Another prominent quality of schizoid persons is a kind of eerie detachment. This is made worse over the years because of the lack of "feedback" from exchanges with other people, which leaves the schizoid person more enveloped in his own world, increasingly more strange or peculiar. Among serial killers, some of the most gruesome murders are committed by the schizoid killer, who can mutilate and carve up bodies with no disturbance of emotion, much as though he were a child whittling wood or taking apart a clock to see what's inside. It is this detachment, side by side with the bodily mutilation, that unfailingly elicits the reaction of "evil" in ordinary people. The fact that the killer may not have been cruel in his interactions with coworkers and acquaintances does not change that label. Under the umbrella of schizoid personality we find serial killers who-apart from their murders-seem decent, even likable. Yet we find others who are habitually cruel, outlandishly so, arousing in us no feeling of their being "human" at all: men whom people formerly, and more delicately, called "sports of nature"-who might now be considered freaks or mutants.
Dennis Nilsen is an example of a schizoid man who nevertheless was tormented by loneliness and hungered for closeness. He is as well known in England as Jeffrey Dahmer is in America, and for the same reason: both were lonely, schizoid men, homosexual, unable to form lasting attachments but hoping against hope to create fantasied (and necessarily short-term) friendships with men whom they then strangled and preserved for as long as they could within their apartments. The corpses, albeit no longer available for conversation, were at least guaranteed of "being there" for a while as companions for these lonely loners. They were also available for necrophilic sex, for however many days it took before the bodies became rank.
Dennis was the son of an English woman-a distant relative of the famous novelist Virginia Woolf-and a Norwegian soldier who had served in World War II. Theirs was a stormy marriage that ended when Dennis was four. The one relative he was close to was his maternal grandfather, and he was sent to live with him after his parents divorced. The grandfather died when Dennis was six, after which he felt bereft and alone in the world. Unlike many serial killers, he enjoyed pets and owned both a dog and a cat. He never suffered abuse of any kind and later held responsible jobs. He served for eleven years in the British Army where he learned to cook; later he served briefly as a police officer. In his early thirties, back in London, he fell into the habit of picking up men in bars, some gay, others not, and inviting them back to his apartment. Before developing this routine, however, Dennis had had a roommate, David Gallichan, with whom he lived for about two years in what was apparently a nonsexual relationship. When they parted ways, Dennis began to drink to excess, felt unbearably lonely-and went to bars to pick up men.
Dennis committed his first murder in 1978, when he was thirtythree. After strangling his invited guest, he kept the body for a time under the floorboards of his flat. For a time, he would pry up the floorboards and have sex with the corpse-until the body was in too great a state of decomposition and had to be disposed of. Altogether, Nilsen killed fifteen men, though there were others he released unharmed. It was when, in 1983, he tried to dismember his current victim and flush some of the remains down the toilet, that the plumbing got stopped up and neighbors complained of bad odors. When the authorities came to look into the matter, he confessed in detail and made no plea for compassion, nor did he show remorse.l9
At trial he was evaluated by psychiatrists from both the defense and prosecution sides. The defense concluded that Nilsen had an impaired sense of identity and was able to depersonalize to the point where he felt hardly anything about his murderous activities (this depersonalization is akin to the extreme detachment mentioned above). The prosecution asserted that he had a "mental abnormality," though not a "mental dis- order"20-perhaps a distinction without a difference. Be that as it may, he was clearly not psychotic. A distinguishing feature of Nilsen, compared with the majority of other serial killers, is that he did not seem dominated psychically by hatred. This is not to say that there wasn't any deeper skein in his psyche, somewhere beneath ready availability to consciousness, where hatred resided. Perhaps he felt hatred toward his mother, whose attention was diverted elsewhere when she remarried and had other children, or hatred toward the father who left the family after a few years of an alcohol-fueled stormy marriage.
Nilsen seemed curiously attached, if one can speak of such a thing, to the men-made-into-corpses whom he invited home. Were they symbolically connected with the beloved but now dead grandfather? Probably, but we cannot know. He does not strike us, at all events, as the typical serial killer, suffused with hatred for the family members of whom his victims were the unwitting representatives. Nilsen bore no animosity toward his victims. Another oddity about Nilsen: he was remarkably intelligent and even self-reflective. This came through in a letter he sent me when I had requested permission from him for a face-to-face interview. This is what he wrote:
Dear Michael: Thank you for your letter dated October 24 which I received yesterday [on All Soul's Day] ... on Halloween-this inappropriate meeting of magic and superstition with science and knowledge. I see your letter is replete with stock phrases from the True Crime genre: "genesis of various violent crimes," "the origins of criminal behavior" ... I think when one begins to pre-package humanity into neat dark boxes indelibly labeled "criminal" and "murderer" . . . then you begin to stray from knowing the full picture of dysfunction as being a primarily human one ... a dysfunction that precedes any artificiality of the deflecting label.
He went on to tell me that he was willing nonetheless to meet with me, but that the authorities where he is incarcerated would not permit this. (Nilsen was sentenced to a minimum of twenty-five years.) Unbeknownst to Nilsen, the letter he received was a stock letter sent him by an agency helping me to set up possible interviews; it was not written by me, personally. I am in total agreement with him about how such phrases tend to rob the recipient of the humanity he surely possesses, regardless of his criminal acts. That is, of course, doubly true of such a sentient and reflective person as Nilsen is-in spite of all that he has done.
Edmund Emil Kemper III stands in stark contrast to Dennis Nilsen. Like Ramirez and Kallinger, hatred was the driving force behind Kemper's serial murders. A giant when he reached his adult height of six foot nine (206 cm), at the age of fifteen Kemper had already shot both his paternal grandparents to death-with a gun the grandfather had given him as a present. His response to the "why" question when he was interrogated: "I just wanted to see what it felt like to kill Grandma and Grandpa.112 1 Kemper had already killed a cat by burying it alive, when he was just ten. At thirteen he shot a boy's dog to death and beheaded another cat. Between 1972 and 1973 Kemper picked up hitchhiking college girls in the Santa Cruz area in California; he would stab or shoot them, then dismember the bodies after conveying them to his apartment-where he would have sex with the dismembered corpses. He later dispatched his extremely abusive and domineering mother (the prime source of his hatred) in a similar fashion, with the added touch of using her severed head as a dartboard. Kemper, currently serving a life sentence, is on record as having mused: "When I see a pretty girl walking down the street, I think two things: One part of me wants to take her home, be real nice and treat her right; the other part wonders what her head would look like on a stick." 22
Kemper was clearly a schizoid psychopath, but there is one similarity with Nilsen: neither was able to form a sustained intimate relationship with anyone. This led Kemper to comment that women, while alive, were unavailable to him, whereas dead they were "his."23 It may say something about his inability to inspire warm sentiments in others to add that my late cousin, Dr. Bruce Danto, a forensic psychiatrist in California, once interviewed Kemper and had come away with the feeling that, albeit vigorously opposed to the death penalty in general, he would have had no hesitation in "pulling the switch" on Kemper.
SADISTIC PERSONALITY
In some respects the Gradations of
Evil scale could be reinterpreted as a Gradations of Sadism scale. The crimes and offenses that are the most likely to earn the label of "evil" are also the ones where sadistic traits are the most pervasive. If we look just at the men in my true-crime biographies (who are more likely to be sadistic than the women), 70 percent of male murderers are sadistic.24 But the higher one goes on the scale, the higher the percentage of men who are sadistic: in Categories 2 through 11, 25 percent are sadistic, but in the large remainder (12 through 22) 70 percent are sadistic. Limiting the search to the last four categories (19-22) all 81 are sadistic. The great majority in the higher categories (16 or higher) are also psychopathic at the same time, so the phrase "sadistic psychopath" would be an accurate characterization of these men: serial killers making up the largest group.
Some of the sadistic traits are stronger indicators than others. Enjoying the suffering of others is the key trait, but lying (deceiving) to others in order to inflict pain (tricking the victim into going to some remote or secret place where the sadist can do his work without detection) is another important trait. A third important quality is the intimidation of others by threats and cruelty. There are several serial killers whose obsession with torture prolonged torture, at that-is so pronounced that the word evil would spring to the lips of just about everyone who heard what these men had inflicted on their victims.
It so happens that some of the torturers have committed acts the full extent of which even the police and crime scene investigators can't fully discover. The children whom David Paul Brown (aka Nathaniel BarJonah) is suspected of torturing, for example, have simply disappeared but for a few bone fragments underneath his apartment. Had they been tortured just a bit? For hours or days? Hardly at all? We will never know. So his place along the scale is uncertain. But there are other serial killers who not only reveled in torturing their victims, but were also compulsive record keepers of their repugnant deeds-deeds that struck the public as fiendish beyond anyone's worst nightmare or exercise of imagination. Such men serve as examples of the worst of the worst-and it has now become obvious to me, having looked at the records of over seventy such men, that had I known when I first created the scale in the late 1980s what I know now, I would have extended it to a few still-higher levels.
As I expressed in chapter 1, I had also wondered whether such men perhaps didn't exist in Dante's time-is there something new under the sun, after all? Or did Dante know of such men but then blushed at the thought of shocking his readers with such gruesome details, for which his elegant poetry would scarcely seem the proper vehicle? What follows are a few examples of "sadistic personality" of such a nature that I cannot convey to you their enormity without apologizing in advance for putting such material on the printed page. But my pen stops well short of putting the full horror of these men's sadism before your view in the same way that soldiers returning from the front lines who have seen mutilation share their memories either not at all or only with other veterans-and then only on rare occasions and in hushed tones.
David Parker Ray appears to be the most cruel and sadistic of all the serial killers, indeed, of all the murderers I have known or studied. I say "appears" because there could be another sadistic killer somewhere who tortured his victims even more than Ray did, but who left no records of his crimes. Of Ray we can once again paraphrase Dr. Simon's book title '15 "Bad men do what good men dream." David Ray did what the Marquis de Sade only dreamed of. Dr. Simon, a distinguished forensic psychiatrist, knows full well what psychiatrists in general know: many people (men much more so than women) from time to time, especially after suffering insults, rejections, reverses, assaults, and the like, do have moments of murderous fantasies. The mental images may even include torture of those who have wronged or hurt them. This is what Dr. Simon meant by his book title. You may consider this a deplorable aspect of human nature, but it is a part of human nature all the same. But here is the important point: the vast majority of us-probably 97 percent of men and 99 percent of women-never assault, let alone torture anyone. Is this because the rest of us are so free of "impure" and murderous thoughts? Hardly. It is because most of us, besides having better genetic underpinnings, have had the good fortune to be well socialized by caring and nurturing parents or by other benevolent interactions with those close to us, with the result that we are more predisposed to love than to hatred. Likewise, our brains have more reliable mechanisms in place that instruct us: "But of course you must not do any of those nasty, retaliatory things you were thinking of" And we don't. Even the Marquis de Sade didn't, though he committed some cruel acts (but no murders) in his younger days. His reputation is built mostly around his sadistic (I don't know what else to call them) fantasies, which he consecrated voluminously to paper (my editions run to about three thousand pages) but never carried out on a person. But to return to David Parker Ray ...
Ray was a mechanic of uncommon skills, a superlative draftsman, a meticulous recorder of his fantasies, and a diabolically clever inventor of torture devices. Ray was no less clever in the methods of escaping justice. And like the notorious Dr. Mengele of Auschwitz, Ray was able to live as two persons in one: a Jekyll and Hyde who could be sociable and pleasant to coworkers and to his children (though not so much to his wives), then switching in an instant into a callous executioner, experiencing a greater high or adrenaline rush from torture than the addict's high from cocaine (which Ray never used).
Ray was born in rural New Mexico in 1939 some thirty miles southeast of Albuquerque. Below is a sketch of his family tree. Cecil, Ray's father, was an alcoholic with a violent temper, of whom a childhood friend of Ray's said, "I heard some things about [Ray's] dad, but I don't want to repeat them."26 Ray's parents divorced when he was ten, at which point Nettie, his mother, sent him and his sister, Peggy, to live with their paternal grandparents. The grandfather was a strict disciplinarian who insisted on a dress code for David that got him mocked by his more casual classmates. David and Peggy almost never saw their father, and their mother seldom visited. David was known as a loner. When he was about thirteen, bondage fantasies began percolating through his brain, and it was not long before he put them into action-tying a woman to a tree while he was in his mid-teens and torturing her to death.27 It is characteristic of men who become serial killers that they relish the sense of godlike power over others, the moment of a victim's death establishing as "factual" this power. This can go a long way to paper over what are usually shameful feelings of worthlessness and inferiority in the pre-murderous phase of the killer's personal life. The "serial" part can best be understood as stemming from the addiction to this morbidly fulfilling "high"-where the petite morte (as the French sometimes call an orgasm: the little death!) comes at the moment of someone else's grande moue. Lust and addiction by definition are acts that must be repeated-calmness, buildup of the craving to the tipping point, satisfaction of the craving, calm-in an endless cycle. Once the brain becomes wired for this cycle, it is like flowers pressed in Lucitestamped eternally and unmodifiable.
Figure 7.1
A meager performer academically, Ray soon showed a remarkable talent for mechanical things. Outwardly, he came across as a pleasant, affable man; he went from one job to another over the years but acquitted himself well at each: gas station attendant, railroad-track repairer, and, in the later years, park ranger in a town south of Albuquerque called (after the old radio show) Truth Or Consequences (original name: Hot Springs). It is not clear when precisely he turned "professional" as a sadist, but by the early 1990s he had already begun building a torture chamber consisting of a double-wide mobile home situated in nearby, and very isolated, Elephant Butte, close to the lake of the same name. Ray outfitted the large trailer-which he dubbed, with his morbid humor, the Toy Box-with all manner of soundproofing, pulleys, chains, gynecological devices, nail-encrusted dildoes, bondage and stretching devices, stun-guns, cameras and TV monitors, cattle prods, syringes, chemicals, and fortified walls and doors. Ray's macabre paraphernalia were every bit
as horrifying as the worst contraptions of the Spanish Inquisition, Hitler's death camps, and Moscow's Lyubyanka prison-the difference being merely one of focus. Ray's primary interest was not in breaking bones, burning, or cutting, but in tortures that concentrated on the organs of sex.
For much of his adult life and apparently even in his teens, Ray's bondage fantasies grew increasingly grotesque, until, in his thirties, he could reach orgasm only by masturbating with the fantasy of murdering a woman. In his forties he began kidnapping and torturing women, sub jecting them to painful and degrading sex, with the emphasis on anal sex so typical of sexual sadists of heterosexual orientation-as with Paul Bernardo, mentioned above.
By 1993 he had created what he called an Introductory Tape-a lengthy commentary and description (sixteen pages, single-spaced when transcribed) that his victims were forced to listen to right after they had been lured from bars back to Ray's "home," thrust into the Toy Box, and immobilized-suspended from the ceiling via the pulleys and chains.
We do not know how many years Ray operated as a professional sadist, nor how many victims he ultimately killed and disposed of. Because he was so shrewd at eliminating all evidence of bodily remainseither in the abundant New Mexico desert or in Elephant Butte Lakeno bodies were ever located. His accomplice and fiancee, Cindy Hendy, estimated that Ray had killed over a dozen, perhaps several dozen women following their torture-but she can give no accurate estimate.28
The Anatomy of Evil Page 25