Apropos psychopathy, in my experience with prisoners and forensic patients, those who show what Hare has called "criminal versatility"being arrested for six or more different varieties of crime-tend almost invariably to meet the full criteria for psychopathy. You hardly need to look at the rest of the record. As a "career criminal," Parnell's arrests touched on the following: armed robbery, sex offenses, escape, kidnap, theft, arson, and fraud (impersonating a police officer)-for a total of seven. Parnell was one of those comparatively rare persons who scarcely lets a day go by without doing something bad; many of those actions (sex offenses, kidnap, arson) were also of the sort that evoke the reaction "evil."
Gary Steven Krist
The inspiration for kidnap in this case was greed. Krist, born in the Northwest in 1945, had a checkered past already by the time he was twenty: drug abuse, assault, theft, weapons possession, time in reformatories, and escape. The more striking of his psychopathic traits were grandiosity and superficial charm. Some said he could be incredibly charming; others, that he "had an ego as big as my office. 112 ' The grandiosity came through in some of his comments, such as: "I didn't want to lead a mediocre life; I wanted to make an impact on the world ... be remembered"; or on another occason: "I think I am a different species; I don't think scientists have genetically classified me." 22 Krist might have had a point in a way: with an IQ measured at 160, he was brighter than most people with so-called genius-level (that is, above 13 5 IQ) intelligence. When he was twenty-four, he thought up a scheme to kidnap a young woman from a prominent family and then followed through with it. Once abducted, the woman, Barbara Mackle, was buried in a wooden box a foot and a half underground in rural Georgia, where she was given water, candy, blankets, and tubes to breathe through. She was held here pending the payment of a half-million-dollar ransom by her father. Kidnap was the sixth variety of crime Krist had committed, which put him in the "criminal versatility" category-the same as in the Parnell case. The ransom was paid, and Barbara was rescued after three and a half days in the underground box. The circumstances of the kidnap -the elaborate outfitting of the box, the prominence of the victimmade it a high-profile crime with the aura of evil surrounding it. Though sentenced to life in prison, Krist was paroled ten years later.
In his forties, Krist entertained hopes of becoming a physician, but when his old record was unearthed, he was denied this possibility, despite his charm and intelligence. Years went by, and Krist surfaced again in a way that brings to mind the French saying plus ca change, plus c'est la mime chose: the more things change, the more they stay the same. The "same" in this case is the penchant for the underground. Krist was arrested in 2006 when a lab was discovered under the ground, beneath a shed at his home. The lab, outfitted with water, light, electricity, and an escape tunnel, was used for processing a million dollars worth of cocaine. The setup showed an ingenuity similar to what he devised in the Mackle kidnap.
Richard Allen Davis
The idea of kidnap as a prelude to rape and murder was imprinted upon the public mind with especial force following the murder of Polly Klaas in 1993 by ex-convict and career-criminal Richard Allen Davis. The middle of five children from a working-class family in California's Bay Area, Davis was raised by a number of stepmothers and his grandmother after his parents divorced when he was eleven. He grew furious at his mother when she brought home various boyfriends, ostensibly for sex, which led him to regard her as a "whore." It did not enhance her image in his eyes that she once burned his hand because he smoked. She was punitive in other ways as well. Living with his father for a time after the divorce did not improve the situation; his equally punitive father once broke his jaw. In 1969 Davis's father turned him and his older brother in to the authorities for incorrigibility." A juvenile delinquent at least since age twelve, Davis stole and committed burglaries and forgeries. He always carried knives. Acquaintances spoke of his having "evil eyes." He took delight in dousing cats and dogs in gasoline and setting them afire; once he even cut up a live cow. He entered the army at seventeen but was discharged a year later because of fighting with knives. He also abused drugs: marijuana, cocaine, and heroin.
By age twenty-one, in 1975, he had accumulated twenty arrests for a variety of crimes, including auto theft, for which he was jailed briefly. The next year he attempted a rape at knifepoint, but this was foiled by a police officer. Later, in jail, he faked a suicide attempt, was sent to a psychiatric ward-and escaped. In 1977 he was given a long sentence for attempted kidnap; he was labeled a psychopath at that time. Released in 1982, he kidnapped again and was sentenced in 1985, this time for sixteen years, only to be released prematurely in 1993. It was in October of that year that he sneaked into the home of twelve-year-old Polly Klaas, carried her off, raped and then killed her. The crime was given national attention. When Davis was caught two months later, his case led to California's "three strikes and you're out" law in which felons are sentenced automatically to life without parole after their third felony conviction.24 Sentenced to death in San Jose's Superior Court in 1996, Davis's final beau geste (besides giving the finger to the judge) was to say that Polly's father had sexually molested her-a lie aimed apparently at "leveling the playing field," psychologically speaking, as though he were no worse than her dad. After handing down the death penalty, Judge Hastings had the last, and best, word, when he said: "Mr. Davis, this is always a traumatic and emotional decision for a judge. You made it very easy today by your conduct."25
RAPE
Most rapes of strangers are committed by men fairly low down in the social order, with poor social skills and strong contempt for women. When men from privileged backgrounds, with good looks and good manners, rape, and do so repeatedly, we are more apt to apply the term evil-probably because we expect better behavior from men who have enjoyed every privilege, and experience greater shock and disgust (key ingredients in the "evil" response) when such men indulge in sexual violence. There is a dispute nowadays, sometimes acrimonious, as to whether rape should be viewed primarily as a sexual crime or as a crime primarily involved with a quest for power by means of violence. Like the rabbi's answer to some "either-or" conundrum Is it this? Or is it that?to which he says "Yes," the correct answer here is "Yes," meaning that rape is both a sexual crime and a violent crime. What is not the same, admittedly, in every case, is the balance between these two motivating forces. Some men are raised in families where the mother's behavior fosters a contempt for women, either because of her cruelty or (as in the case of Richard Davis) her flaunted promiscuity. Yet other rapists have grown up in families that were intact and not notably troubled, or at least not abusive, and where there had been, in addition, no history of either mental illness or head injury. Somehow these men became predators anyway, sometimes even psychopaths, with a sense of entitlement: women were theirs for the taking. One always suspects heredity in such cases-some innate tendency to the narcissistic part of the psychopathic picture. Here is an example.
Fred Coe
In the absence of abuse, neglect, or any of the other known "risk factors" for violence or psychopathy, there is no ready explanation as to what turned Fred Coe into a multiple rapist. He was born in 1947 into a prominent household in Spokane, Washington. His father was the managing editor of the local paper. His mother, Ruth Coe, an attractive woman, was obsessed nevertheless with appearances: she pushed Fred and his sister into having cosmetic surgery they didn't need, since they, too, were very attractive. Ruth was extraordinarily overattached to her son; both lacked moral scruples in a way quite out of keeping with their status in the community. A B student in high school, he would break into the teacher's desk and change the record to give himself A's. He lied artfully when threatened with expulsion, ascribing the "error" to "an administrative mistake." When he married, he was broke most of the time, and he would instruct his wife how to skip restaurants without paying, explaining to her, with the self-serving philosophy of the psychopath, that a person without money had an "ethical right to s
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Fred imagined himself a famous writer-the "next Hemingway or Shakespeare"-but was utterly without talent; his prose was overblown, filled with cutesy puns ("cuntree, Amareeka, unWashedington, Catlicks, Proudestunts") of the sort we associate with manic patients. He lived a parasitic life, cadging money from his parents on into his thirties, earning nothing at a real estate job he held only briefly. He was fired for paying his basic expenses with bounced checks, all the while boasting he would become first the top salesman in the firm and that he would one day be "one of the richest men in the world."27 Typical of his grandiosity, he went out and bought a whole fancy wardrobe with money he didn't have before starting the job. This, despite his wife admonishing him: "Fred, just go to work. Sell a house. Then buy your clothes!"28
He committed his first documented rape in 1978 when he was thirtyone; this was followed by as many as forty more, though the exact figure will never be known. The influence of his family, the shameless loyalty of his mother, combined with the failure of the police over the next three years to make the needed connections between the various rapes occurring in Spokane's South Hill section delayed his being brought to justice. And when in August 1981 he was finally sentenced to seventy-five years in prison-as a sexual psychopath and rapist-his mother, outraged that her "boy" could be accused and convicted-went and hired a hit man for $4,000 to kill the judge. The hit man was a police undercover agent, whose testimony got her sentenced as well-albeit to a much briefer stay. Fred Coe claims innocence to this day. The rape victims, one of whom came close to suicide, would have had no trouble recognizing the evil and cunning that lay behind the suave and handsome mask of this man. Many other were fooled. As one person put it during the trial: "Mr. Coe is no ordinary criminal. He is ... a pathological liar and a consummate actor whose quickness of mind cannot be disputed. Like most psychopaths ... he has spent his entire lifetime outwitting others.... We, his potential victims, have reason to worry now that Mr. Coe will be clever enough in the end to outwit even the most intelligent members of the community, persuading them he is safe to be at large."29
The best clue we have in trying to unlock the mystery of Coe's psychopathy lies not so much in the pampering and misplaced loyalty of his mother as in the mother herself. When testifying on her behalf at court, Coe's father mentioned that his wife had undergone a change of personality after several operations and later, after menopause, when she went first into a severe depression. Treated with various medications by a psychiatrist, she went into a manic phase, buying all sorts of expensive things that she didn't need, until her condition was brought under control with lithium. It is quite likely that Fred's extreme grandiosity and his impulsivity, even his penchant for foul language (evident in his writings), were a milder version of his mother's manic illness. There are of course many grandiose psychopaths with no tendencies to mania; the vast majority of manic persons are not psychopathic. But there is an overlap. Added to this factor (which I feel is the decisive one in Coe's case) was his mother's blind loyalty and amorality: he could do no wrong in her eyes. Fred had no internal brakes. Had both parents consistently supplied external brakes by making him adhere to proper social standards, he might have grown up the supersalesman he fancied himself, or an engaging master of ceremonies, instead of the egomaniacal fraud and repeat-rapist that he became.
SADISTIC MURDER
In any discourse on evil, we will inevitably make frequent reference to the kindred concept of sadism, as touched on in chapter 1. Twenty years ago, "Sadistic Personality" made a brief appearance in the official manual of diagnosis used by the American Psychiatric Association.30 The term was dropped in subsequent editions, largely under political pressure from feminist groups. They worried that defense attorneys in cases of wife bashing and the like would try to get their clients off the hook, making it look as though these men "suffered" from sadistic personality and (supposedly) couldn't help doing what they did. Obviously the sadist does not "suffer" from this disorder; others suffer from it. I believe the disorder belongs in the manual because, after all, it exists, and there are many who suffer-terribly-from what sadists do to them. But given the chicanery defense attorneys will sometimes resort to-blaming the death of Jennifer Levin at the hands (indeed, the hands, for she was strangled) of Robert Chambers as though it were just "rough sex"-it is easy to sympathize with the objections that the feminists were voicing.31 "Sadistic Personality" was described as having eight different characteristics, of which one needed to exhibit any four (or more) of them to qualify. Included were using cruelty or violence to establish dominance, humiliating someone in the presence of others, intimidation, limiting another person's freedom, and taking pleasure in the suffering of others. This last, italicized item is the key one. Some of the stories mentioned so far in this chapter had to do with persons who intimidated or humiliated or cruelly dominated-but didn't necessarily get a thrill out of the pain they were inflicting on someone. They showed sadism-but not the quintessence of sadism: relishing the pain they forced others to experience. This is the very quality that was front and center in the persons sketched in the paragraphs below.
The Hate Crime in jasper Texas
In early June 1998, three drunk men John William King, Shawn Berry, and Lawrence Brewer-kidnapped a black man, James Byrd Jr., who was hoping for a ride home after the bars closed. The three men "offered" Byrd a ride but first clubbed him to near unconsciousness and then hitched him to the back of their pickup truck. They dragged him, still conscious and undoubtedly suffering incredible pain, for some three miles, until they drove past a sewage drain where Byrd's head and right arm were pulled off. Their deed done, the three men then dumped Byrd's mutilated remains in a cemetery where black people were buried and set off for a barbecue. All three men were avowed white supremacists who had met while in prison. Among his tattoos King had one depicting a black man hanging, though to be fair, King was an equal-opportunity bigot: his murderous hatred extended to Jews, Asians, and gays as well. King had been adopted into a family of people who were not racist and who found him uncontrollable as an adolescent. This points in all probability to a genetic factor from a source, however, that we know nothing about. Having left many traces of their despicable act, the three were arrested the next day. At their trial the jury was made up of eleven whites and one black. King, proud of his act, (along with unrepentant Brewer) received the death penalty; Berry, life in prison. One can gauge King's level of remorse from his reply to a reporter who asked him, "What do you have to say to the Byrd family?"-to which King said, "Suck my dick."32 This was the first time in Texas history that a white man received the death penalty for killing a black man. One reporter wrote of how the townspeople, black and white, showed a "stunning display of racial unity," adding that "in the face of naked evil, a community comes together."33
Phillip Skipper
When people see patterns of behavior repeating down the generations, they like to say, "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree." We saw an example of this with Ruth Coe and her son, Fred. It's not always clear, of course, how much these patterns reflect heredity or how much the children's mimicry of their parents. As I've mentioned, the worse the environment while growing up, the harder it is to detect what heredity may have added to the picture. But it probably means something that the father of Phil Skipper was sent to prison for life in Louisiana for rape, aggravated sodomy, and murder. One of Phil's two sisters died of a drug overdose; the other, Lisa, was married to John Hoyt. Phil and his wife took a teenager, Johnny Baillio, under their wing, and all five lived close together in a rural area near the border with Mississippi. The two men and young Johnny were part of a small gang, led by Phil, of racist thugs, modeling themselves after the Ku Klux Klan. They were all poor, lived in trailers, and had arrest records for assault and battery, drug dealing, and, later on, for murder and grave robbing. Lisa was a cocaine addict. It is a testimony to the way a dependent child will often cling to an abusive parent figure to note how Baillio, when
he first moved in, put up with Phil's torture. Phil would tie Johnny to a tree and burn him with a cigar, he made the boy submit to fellatio at knifepoint, and beat him with his fists or a garden hose. Yet Johnny remained loyal to Phil and readily joined in when Phil popped the suggestion, "Let's go out and kill a nigger."34
The Anatomy of Evil Page 21