The Anatomy of Evil

by Michael H. Stone

  In writing this book about evil I was aware from the outset that the most convincing examples of evil acts would be the ones hardest to convey to the reader, without descending to the pornographic and the sensational. It may be, of course, that I am simply preaching to the converted and that you already agree with me that evil is the appropriate word to use when we hear of, say, the child murders of Royce Zeigler and Zein Isa or the depravity of Jeff Lundgren. But if you remain uncomfortable with the concept of evil as presented thus far and would say "amen" only upon hearing-or seeing-the torture evidence of David Parker Ray, then I am handicapped. I cannot show you the worst of Ray's hideous but artistically crafted drawings. I cannot reprint here more than a few sentences of the Introductory Tape. I can share with you my own experience when trying to read the transcription of the tape: Though I have been studying murderers and their personalities for over twenty years, I could not bring myself to read past the first of its sixteen pages. When I told this to a close friend-a preeminent psychiatrist and former chairman of a prestigious psychiatry department-he said: "Oh, c'mon, Stone, you have to be kidding." But when he started reading, though he did get through most of it, he readily understood my reluctance. Just as hearing (or reading) Ray's words makes one want to turn away, viewing the Toy Box makes one want to look away so as not to dwell beyond one's tolerance upon the suffering Ray's victims had to endure. When a local locksmith, Bill King, was summoned after the arrest to open up the Toy Box, this was his reaction: "I could feel an evil presence in there. It was like something floating in the air, and I didn't want to be there. I'd seen enough."29 In a like vein, several TV shows reporting on the case titled their programs The Evil in Elephant Butte.30 Here is a brief excerpt from the Introductory Tape:

  My lady friend and I have been keeping sex slaves for years. We both have kinky hang-ups involving rape, dungeon-games, etc.... Our fetishes and hang-ups include stringent bondage, a little sadism.... You're gonna be here a month or two, or maybe three, if you keep us turned on. If it's up to my lady, we'd keep you indefinitely. She says it's just as much fun and less risky. But personally I like variety.31

  Reading this brief excerpt, as uncomfortable as it is, can in no way compare to the emotions of a woman immobilized, limbs bound tightly, mouth covered with duct tape, her body hoisted by chains toward the ceiling of the Toy Box, a captive audience to Ray's voice coming from a loudspeaker-announcing what is about to happen to her.

  In the dossier accumulated on Ray after his arrest is a file titled "Copies of Drawings Illustrating Women Being Subjected to Sexual Torture," which runs to forty-seven pages.32 In the least repellent of these pictures, none of which will be shown here, a woman is portrayed tied to a table, bound by a variety of tightening winches and chains, in preparation for electric shocks and whatever other tortures Ray and his accomplice were in the mood for. Oddly, the picture is not pornographic in the sense of arousing one sexually-unless one happens to be a sexual sadist. Instead the picture is at once sickening and clinical-a measure of Ray's utter detachment from the suffering of which his "blueprint" is the harbinger. How can we begin to understand the origins of sexual sadism in men like David Parker Ray or Robert Berdella, Leonard Lake, and Dennis Rader?33

  All we know at this time is that there are many factors that play a role, some more common and perhaps more significant than others: genetic risk for psychopathy (and certain of its components like thrill seeking and callousness or lack of compassion), parental brutality, father absence, maternal neglect, sexual molestation, low socioeconomic status, mental illness, and so on.34 But there is no factor that is present across the board in all sexual sadists, and no "crucial" factor without which one never sees sexual sadism. That is, no analogy can be made with the tuberculosis bacillus without which one doesn't get TB. A better analogy is to Persian carpets. Each is made of interwoven strands of different color and thickness (these are the various "factors"), each ends up a Persian rug-but no two are the same; each has its own pattern of colors and shapes. Some are quite similar; they are woven in the same city: Tabriz, Isfahan, Shiraz, and experts can tell which city they came from. In Ray's case, he had a violent father who abandoned the family, a mother who left him in the care of grandparents and saw little of him afterward. There is no suggestion of sexual molestation, yet in his early teens he was already obsessed with bondage and divided the world of women into ladies and whores, the latter as disposable after use as dinner napkins.

  Leonard Lake, whom we will discuss a bit further on, was abandoned by his mother when he was a toddler. Robert Berdella had a violent and abusive father. Dennis Rader, whom most know as "BTK," came from a rather normal middle-class home where his mother occasionally spanked him on his backside for naughtiness-which seems to have stirred up sexual excitement. How many millions of boys experienced a similar life at home, or worse, and never became violent, let alone sexual sadists?

  I think of a patient I once treated years ago who came from the same town as Jeffrey Dahmer. My patient had been sodomized by his father when he was nine; his older brother used to throw lit matches at him and force his hand onto a hot radiator. He grew up to be a loner: angry, embittered, suspicious, but also a gifted student of languages who hated most people but never laid a hand on anyone. Dahmer's father was a kindly man who did not abuse his son sexually or otherwise; the family was better off economically than was my patient's family. Dahmer's mother seems not to have been very available emotionally. My patient had more "reasons" to be a violent person; Dahmer had fewer of the popular "reasons." Genetic factors probably account for much of the difference-and I will say more about this in the chapter on neurosciencebut these are as yet too ill defined or else hard to detect for us to be able to claim in advance: this man is going to be a sadist or a serial killer (or whatever else we are looking for). In any case, the genetic factors account for no more than a tendency, a predisposition that can either be muted by a protective environment later on or else brought to the point of aggressive outbursts by exposure to a harsh environment. We can be fairly certain, at all events, that once the pattern of excitement through sexual cruelty got established in Ray during his teens, the pattern became fixed. There was no going back.

  PARENTAL ACTS OF OMISSION AND COMMISSION

  What turns that innocent baby boy in the obstetrics ward into a serial killer? Many people seek the answer in bad family circumstances, as if those alone can account for such a drastic detour from the normal path of development. There are two main reasons for this tempting but not very accurate conclusion. First of all, it is rare to find a serial killer who was raised in a family that was even a close approximation of "normal." A family, that is, where mother and father remained together as a harmonious couple, gentle and devoted to their children-whose punishment for "naughtiness" was mild, effective, and fair. Secondly, the departure from this ideal, in the families of serial killers, was often radicalso destructive as to cry out for intervention by the Child Protective Services. A more realistic view would give heredity its due, since any coherent explanation of serial killing lies in the interaction of circumstances both before and after birth. Admittedly, the worse the family environment, the harder it is to see what (if any) genetic factors or problems during pregnancy may also have played a role. This is because a horrific environment can lead all by itself to future violence, including the extreme kinds of violence that we label as evil. This may paper over, as it were, whatever unfavorable prebirth influences that may lie hidden underneath. We will look more closely at these interactions in the chapter on neuroscience, but for now, we will examine four different destructive family influences, using vignettes of serial killers whose early lives were marred by one of these four factors.

  Parental Cruelty

  James Mitchell ("Mike") DeBardeleben is one of the schizoid psychopaths who swell the ranks of serial killers.35 He was the middle child in an upper-middle-class family. His father was a lieutenant colonel in the army and was known for his punitiveness
toward his sons. When Mike was five, for example, his father would thrust his head underwater as a punishment for various childhood peccadilloes. He also beat Mike on many occasions.36 His mother was a chronic alcoholic, at times violent in her punishment of Mike for his stubbornness.37 She was promiscuous, picking up men in bars, especially when her husband was stationed away. Mike was the most rebellious of the children and thus drew the most fire from his parents.

  In DeBardeleben's case, parental cruelty (coupled with his mother's promiscuity) merged with what is almost certainly a genetic tendency to psychopathy, as suggested by his rebelliousness.38 His brother, Ralph, with what may have been a different set of genetic givens, later committed suicide.

  Like David Parker Ray, DeBardeleben aspired to create a torture chamber (though he never carried this out). Unlike Ray, he did not have a pleasant social exterior. At his very best, Mike was mean, nasty, and brutal toward his five wives-blackmailing some with pornographic pictures he had them pose for, so they would be too afraid to expose him. He was unspeakably cruel to the twenty or so victims of his serial murders-some of whom he tortured to the point where (as he recorded on tape) they pleaded with him to either stop or kill them.39 True-crime writer Stephen Michaud saw DeBardeleben not only lacking in the merest trace of decency toward anyone, but "so evil, so unspeakably bad" that he found it difficult to tell his story: "It was too bloody horrible, sustained horror. 1140

  DeBardeleben's hatred-demonization would be a better word-of women surely stemmed from his hatred of his mother. He viewed women as whores and sluts, worthy only of being reduced to nullities via rape and murder. In the classification of sexual sadists developed by former FBI profiler, Roy Hazelwood, DeBardeleben was of the "angerexcitation" type that punishes women for supposedly being "evil" and "powerful." Men of this stripe are animated by the urge to eliminate that power.41 Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, also hated his seductive and punitive mother; both he and DeBardeleben can be understood as committing "serial matricide": killing, symbolically, their mothers over and over again. DeBardeleben was much crueler than Ridgway, becoming in his eighteen-year-long career of serial murder a black hole of narcissism, sucking in and destroying any woman who came near. For all that, DeBardeleben was curiously more "philosophic"-if one dare apply that word to a serial killer-in that he penned a psychologically accurate account of what sadism is all about:

  The central impulse [of sadism] is to have complete mastery over another person-to make her the helpless object of our will, to become the absolute ruler over her, to become her god ... and the most radical aim is to make her suffer, since there is no greater power over another person than that of inflicting pain on her.42

  Given that purposely causing intense suffering is the heart of what evil is all about, DeBardeleben comes across as a kind of high priest and spokesman among the practitioners of evil. And since serial killers commit the acts we define as evil-routinely and habitually-it is not surprising that evil's high priest should arise from within the ranks of serial killers, rather than the ranks of those who dip into evil just once or twice in their lives, like the wife killers and mass murderers.

  Parental Neglect

  Since a third of serial killers experienced parental neglect, there are many examples to choose from to demonstrate its effect. Neglect by the mother is more damaging in the first few years of life than neglect by the father, though father absence becomes a serious matter in the lives of boys in their preteen and teenage years.43 To grow up without a mother's love and without any compensating maternal influences from other sources altogether will tend to rob the child of the qualities we lump together as "human." A boy in these circumstances is at risk to grow up like one of Harry Harlow's monkeys-the ones raised next to a substitute "monkey" made of wire rather than one made of cloth.44 The monkeys with the wire mothers were deficient in every social and sexual sphere.

  Maternally deprived boys and girls grow up handicapped in the same ways. As for the boys, many tend to be filled with envy and hatred of normal people. If they are, in addition, beaten by foster parents or other caretakers, they are more likely than others to lash out violently and to treat other people as though they are no more than inanimate objects to be smashed or carved up at will.

  Leonard Lake was a California man born in 1945 to Elgin and Gloria Lake. Elgin abandoned the family after the birth of Leonard's younger brother. Gloria later tried to reunite with him, taking along the two younger children and leaving Leonard in the care of her parents. He was never reunited with his mother even after she divorced and remarried when Leonard was nine.45 What contact he did have with his mother was far from perfect: she encouraged him to take nude photos of girls, including his sister and cousins-as if to develop pride in the body-but with the effect of his developing instead a preoccupation with pornography and, later, a penchant for having sex with his sister. Like David Parker Ray, he was intact enough to sandwich in two marriages before he teamed up with an illegal immigrant, Charles Ng, to create a torturebunker in a remote area, where they captured and tortured some two dozen people (mostly women), reducing their remains to ashes in an adjoining crematorium. Of some of their victims they made "snuff films"-films that depict the victim's murder. Lake's second marriage went aground when his wife discovered he been making amateur pornographic films featuring bondage acts.46 Lake was devastated for a time after the divorce, yet he then felt free to do anything he wanted, commenting, "Society is powerless against one who is not afraid to die." What makes Lake noteworthy, placing him, along with Ray and DeBardeleben, at the end of the Gradations scale, was his compulsive diary keeping, where his extreme acts of sadism were faithfully recorded for posterity. Like the monkey reared with the wire mother, Lake couldn't make normal connections. He spoke of his envy of beautiful women and rich men who always end up getting the best of life and of whom Lake said, "I live to correct this."47 As for Lake's participation in evil, this is best grasped by viewing one of his filmed scenes. He and Ng captured a young mother, Brenda O'Connor. They had already killed her baby, but she didn't know this. When she begged for her baby, Lake engaged in the following dialogue:

  Lake: Brenda, you have a choice. We'll give it to you right now.

  Brenda: What?

  Lake: You can cooperate with us ... that means you will stay here as our prisoner. You will work for us, you will wash for us, you will fuck for us. Or you can say, "No, I don't want to do that," in which case we'll tie you to the bed, we'll rape you, and then we'll take you outside and shoot you. Your choice.41

  Later, when arrested-ironically, for theft, by a policeman who knew nothing of the torture-murders-Lake committed suicide, swallowing two cyanide pills. Looking back on the crimes of Lake and his younger accomplice, I feel compelled to add a footnote to my definition of evil. Beyond the world where we can say tout comprendre c'est tout pardonnet-to understand all is to forgive all-lies a world where we can understand, but not forgive. The bondage and enslavement of Lake's women victims were Lake's antidote to the abandonment and neglect by his mother: Lake's women were immobilized and held captive. And taking a page from DeBardeleben, his torture of a woman showed that he had (godlike) power over them, rather than the woman/mother having power over Lake. But his fury at his mother's abandonment made him go the extra step and kill them. So much for my "psychoanalysis" of Leonard Lake. But what he did to these women takes him to a world where there is no forgiveness. When people speak of evil, this is the world they are talking about.

  Parental Humiliation

  About two serial killers out of three suffered humiliation from one or both parents. There are certain kinds of put-downs that are hard for young boys or adolescents to shake off, especially hurtful remarks about sexuality, lack of manliness, stupidity at school, or odd physical features (including being grossly overweight). Humiliation, if severe enough and prolonged, can create a vicious circle, undermining the boy's self-esteem, making him more hurt or more angry and argumentative with the overly
critical parent, who retaliates by further humiliation, and so on. The serial killers who were humiliated usually endured other negative experi ences as well, but sometimes this particular misery seemed to be the one that overshadowed all the others.

  Gerald Gallego, for example, was raised by his mother and a stepfather; he never knew his birth father. Like many serial killers, bed-wetting was a problem for much longer than is usually the case-and for this he got taunted by his stepfather, who dubbed him "pissy-pants." Of course there's more to the story with Gallego. It came out at his trial, after he was arrested for killing women and dumping them by the side of the road. Apparently his birth father had killed two policemen-and had dumped their bodies by the side of the road (for which the elder Gallego was executed).49 I'm sure there are no genes for dumping bodies by the side of the road-but the son may have inherited some genes (genes that relate to aggression, for example) that, when mixed with the humiliation, heightened the risk for violence.

  Jerry Brudos, a serial killer of some dozen or more women in Oregon, liked to wear his mother's shoes when he was a boy of five.50 A strict, puritanical woman, she grabbed and destroyed the shoes, shaming him that what he had done was "wicked."51 But a pattern got established, no doubt fixed for all time, by his mother's making such an issue of his boyhood experimentation. By his teen years, he was collecting and hiding shoes and women's underwear; touching these articles of clothing was both soothing and sexually exciting. His activities passed a line in the sand when he was seventeen: he became violent, demanding at knifepoint that a girl of his age strip naked. When caught, he was sent for a psychiatric evaluation; the conclusion was that he had a hatred toward his mother, which then gave rise to a thirst for revenge against women in general. In his late twenties he progressed to serial sexual murders, violating the bodies of his victims usually after they were dead, not only having sex with the corpses but in some instances removing a breastand using it as a mold for a paperweight.