The Anatomy of Evil

by Michael H. Stone

  SOME DEFINITIONS

  Aficionados of movies, television, and contemporary "airport" fiction will have noticed that the theme running through so many of the programs and books is, with almost monotonous regularity, serial killers. Perhaps because we in America no longer have a frontier, serial killers have replaced cowboys as objects of popular fascination. There is even a secret admiration, since these are men who do as they please, whereas the rest of us are obliged to rein in our more violent impulses.

  Not all serial killers are cut from the same cloth; as a result, the phrase is used in confusing ways. There are three major varieties. The serial murders of patients by unscrupulous nurses and doctors-a few of whom we encountered in chapter 6-make up one of the less common varieties: one in which a sexual motif is lacking. A second variety concerns murders with fairly long intervals in between of random strangers, irrespective of age or gender. These killers are misanthropic men who simply hate people; again, there is no sexual motif. This is also the rarest type. Finally, there is the largest (albeit still uncommon) group: men committing serial sexual homicide. When people speak of "serial killers," this is the type they usually mean. The sexual element is central to the type, since the scenario is one of rape followed by murder (more common) or else murder followed by sex with the corpse (this necrophilic type is less common).

  We could even speak of yet another variety of serial killing with a sexual overtone but without rape. If we were to make this into a fourth type, it would truly be the rarest of all the varieties: serial homicide committed by women who are seeking vengeance symbolically for sexual wrongs done to them (incest, usually). But I prefer to categorize this scenario as an uncommon variant of serial sexual homicide-one in which more attention is paid to the motive than to the overt act. The men (and the rare women) in this category belong to the higher levels of the scale: Categories 17 to 22.

  There are not many persons who devote themselves single-mindedly to torture in peacetime that do not show at the same time a perverse sexual preoccupation. In times of war or group conflict, there is no lack of torturers who serve as functionaries of the state: men (and a few women) who would not be recognized by their friends and neighbors as sadists or as otherwise abnormal people. They are just doing a nasty job that (according to what they have been made to believe by the leader or some other higher-up) just "has to be done." After the conflict is over, most such persons return to their ordinary lives and their ordinary families, continuing to pursue their ordinary work. I in no way mean to place them outside the realm of evil; but theirs is a different kind of evil than the one we are focusing on in this book. For brevity, in this chapter "serial killer"-unless otherwise specified-will refer only to men who have committed serial sexual homicide. The FBI prefers to limit the phrase to men who have killed at least three persons, even though a pattern strongly suggestive of serial killing may emerge after only two murders (because of similarities in method and choice of victim). The reason for this definition is to allay anxiety in the public. There are more occurrences of two similar rape-murders than of three. If the media began writing scare-headlines after every instance of two such murders within a short time span in the same area, terror and hysteria would be rampant in the community, which might interfere with the painstaking detective work needed to catch the killer.'

  DIVERSITY IN THE RANKS

  When I began to study serial killers some twenty years ago, I knew of only a dozen or so. My main interest was to find peculiarities in their backgrounds that might help explain why they did what they did. The personality of serial killers was of special interest to me, since personality disorder was the area of my research and very little had been written about the topic at that time. As a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst trained during the 1960s, I had been taught that psychiatric conditions, even the most serious ones like schizophrenia, were caused by bad environmentwhich usually meant bad parents, which in turn usually meant bad mothers. Heredity was given short shrift, since it seemed that if you were born with a certain condition there was no point in trying to cure it: this was an affront to our American optimism that said you could cure anything (provided you weren't born with it). Only after I finished my training did I come to the realization that "nature" was of great importance in understanding psychiatric conditions; not only that, but that nature and nurture were inextricably bound up with one another, each interacting with the other in often complex and poorly understood ways.

  I made a spreadsheet that contained a list of each serial killer with as many "variables" as I could think of that might help me understand the similarities and differences among serial killers (as well as among murderers of other types). For "nature" variables, I looked at the close relatives of each man: which relatives were mentally ill, which had committed crimes (especially crimes of violence). For "nurture" variables, I looked at the makeup of the family: Were the parents known to be caring and consistent? Had either been abusive to the future serial killer-either physically, verbally, or sexually? Which men came from intact homes, which from families where the parents divorced early on? Which ones came from fragmented families where the parents had so many divorces and remarriages that the family tree was a crazy quilt-where no one seemed to know who belonged to whom and no "caretaker" seemed much concerned with any of the children, stepchildren, foster children, half-siblings, and in general the chaotic mishmash that substituted for "family life"? How many of the men had been adopted, and what, if anything, did we know about their natural parents: Were they mentally stable? Had either been arrested for crimes? And what were the adoptive parents like-kind and devoted or neglectful and exploitative?

  I realized that nature and nurture weren't the whole story: some of the men developed epilepsy or meningitis or some other disease of the brain that might have an effect on future behavior. Others met with serious head injuries that caused long periods of unconsciousness and damaged key areas of the brain that were important in governing behavior. Sometimes these injuries were just plain bad luck. But sometimes bad parenting helped to create this bad luck: a neglectful parent might ignore a rambunctious son whose wild behavior leads to a head injury. Then there is the occasional parent who, to turn the phrase around, added injury to insult by smashing a boy's head with a wooden plank. This was but one of the indignities visited upon Henry Lee Lucas by his mother.'

  Before these men became serial killers, a great many of them engaged during their adolescence in what some have called "rehearsal" behaviors: assaults on family members or strangers, armed robbery, arson, and animal torture. They graduated over time from these types of (juvenile) delinquent acts to the sex-murders by which they would later become identified. Material of this sort went into my spreadsheet as well. Another item of great importance is drug abuse. Alcohol and many of the street drugs like cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine, and angel dust3 have the effect of priming the pump toward action (murderous action, in this case) by drastically lowering inhibitions and by clouding judgment. Here again, nature and nurture are often intertwined: some of the serial killers had alcoholic parents who either passed on their genetic tendency to alcoholism or at least taught their sons-by example-the charms of liquor.

  When I started out and knew only of those dozen or so serial killers, I couldn't make any generalizations about drug abuse. But now, twenty years and 130 serial killers later, it's clear that a third of the men had one or both parents who were alcoholic. Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler; John Wayne Gacy; and Peter Sutcliffe, England's Yorkshire Ripper (nicknames being the norm rather than the exception among these men) all had alcoholic fathers. Tommy Lynn Sells and Mike DeBardeleben had alcoholic mothers. In the families of Gary Heidnick and Henry Lee Lucas, both parents were alcoholic. With some of the men, alcohol was both a nature and a nurture factor: before Gary Heidnick grew up to become Philadelphia's Cellar of Horrors killer (chaining black women to his cellar wall, raping, and then killing them), his alcoholic father used to get into a rage when four-ye
ar-old Gary was crying-and would then suspend his son outside a fourth-floor window by his feet, threatening to drop him if he didn't stop crying.4

  One of the problems I encountered in my search for the causes of serial killing stemmed from having to rely mostly on biographies, since I was able to interview personally only a small number of men. The biographies told me a great deal about the personalities of these men and something about their immediate families and past criminal records. But little mention was made about certain aspects of their past that we now know are very important tip-offs to later antisocial or even violent behavior. One such tip-off that got a lot of attention forty years ago-its accuracy has been debated back and forth since then-is the triad of childhood fire setting, bed-wetting, and animal torture.5 Children whose behavior included this triad were considered at high risk for committing crimes (that might include sexual crimes) as they became adults. Since arson is a crime, it is likely to come to the attention of the authorities. Animal torture may not get much attention at first, but that part of a serial killer's history comes to the surface after he is arrested, thanks to all the investigative work that surrounds the arrest and trial. But bed-wetting is no crime, so it is often ignored. From the biographies, I found that about one serial killer in twenty was known to show the whole triad. There were just as many who were known to have set fires and tortured animals (usually cats) but whose bed-wetting (or, more medically, enuresis) history was unknown. David Berkowitz, known to most of us as the "Son of Sam" for his lover's lane murders of 1976, recorded the number of fires he set in his teen years: 1,488.6 He also tortured animals. Did he also have enuresis? We don't know. In any case, animal torture is a much more important indicator of possible violence in the future, because a boy setting a cat on fire or hurling rocks at a dog means that he has no compassion for living creatures, is indifferent to their pain, and is in all likelihood getting vengeance vicariously for being treated outrageously by one or another parent. There are many serial killers, such as Albert DeSalvo (the Boston Strangler), Ed Kemper, Gary Ridgway (the Green River Killer), and Arthur Shawcross, who were brutalized by a parent and who also tortured animals.

  Attention-deficit disorder in children and adolescents (exhibited as inability to concentrate and tendency to be fidgety, restless, and irritable) is another risk factor for later antisocial behaviors.? ADD, as it is usually abbreviated, is more common in boys than in girls; the tendency is often passed from father to son. Many serial killers probably had this condition in their younger years, but it is seldom mentioned in their biographies. An exception is Richard Ramirez, the Los Angeles Night Stalker, who, as we now know, had ADD as a child.'

  Looking at all of these and similar risk factors made one thing clear, however: there is no one-size-fits-all profile for serial killers. Instead, there is a complicated mix of nature and nurture adversities, on top of which are still other highly unpredictable situations, such as being born "funnylooking," which leads to being mocked by classmates. Coming from a poor or even a working-class family adds to the chances for aggressive behavior,9 as does coming from a culture of machismo, where it is common for men not only to control women but to use physical force to exercise that control. Or, there may be a seduction by a close relative early in one's life that suddenly and drastically creates an obsession, an idea that one can never get out of one's mind and that shapes forever the pattern of one's behavior. The pattern-here, an addiction really-may be one of violent revenge that one must carry out again and again on all who resemble those who mistreated him in adolescence. I will give an example of a serial killer transformed and transfixed by such an experience in his mid-teens. But before that, I would like to provide a "menu" of characteristics and occurrences before and after birth that we see more or less frequently in the ranks of serial killers: attributes that contribute importantly to the development of a serial killer, granted that no serial killer shows all of them, and a few show almost none.

  THE MENU

  From the Nature Side

  • Mental Illness (severe, with psychosis)

  • Schizophrenia

  • Manic-Depression (especially the manic type)

  • Autism or Asperger's Syndrome

  • Delusional Disorder

  Psychiatric Conditions (less severe, without psychosis)

  • Attention Deficit Disorder (with or without hyperactivity)

  • Alcoholism (of the familial/inheritable type)

  • Epilepsy (such as temporal-lobe epilepsy)

  • Inordinate sexual drive (in the absence of overstimulation in early life; may be related in some men to very high innately determined testosterone levels)

  Personality Disorders (inheritance accounts for about half the disorder)

  • Antisocial (more common in males)

  • Psychopathic (more common in males)

  • Schizoid (chief characteristic: aloofness; more common in males)

  • Sadistic (more common in males)

  • Paranoid

  • Impulsive-Aggressive/Intermittent Explosive

  From the Nurture Side

  • Parental (any primary caretaker) cruelty/physical abuse

  • Severe parental neglect/abandonment

  • Severe parental verbal abuse/humiliation

  • Death of a parent

  • Growing up without a father

  • Parents divorce before child is sixteen

  • Being adopted

  • Family with low socioeconomic status

  • Parental sexual abuse/seduction, with subsequent hypersexuality. (This may include the repetitive witnessing of parental overt sexuality/promiscuity, sexual misuse of a sibling, and the like)

  • Brain disease or damage-especially head injury to frontal lobe(s)

  • Immersion in violent television-in psychologically vulnerable children

  Of Mixed or Uncertain Origin

  • Paraphilia (voyeurism, sexual sadism, bondage, exhibitionism, etc.)

  • Early "after-effects" of adverse nature-nurture events

  • Juvenile delinquency

  • Substance abuse (especially cocaine, methamphetamine, angel dust)

  • Alcoholism (if not primarily on a genetic basis)

  • Conduct disorder in childhood (can reflect nature: ADD or early signs of manic illness, or nurture: parental cruelty)

  • Animal torture and/or fire setting

  • Rape or other sexual offenses committed in adolescence

  As one can see from this list, these characteristics could be assigned to a simple set of categories: Bad Genes, Bad Parents, Bad Luck (head injury, for example), Bad Drugs, and "Raging Hormones."10 This menu, or "schema" can be understood as a collection of ingredients from which a prescription for violence in general may be written. The murderers and rapists sketched in previous chapters showed either a few or many items from this menu. What nudges some men who have a number of these characteristics to go in the direction of serial killing cannot easily be pre dicted just from knowing their particular attributes from the menu. There must in addition be either abnormalities of a sexual nature that account for the difference or an exaggerated thrill seeking that can be satisfied only by intense sexual experiences.

  SEDUCTION AS A KEY ELEMENT IN A SERIAL KILLER

  I became acquainted through my work in a prison with a man in his forties who had, in the context of sexual encounters, strangled four men over a period of about two years. He had been married and divorced but was predominantly homosexual. His pattern was to meet a man in a gay bar, promise an evening of sex back at his place, and then, after he had gotten quite drunk, take the man to a secluded spot, engage in sex, and immediately afterward strangle the man to death with the image in his mind that the victim was actually his mother. This man had grown up as one of five brothers, among whom he had the misfortune to be his mother's "favorite." The father was a policeman; the mother, a security guard. A bulky, tough-as-nails woman, his mother was a formidable figure at home
; she was the chief disciplinarian, and she used her guard's baton to exact the same measure of obedience and submissiveness in her children as she did with the miscreants she collared during her workday. The man I had gotten to know in the prison had been beaten often and severely by his mother (sometimes to the point of bleeding)-a punishment also meted out to his brothers. But because he was her favorite, she enticed him at age fourteen into having intercourse with her on a regular basis. From that point on, there seemed to be an oscillation between the two activities: beating one day, sex the next, beating the third day, sex the day after, until he finally left home at nineteen. He developed a blistering hatred for his mother, which he said was 70 percent because of the beatings and 30 percent because he knew her seducing him was wrong. In his alcohol-besotted state he was killing his mother over and over again. In addition he had strong psychopathic traits: he was an inveterate liar and con man, full of charm and glib speech.

  From the standpoint of the Gradations scale, this man would be placed in Category 17 for serial sexual murder without torture. One might not think of him as an "evil" person; the evil resided in his habitual act when overcome by the urge to find and murder a potential victim in a bar. He was psychopathic but not sadistic; he was not a loner; in fact, he was extraverted, charming, and good-humored in ways that could have made him a supersalesman, were it not for his penchant for murder. He was also physically strong and athletically built, qualities that enabled him to overpower his prey. I believe it was the mother-son incest that created the pattern of sexual crime, but for which he may have either committed no crimes at all or only property crimes.