The Anatomy of Evil

by Michael H. Stone

  Brudos was a psychopath: utterly callous and without remorse, not all of which, I think, can be laid at his mother's doorstep. There are plenty of little boys whose mothers made them feel emasculated for trying on their shoes who never grow up to do the things that Jerry Brudos did. So he may have come into the world with some of the genetic low cards as well. As for the "no remorse" factor, a journalist once asked Brudos when he was languishing in prison for the serial murders, "Jerry, now that you've been here a while and can look back on your life, do you have any different thoughts about those women you killed?" Whereupon Brudos rolled up a little piece of paper into a wad, flicked it onto the floor, and said, "I care about those women as much as I care about that paper-wad."

  Parental Seduction

  Not all serial killers had been seduced by a mother or sodomized by a father. Some were sexually molested in their early years by a foster parent. This kind of premature introduction to the sexual life often has the effect, through its overstimulation, of making the child both preoccupied with sex and "hypersexual." A boy born with genetic risk for violence who is then exposed to such an erotically "turned-on" environment may steer his course toward sexual crimes rather than, say, embezzlement or bank robbing. I chose for my example here a man, Tommy Lynn Sells, I had interviewed on death row in Texas, not so much because he was one of the few who was seduced by a foster parent, but because he could talk about it with unusual candor. Most murderers and men on death row claim innocence and lie about their crimes, especially if the victim(s) were family sz members (think of Scott Peterson and his pregnant wife, Laci).

  Tommy Lynn Sells was born, along with his twin sister, Tammy jean, in 1964 in California of uncertain paternity. They both came down with meningitis when they were a year and a half old; Tammy Jean died. His mother was poor and was overwhelmed with trying to care for the other children and sent Tommy to an aunt, but when he was about eight, he was sent to live with a man who gave him food and shelter-but at a price. The man was a pedophile and made Tommy give him oral sex.53 Sells did poorly in school, was mocked by the other students because he spoke differently and had fewer possessions than they did, but he learned to "level the playing field" through violence. He had to fend for himself in his teens and became a drifter, going from state to state (in the South mostly), doing crimes of theft to put food in his mouth and crimes of violence to get even with those he hated: the women who had abandoned him and the pedophile who seduced him. Even his mother shifted at times between seductiveness and rejection. Sells began murdering in his teens: first, men who crossed his path, but later on, women and even children. By the time he was caught, he had killed, according to his reckoning-whose accuracy is hard to verify-some seventy people. What led to his arrest was the attempted murder of a young girl whose throat he had slit after sneaking into the trailer where she and a friend were sleeping. The friend died, but the other girl was able to walk, bleeding profusely, to a neighbor, and also gave the police a description of her assailant.

  Many of Sells's murders were horrific, including that of the Dardeen family in 1987 in Illinois. After being invited to a meal with the family, he shot the husband, beat the wife and their three-year-old son to death. During the beating, the pregnant wife spontaneously delivered a baby girl whom he also beat to death.54

  Yet, Sells had the kind of charm that Ray and Lake also had: he married several times and had two children, in among all the slaughter.

  When I had the opportunity to interview Sells on death row in Texas, my reaction-before I actually met him-was that I would like to kill him for all the atrocious rapes and murders he had committed. Death row interviews are always conducted in special cubicles where three inches of glass separate the visitor from the inmate. My opening comment was: "Well, Tommy, I guess they got these three inches of glass so I don't kill you and you don't kill me!" He laughed and said, with a broad Texan twang: "You got that rahht!" But then he told me with remarkable candor about the man who violated him when he was a boy of eight and nine, and about the hatred this (and everything else that had happened to him) filled his mind with ever after.55 Tommy spoke to me about the "adrenaline rush" he got when he slit the throat of a victim and saw the blood rushing out. "That settled down my anger for a couple weeks," he told me, until, that is, the hatred built up again, and he craved another murderous "fix." He was also forthright enough to acknowledge to me that were he to feel full remorse, instead of just a little bit, he'd have to go kill himself for all the terrible things he'd done. This was the voice of a conscience, however meager and beaten down. And within the vast desert of damage and depravity that surrounded his life, there was this oasis of humanity, miniature though it was, that allowed me to feel a measure of compassion for this man.

  All but a few of the murderers I have interviewed in prisons and forensic hospitals have lied and denied-and in so doing, have earned a contempt that is by no means easily overcome. This does not mean that the public was wrong in considering the serial murders of Tommy Lynn Sells as "evil." Far from it. It suggests, however, that in some people evil can coexist with a few human qualities one would scarcely imagine were there underneath. Sells has indicated that what launched him on his career as a murderer was his having witnessed, inadvertently, during the Peeping Tom days of his adolescence, a neighbor who had his son perform oral sex on him. This reminded him, so he told me, of his male caretaker of a few years before. But this may be a self-serving memory of dubious authenticity. So what earned my measure of compassion was not his honesty, for that was not unimpeachable; it was not his remorse, for that was meager. It was rather his candor about what had happened to him during his early years, and about the destructive (and ultimately selfdestructive) path of vengeance he then pursued.

  I am often asked by friends who knew I had been going around the country interviewing serial killers: Was I ever frightened, or even a bit anxious, as I faced these men? I was anxious, as it turned out, before the first such interview, wondering what it would be like to sit across from a man who had killed people by the dozen-and not even in combat or when ordered to partake in "ethnic cleansing" but in peacetime, and just because killing was what he liked to do. My first interview was with Arthur Shawcross, who had killed a dozen prostitutes in Rochester, New York. There were, of course, guards all around, and Arthur himself is disarmingly jovial. My anxiety quickly dissipated. By the time I interviewed Tommy Lynn Sells, I felt like an old hand at it and wasn't anxious at all. Not consciously anyway. But there must have been something about his "adrenaline rush" at slitting the throats of all those young girls that left its imprint on my brain despite my nonchalance during the interview, for that night I had the following dream:

  I am in the reception room where a receiving line has formed to congratulate Hitler on his reelection to some office. Hitler is in military uniform, shaking everyone's hand as each one has his turn. It is 1954-nine years after Hitler's suicide, but I am not aware of this in the dream. I am about tenth in line, and as I approach, I feel ill at ease, thinking: Shake the hand of Hitler? I want to kill him! But would killing Hitler be a crime? Would it be murder? My mentor, Dr. Kernberg, is standing off to one side, so I go up to him and ask: "Otto, I feel I should kill Hitler. But would that be murder?" He ponders a moment, but then tells me: "Well, in the case of Hitler, no, it would not be murder; it would be all right."

  The meaning was pretty clear to me. My feelings toward Sells were very divided. It was as though he were two people scrunched together into one enormous person, as he had indeed become after years of prison-fare carbohydrates: one man who was disarmingly jovial, like Shawcross, but who could talk with candor about his past and about his deeds. And a second man, who inspired fear and loathing for the murders of all those women and children. Before I met him, I felt like killing him. After I met him, I felt respect for Sells-for his acknowledging openly what he had done, and for the small seeds of remorse that were beginning to sprout in this man. Confronting the half-human, half-demon "
split-self" that Sells had become evoked the same sort of split in me: half-homicidally contemptuous, half-compassionate. Small wonder that I summoned Otto Kernberg as my adviser in the dream: When he was a boy, he had once seen Hitler during the first days of the 1938 Austrian Anschluss, and had then escaped with his family. And he went on to become the world's leading authority on the psychological defense mechanism of splitting, which takes place when we try to grapple with totally disparate, oil-and-water emotions, usually of love and hate, that we cannot comfortably integrate.

  OTHER FACTORS

  Among the many threads that make up the tapestry of serial murder, some are common, detectable in almost every case; others are rare yet very noticeable when present. In the closing sections of this chapter I will touch on several of the more important of these as-yet-unexamined threads.

  Adoption

  Adoptees make up about 2 percent of the population in the United States. The vast majority are adopted into homes with loving and devoted parents; the adopted children, however curious they may be about their birth parents, grow up as reasonably well-adjusted people, leading constructive, gratifying lives. But if we look at crime statistics, especially in the tiny arena of serial killers, the story is not so optimistic. The FBI, reporting on 500 serial killers, found that 16 percent had been adoptees.56 In my study of 145 serial killers, 15.8 percent were adoptees -basically the same conclusion.51

  Being an adoptee can create problems in several ways. Since we're talking about serial killers here, I am focusing only on boys. The boy might, for example, resent having been given up by his birth mother, becoming, even though he is happy with his adoptive mother, an embittered, angry person. This was the case with David Berkowitz, the "Son of Sam." He had been adopted by middle-class parents who were loving, consistently there for him, and not at all abusive. A social misfit and loner, he went downhill after the death of his adoptive mother. In his teens he set fires and tortured animals. He pictured his birth mother as promiscuous and indifferent; he earned his celebrity status by shooting to death girls (and a few young men) who were making out in lovers' lanes around town-equating the girls with the kind of promiscuous, unmotherly woman his birth mother seemed to have been. Since there are thousands of adopted boys in similar circumstances-who never commit crimes, let alone serial murder-there has to be something else wrong with this picture. Did Berkowitz have a violent birth father? Did the birth mother abuse alcohol in the first months of pregnancy? We don't know. But we are pretty sure his life after he was adopted did not contribute to his later violence.

  Joel Rifkin, the serial killer of seventeen or so prostitutes in Long Island, was also raised by adoptive parents who were caring, devoted, and well-to-do.58 Here again, the less we can find wrong with his life once he was born, the more we have to assume there were troubles in the genes or in the mother's pregnancy. These factors we examine further in the chapter on neuroscience.

  Charles Schmid presents a more complicated picture: adopted at birth, he was raised by parents who were generous and indulgent in the main, though his father and he got into frequent arguments and sometimes his father was physically abusive. Schmid was clearly psychopathic: charming, glib, grandiose, dishonest (to impress women he rigged a guitar with tapes of famous guitar players), and thrill seeking (he liked to do parachute jumps, not pulling the opening cord until the last second). So the evil, as defined by his serial murders, seemed to come from three parts nature and one part nurture. Perhaps more injurious than his father's beatings was the response of his birth mother after Schmid tracked her down during his adolescence. She said, "I didn't want you when you were born, and I don't want you now. Get out!"59

  The situation with Gerald Stano was even more complicated and raises the question whether good adoptive parents can make up for truly horrendous circumstances that were limited to the first few months of life. Stano was adopted as a one-year-old (having been given up for adoption at six months) from a promiscuous, alcoholic mother who neglected him to such an extent that he was considered unadoptable by the doctors in upstate New York. The neglect was such that he was found eating his own feces in order to survive.60 Eugene Stano was the manager of a large corporation; his wife was a social worker. They were devoted parents who provided all the comforts of upper-middle-class life. But Gerald began stealing early on and progressed to worse behaviors later: he bribed schoolmates (with money he stole from his father) to let him win races so he would look successful in his parents' eyes, he abused drugs, and was violent with women, including the wife he was briefly married to when he was twenty-four (in 1975). Well before that, he committed his first murder, when he was eighteen. Eleven years later he was in prison for the murders of forty-one women, though the total may have been even greater. He claimed to experience sexual arousal from the slow strangulation of his victims. Stano was executed in 1998 when he was forty-six. Raymond Neal, whose sister had been murdered by Stano, was present at the execution. For him, Stano was an evil man, a monster, and Neal felt relief when Stano was pronounced dead.61

  There is a tendency in modern societies to view vengeance as a barbarity; ditto, the death penalty. These issues go beyond the scope of this book. Suffice it to say that the desire for vengeance when one has been grievously wronged answers to something deep within us. This is illustrated beautifully in a recent article in the New Yorker about life among the tribes in New Guinea, the subtitle of which is, "What can tribal societies tell us about the need to get even?"62 The author argues persuasively that the "thirst for vengeance is among the strongest of human emotions," adding (on the last page) that "[w]e grow up being taught that such feelings are primitive, something to be ashamed of, and to transcend." My only point here is that transcendence comes hard when your sister has been strangled by a serial killer.

  Head Injury

  One in four serial killers suffered during their early years either a head injury or (more rarely) a condition affecting the brain-such as meningitis or a very high fever. A good deal depends on just which part of the brain was damaged. But if the "right" regions were damaged, such damage could have serious consequences on self-control, on sizing up social situations correctly, tuning in to other people empathically, resonating with them compassionately, and so forth. The effects of such head injuries are hardly limited to serial killers but are important as precursors to crimes of all sorts. Usually when head injury is part of a killer's history, it is interwoven with other negative circumstances: having been beaten as a child (including on the head, as in the case of serial killer Henry Lee Lucas63), being mentally ill, or being at risk for psychopathic personality. But sometimes serious head injury seems to be the only background factor even in a serial killer.

  Richard Starrett came from a well-to-do family in Georgia. The parents were good people and spared him the kind of physical or verbal abuse or the neglect that was part of the picture in the lives of so many other serial killers. He suffered a head injury when he was a toddler and an even more severe one when he was seven. On that occasion he had been hanging upside down on a jungle-gym in the playground and fell onto the asphalt, unconscious. His mother rushed him to the hospital, but doctors found nothing seriously wrong at that time.64 Shortly afterward, however, Starrett began to have headaches, dizzy spells, blackouts, and moments of collapsing. He loved animals yet became intrigued with sadistic magazines that emphasized bondage. He became a Peeping Tom in adolescence, and by the time he went to college, he was hearing internal voices and had headaches that were triggered by violence or sex magazines. Rather than finish college, he dropped out and went to California because of uncontrollable urges to stalk women. Yet he was able to marry when he was twenty-three and have a daughter, though he still suffered blackouts, headaches, and "absences." Back in Georgia for a time, he had a love affair with another woman, but when she discovered he was married, "something happened." He said he removed a gun from a drawer so she wouldn't see it-and it accidentally went off, killing her. Maybe. I think a be
tting man would put more money on murder. It was after that, at all events, that Starrett began to meet and overpower women for sex: he would then indulge in bondage and torture, killing about ten women before he was arrested. Now serving a life sentence, he himself figured his head injuries were the main reason he ended up with damaged brain function and an abnormal electroencephalogram, along with the paraphilia (as defined below) of bondage. All these led ultimately, in Starrett's case, to the serial murders. Starrett even felt remorse for his crimes, which is unusual in a serial killer. This suggests that he was not a psychopath-certainly not from birth-but rather someone whose behavior was shunted way out of line by brain damage in key areas. Which areas those are I will outline in detail in the chapter on neuroscience.

  Paraphilias

  Sexual urges directed at nonhuman objects (including animals) or the infliction of suffering and humiliation on a sexual partner or children are viewed together under the heading of "paraphilia." In hearing about a person with a paraphilia (almost all such persons are men), the public may react with bewilderment or disgust if the paraphilia is not very harmful. The Peeping Tom (voyeurism) or the "flasher" (exhibi- tionism)-even the man who rubs against a woman on trains or subways (frotteurism) will seldom be called "evil." Public opinion becomes much more severe where harm is involved or when the degree of depravity is extreme. Men who engage in or force sex on children (pedophilia), or who eat a victim's flesh (cannibalism), or who have sex with a corpse (necrophilia) are far more likely to be labeled evil by ordinary people or by the media. This goes double for men who rely on murder for sexual arousal (sexual sadism), which is the case with many serial killers: at least 30 percent. Tying up and immobilizing a victim (bondage) is often a prelude to the more harmful (and lethal) paraphilias, since once immobilized, the victim is under the total control of a man who is free to do exactly as he pleases.