dann) or out of hatred (Purdy) were confronted in the last chapter.
John Battaglia Jr
As was mentioned in chapter 3, Zein Isa was the terrorist/zealot who killed his (to him) wayward daughter but who knew enough of American culture to pretend in court that he killed her in self-defense. John Battaglia was a home-grown terrorist who, to jump ahead a bit, left his defense attorney with no options at all. His grandfather was a mafioso who committed armed robbery; his father was a lieutenant colonel-a rigid and abusive disciplinarian, who once broke a guitar over his son's back. His mother, a depressed alcoholic, committed suicide when John was seventeen. He went downhill after that, becoming explosively violent, once pulling a pistol on one of his two brothers. He both dealt and abused cocaine, for which he was arrested.
He appeared to straighten out to the extent of joining the marines and later became a CPA. Marrying for the first time in 1985, he quickly showed a dark side, getting into murderous rages over trifles. He was physically abusive toward his wife, Michelle, who kicked him out. He stalked her and attacked her viciously, continuing to do so after she again kicked him out. After throwing a rock at her car, John spent eight days in jail, but in general he earned the reputation of being the "Teflon Man," always managing to wriggle out of probable arrests. He bugged Michelle's phone, which allowed him to listen to her conversations and thus anticipate her next move, thereby dodging whatever charges she tried to bring against him.
John then met another woman, Mary Pearle, whose family he envied because of their much higher social status and wealth. Ignoring the warning signs of his past abuse charges, she married him-only to discover that he was still abusive and menacing. Mary threw him out because of his threats. By this time they had two small girls. Still abusing cocaine, he entered the house despite Mary's order of protection and assaulted her severely. Eventually they separated and lived apart.
Two years later, in 2001, John insisted on visitation rights with his daughters-at his place. When they arrived, he phoned Mary, and while the phone line was open, he shot both girls to death so that their mother couldn't help but hear their screams and the gunshots.
Right before his inevitable arrest, he went to a tattoo parlor, where, in a gesture of unaccustomed delicacy, he had images of the two justmurdered daughters made, one on each arm.
At his trial, the defense attorney, struggling to find some extenuating circumstance in this ridiculously open-and-shut case, tried to argue "bipolar manic disorder" as the "illness" that drove his client to commit such a depraved act. The jury was unmoved, and John was convicted of first-degree murder. If indeed he had any "highs" at all, they were in response to his abuse of amphetamines and cocaine, not to an unsubstantiated mental disorder. He showed no remorse at trial-in keeping with the extreme narcissistic traits that are intrinsic to his psychopathy.9
Latasha Pulliam
The sad case of six-year-old Shenosha Richards, a kindergarten pupil at the Sexton Elementary School on Chicago's South Side, began when she came home from school the afternoon of March 21, 1991. She was led away by an acquaintance of her mother, Dwight Jordan (known as Tank) and his girlfriend, twenty-year-old Latasha Pulliam. Only the day before, Latasha had taken the girl to a children's park. Shenosha mentioned this to her mother that evening, adding that she "had a nice time." Her mother warned her not to go anywhere with strangers. Probably the girl no longer regarded Latasha as a stranger; in any case she was willing to go that next afternoon with Tank and Latasha to her apartment nearby, with promises of a snack and a movie.
What happened next is depressingly clear, although who did what to the girl is partly obscured by self-serving statements from the two abductors. The girl was left alone at first with Tank, an ex-convict in his for ties, while Latasha went elsewhere to take cocaine. She returned to find Tank trying unsuccessfully, so she said, to rape Shenosha. According to Latasha, he then took a bottle of shoe polish, in a kind of rape by other means, inserting it in and out of the girl's rectum amid her crying and her promises she wouldn't tell anyone.
When I spoke recently with Dr. Paul Fauteck, however, who had conducted a forensic evaluation with Latasha before her 1991 trial, he told me that she had not been coerced
by Tank into hurting the girl. Instead, she had acted on her own. It was she who inserted the bottle. Dr. Fauteck found that she met the full criteria for psychopathy, according to Hare's checklist. It was when Latasha got Shenosha to acknowledge that she would indeed tell her mother that Latasha killed her, somehow hoping to escape being found out. Minutes before that, when the girl was screaming (after the assault on her body), Latasha led her into an empty apartment down the hall, where she proceeded to strangle the girl with an electrical cord, tightening and relaxing the cord by turns to frighten her. Finding a piece of wood with a protruding nail, Latasha shoved it into the girl's chest, puncturing her lungs in two places. Shenosha pleaded with her: `Don't hurt me, I love you!" Latasha then pulled the cord tighter for several minutes, which led to the girl's death. To make sure, she next struck the girl's head with the metal part of the hammer, fracturing the skull. After tossing the girl's sneakers out the window, Latasha placed her body in a garbage can, covering it as best she could, and then ran off (as Tank had already done a while before). Later that afternoon, Mrs. Richards discovered her daughter's body in the garbage can, mistaking it at first for a doll. As she later told the court: "That doll was my baby." 10
Latasha and Tank were quickly arrested. At trial he was sentenced to life without parole; she, to death. Appeals were mounted on the grounds that Latasha herself had been tortured and sexually abused throughout her childhood by an alcoholic mother who also forced her into prostitution. At fifteen she was made pregnant by one of her mother's boyfriends. What the defense assumed was a more compelling point was: Latasha was "mentally retarded," with an IQ of 69, and thus not "death-eligible" by statute. This argument fell flat because previous tests showed IQs in the 70s, besides which, everyone who spoke with her noted how her vocabulary was much too sophisticated for a "retarded" person."" In addition, the abuse Latasha suffered at the hands of her mother failed to win the sympathy of the jury, owing to similar abuses (burning with cigarettes, scalding) that she was known to have inflicted on her own two daughters, who were at the time five and two.
When I interviewed Latasha some fifteen years later, she was by then remorseful and tearful when recounting the torture-murder of the little girl. Calm and cooperative in recent years, she had been assaultive when first in the prison, and had even forced another prisoner to have oral sex with her. In 2003 Governor George Ryan of Illinois rescinded all death penalties (to the consternation of the victims' families), before which time Latasha would pretend to hear voices-as if to plead mental illness as a mitigating factor when the other appeals were overturned. It was this feigned illness that led Dr. Fauteck to diagnose her as a malingerer,12 though how "abnormal" such behavior is in a person awaiting execution is an open question. Even to this day, Latasha denies taking such an active role in torturing the girl, insisting that Tank had forced her to confess to things done mostly by him-or else he would kill her younger daughter, Patrice.
This appalling murder has some of the elements of Rashomon, the famous Japanese story of a murder retold in four different versions by four different witnesses.13 Was Tank really the main culprit? Or was Latasha? Going over the evidence again, I must conclude that Latasha bore the major responsibility. Tank was not even in the room where Shenosha was strangled, stabbed, struck, and killed. In many murders committed by two persons, each finds it convenient to shift the blame onto the other, which in turn contributes to a crime more violent and heinous-more evil, if you will-than either participant would have felt comfortable doing on his own.
There would be no reason for Mrs. Richards to feel sympathy for Latasha, even at this late date. I did feel a measure of sympathy when I took into account the well-documented torture she had suffered once her parents split, leaving Renee, her mother, as the sole "caregiver." We know that violence breeds violence, and extreme violence often breeds the same in the next generation. What Renee committed was "soul murder"" for which the law is rarely able to prosecute to the extent it merits. What Latasha committed was actual murder, which the law finds easier to deal with. Was it inevitable that Latasha, violated and dehu manized as she was, would grow up to be a murderer? No. Was it far more likely that she would injure or kill a child than would a woman not exposed to such a malefic environment? Certainly. So what we have here is the transmission of evil down the generations-not from genes so much as from parental cruelty and sadism.
As I will show in the section "Parents from Hell" (chapter 8), some children do escape. But those reared in broken homes and in poverty, and who have limited intellectual resources, have few escape routes. Referring to Latasha's background, one of the prosecutors asked the rhetorical question "Is that an excuse for what she did to Shenosha Richards? Wouldn't an abused person know the pain that you go through when you get abused?"" Naively, we might think so. What is nearer the truth, however, is that parental cruelty often rewires the brain itself, augmenting the desire for revenge (to be taken out on others, who, like Shenosha, are as weak and helpless as the formerly abused child-and future abuser, Latasha-had been years earlier). This limits the menu of responses to stress down to one that was learned all too well before, greatly increasing the likelihood that one will in the future resort to violence rather than shun violence. Latasha has now spent half her life outside and half her life in prison. Having been raised in what can only be called a manufactury of evil, the only sympathetic humanity she has come to experience has been, ironically, at Illinois' Dwight Correctional Center, the only home she will ever know and the only one where she has known kindness.
KIDNAP
In earlier times, before the public attitude toward the death penalty began to change, kidnap, along with murder, treason, and killing an officer of the law, were all viewed categorically as meriting the death penalty. In the case of kidnap (the legal term for the act of kidnapping), it was the agony of the family members, as well as of the kidnap victim not knowing what was going to happen next, that added up to the kind of extreme psychological torture for which the death penalty was seen as appropriate. Formerly the bulk of kidnaps were motivated by greed: payment of a ransom was the quid pro quo for the return of a loved one, who more often than not was a child. We have become familiar with other types of kidnap over the past decades, to say nothing of the wholesale use of kidnap by ruthless political regimes. In my visits to Haiti during "Papa Doc" Duvalier's rule in the 1960s, I learned of many people among the well-to-do who were abducted by the Tonton Macoute16 in the middle of the night, never to return. Then there were the political dissidents-the desaparecidos or "disappeared ones"-in Argentina. Space does not permit a complete list of such atrocities.
In recent times, we have become familiar with kidnaps motivated by factors other than greed. There is kidnap for the purpose of rape (almost invariably ending in murder) and kidnap in order to secure, and to keep indefinitely, an unwilling sexual partner. Cases of the latter sort involve a pedophile and his (it is always a "his") child victim. The pedophile is not interested in ransom but in the unlawful imprisonment of the child, usually for sexual purposes, for months or for years; the agony of the parents is thus magnified a thousandfold, incalculable really, and well into the realm where one speaks of evil.
In 2006 the story of Natascha Kampusch came to light. She had been abducted and held captive in an underground bunker for eight years by an Austrian pedophile, Wolfgang Priklopil, until at age eighteen she was able to break away and return to her family.17 One is usually declared legally dead after being missing for seven years, so her parents must have assumed she had been killed by her abductor, even though parents "hope against hope," no matter what. A similar case happened in Long Island in 1993, when John Esposito, the forty-three-year-old bachelor friend of twelve-year-old Katie Beers and her family, abducted her and kept her in a secret underground room beneath his garage. Access to that room, which Esposito, like Priklopil, had constructed himself, was guarded by a two-hundred-pound slab of concrete; her little room was ventilated and equipped with a bat
hroom and a TV. Clearly Esposito meant this to be a long-term residence. But having abducted a twelve-year-old boy some years earlier, he was immediately a suspect. He broke down after intense police surveillance, with the happy result that he confessed sixteen days after Katie's disappearance.18 From a psychological standpoint these two men had less than the full panel of psychopathic traits. Deceitfulness was, however, certainly part of Esposito's repertoire: before he finally confessed, he managed to shed tears during a public interview for the "missing little girl." These two men might better be characterized as introverted, socially awkward pedophiles with some of the narcissistic (Factor-I) traits, especially exploitativeness and lying. In the more flagrant examples of psychopathy, there were plenty of warning signs early on unfortunately ignored until great damage was done ... as the following case will illustrate.
Kenneth Parnell
Parnell was born in 1931 in Texas to a mother who was a religious fanatic. She made life intolerable for his father, who divorced and abandoned the family when Kenneth was five. At thirteen he was sexually molested by a boarder at his mother's place. Following this he set a fire, for which he was incarcerated for a year. Upon his release he stole a car, which landed him in a reformatory for two years.19 By age twenty he was arrested for sodomizing a boy and for impersonating a police officer with a fake deputy badge.20 He was remanded to a hospital in California, escaping when still in his twenties, only to be recaptured again and to escape again. This led to his spending three and a half years in San Quentin, after which he violated parole and was arrested yet again. Parnell had two brief marriages in the mid 1950s and had a daughter by each; he was technically bisexual, but predominantly homosexual. In the 1960s he graduated to armed robbery, for which he spent six years in a Utah prison. The crime that brought him notoriety happened a bit later-in 1972. That was the year he kidnapped seven-year-old Steven Stayner in Ukiah, California. Besides forcing the boy to perform oral sex and to submit to (quite painful) anal sex, Parnell conned the boy into thinking that his parents "couldn't afford to keep him anymore," and that a judge had awarded Parnell with custody. Furthermore, his new name was to be "Dennis." Steven was kept for over seven years-to the point where he no longer recalled his last name. It was when Parnell abducted yet another boy (a five-year-old, this time) that Steven, now fifteen, ran away while Parnell was at his job. He carried the boy on his back and went to a police station, where the truth gradually emerged and Steven's true name was finally recognized. Pedophilia and nonfatal kidnap were not viewed with the seriousness they deserved in the California courts of that era, so Parnell was sentenced only to seven years. In 2003 at age sev enty-one he actually tried to purchase a four-year-old boy, with the stipulation that the boy have a "clean rectum"-a request that raised a lot of red flags to the person he was dealing with. For this attempt at child molestation he was arrested; he spent his remaining years in prison, dying at age seventy-six in 2008.
The Anatomy of Evil Page 20