The Anatomy of Evil

by Michael H. Stone

  Just how a man develops a paraphilia is not well understood. Both genes and family environment appear to play a role. The subject will be treated more fully in the chapter on neuroscience, but it does appear that many men with one or more paraphilias have either witnessed inappropriate sexual encounters during childhood, or were themselves sexually molested in some way. But this is not always the case: some men seem to be born with brain differences in certain areas that incline them to develop a paraphilia, even in the absence of childhood maltreatment. Sexual sadism in a man like Tommy Lynn Sells, who as a child was maltreated in every way we can imagine, is less surprising as an outcome. But that same paraphilia-the hallmark of serial killing-is quite surprising in a man whose childhood seems reasonably normal ... and to that extent, all the more intriguing from the standpoint of a possible heredity factor.

  Dennis Rader, who baffled the Kansas authorities for the better part of two decades when he embarked on his career as a serial killer, gave himself the nickname BTK-for bind-torture-kill.b' By the time he was finally caught, he had killed ten people. The long interval between the first murder and the arrest had partly to do with his cleverness and partly with his leading a double life-the other half of which was that of an ordinary married father of two, well dressed in a business suit, and president of his local church. His double life extended down to his being able to juggle sadistic sex with his victims and "vanilla" sex with his wife, who had no idea of his other self.

  We know little about his early life, apart from the fact that when he was spanked by his mother, he used to have erections. Already by age eight or nine, he developed sadistic sexual fantasies, though in other respects his facade to the outside world was unremarkable. The progression from fantasy to paraphilia was not long in coming: he had a whole menu of paraphilias, most of them the dangerous ones. Besides dressing in women's clothes (transvestism-a nonharmful variety), there were also pedophilia, bondage, sexual sadism, and yet another, characterized by hanging oneself briefly so as to experience a stronger orgasm when masturbating (called "autoerotic asphyxiophilia"). As for the sexual sadism, during the Otero murders, which he committed at age twenty-nine in 1974, he had an orgasm when he killed the eleven-year-old Josie Otero, marking this as a distinctly a sexual crime. A hint that his perversions arose from genetic peculiarities (or possibly birth complications) is the fact that Rader had three brothers who are apparently normal. Because a complex personality trait depends on the interaction of many genes, and on their subsequent interaction with the environment, it is not to be expected that even relatives as close as his three brothers would develop the same abnormality.66

  What is particularly chilling about Dennis Rader as a serial killer is this: here is a church president in (what looks like) a Brooks Brothers suit, well mannered, articulate, suave, forthright, telling the judge about strangling this or that woman with no more inflection in his voice than you or I would have were we to read to a friend a newspaper ad for lawn chairs or a travel clock. This is a man who took an intermission from murder so that, like any good dad, he could attend his kids' athletic games.67 The point being: he was more like you or me than any other of the serial killers, meaning that-outwardly-we are not so different from Dennis Rader. Perhaps this is why Phil Kline, the attorney general, told people at Rader's trial: "In a few minutes you will look face-to-face with pure evil. ... Victims whose voices were brutally silenced by the evil of one man."68 In Rader's case, evil resides not only in what he did, but in the distance required for the rest of us to reassure ourselves that, well, at the end of the day, on the inside at least, were not at all like Rader! Perhaps this kind of distancing helps account for the public's fascination with Ted Bundy, charming, handsome, smart-not so different from us. Whereas, when it comes to a ghoulish freak like Ed Gein or Richard Chase, "evil" appears to reside not just in the grotesqueness of their acts but in their bizarre thoughts and attire. We already feel pretty secure that we could never be like them. Their evil strikes us, comfortably, as totally "alien" to ourselves.

  The Triad

  As mentioned earlier, boys who set fires, torture animals, and wet the bed long past the age when other children gain bladder control are known to be at risk for behaving in violent ways as they grow older. Killing or torturing the kinds of animals that children usually cherish as pets-cats, dogs, and rabbits-is probably the key element here, since these animals are the closest, in the child's mind, to people. So it is not surprising that serial killers were much more likely, in their early days, to have tortured animals than were the men who killed their wives.69 Boys who are on the path to becoming serial killers and who have an underlying hatred of women will often resort to killing cats as a kind of rehearsal for murdering women. It is easy to see why, given that, apart from the ears, cats look like beautiful women in miniature: heart-shaped face, high cheekbones, big eyes, small nose, demure mouth, coy expression. Animal torture when combined with one of the dangerous paraphilias like bondage or sexual sadism makes for an even greater predictor of repeated sexual crimes. Men who kill their wives rarely show these types of predilection. It is for reasons of this sort that those who end up being called "evil" (as defined by the extreme of depravity and victim suffering that characterize their acts) are likely to have exhibited such destructive behaviors as bondage, fire setting, and animal torture. Within the realm of serial killers, this childhood "triad" is a significant tip-off to future violence against humans.70

  Gary Ridgway, who was later to achieve notoriety as Washington State's Green River Killer, ultimately killed, by his own inexact reckoning, about seventy women. He targeted prostitutes, though some of his victims were not. Unlike most of the well-known serial killers whose IQs tend to be well above average, Gary's IQ was below normal (82), but this was no impediment to his career as a serial killer-a career that spanned as many years as that of Dennis Rader. Gary's mother was apparently very attractive-but equally cruel. When he wet his bed, his mother would parade him naked in front of his two half-brothers and make him stand in a tub of cold water, while she herself was half-naked, staring at his genitals.n His mother's alternating cruelty and seductiveness got transformed in Gary's mind into violent fantasies of killing her and, later, other women with a knife. During his teen years he killed cats and birds and also set fires. Gary began his serial killing in earnest after he learned that his first wife had cheated on him-which made her into a "whore" in his mind. Though psychopathic, he could be a friendly and helpful neighbor. Gary read the Bible, went to church, and encouraged neighbors to take God more fully into their lives.72

  He seemed genuinely in love with Judith, his third wife. I happened to meet Judith when she and I were guests on the Montel Williams TV show in 2007 (and Gary was already in prison). She told the audience that during the years they were together, the frequency of his killing declined appreciably, as though he were finally happy enough, once he was with a good woman, that the destructive urge was no longer so strong. Of course, she only learned this after Gary's arrest. During their marriage, she knew nothing of his secret activities. When first arrested and interviewed by the police and by the FBI, Gary was for the most part amiable and calm. But when asked why he dumped by the river the bodies of the women he strangled, he suddenly grew angry and said,

  "The women were garbage!" The general feeling was that Gary had been committing a kind of serial matricide, killing his sexy but hated mother again and again.73

  Substance Abuse

  Abuse of alcohol or other drugs is common in serial killers: almost half (45 percent) drank alcohol to excess, and another 7 percent used other drugs, such as marijuana, cocaine, or methamphetamine. The larger group that abused alcohol could be divided into a somewhat bigger half (of men that used alcohol exclusively) and a smaller group where the men relied on multiple substances: alcohol plus cocaine or LSD or whatever. But people who commit violent crimes (whether or not they reach the level of evil) often abuse drugs to work up the nerve, in many cases, to do wha
t they're itching to do.74 This is true for serial killers as well. It would be no exaggeration to say that serial killers are addicted to serial killing the way cocaine addicts are addicted to cocaine. As we saw with Tommy Lynn Sells, murder gave him both sexual release and at the same time, release of the pent-up rage he felt against the world.

  The ordinary and rhythmic build-up of sexual tension in men75- which in general demands release with greater urgency in men than in women-gets intertwined with the periodic need in serial killers to seek victims and to rape and kill them. And for a good half or more of them, alcohol (or whatever is the killer's drug of choice) is the fuel that gets the engine going. How alcohol affects the brain, acting as a catalyst to violence, will be shown in more detail in the chapter on neuroscience. The short explanation is that (as almost everyone has had a chance to witness at some time or other) alcohol (or cocaine or meth) lowers inhibition; the drugs take one's foot off the brakes, making it easier to do what one merely felt like doing before guzzling the beer or the whiskey or doing the line of cocaine.

  Jack Unterweger was born a few years after World War II in Vienna. His mother was a barmaid (whom Jack later characterized, probably incorrectly, as a prostitute); his father was an American GI whose identity remains uncertain. Raised partly by his maternal grandfather in rural Austria, Jack began abusing alcohol by age twelve. This was followed by a period of juvenile delinquency: he committed theft, fraud, burglary, and robbery. He committed his first murder when he was twenty-four. By this time, he had grown into a highly intelligent and boyishly handsome charmer-a kind of Middle-European counterpart to America's Ted Bundy. Initially sentenced to life in prison, his stay was downgraded-with a softness in sentencing that has come to typify postwar European courts-to fifteen years.

  While in prison, Jack wrote an autobiography called Purgatory, or the Life in Prison, which, unbeknownst to the public, was filled with selfserving lies and distortions."b The book won Unterweger many ardent supporters from the leftist and counterculture press. He was even able to con various psychiatrists, who convinced themselves and the public that he was a changed man, remorseful and cured of his hostility toward women. This helped accelerate his release in May of 1990. It wasn't long afterward that Unterweger used his considerable charm both to acquire girlfriends and supporters (who succeeded in launching a movie about his book)-as well as female victims, whom he sodomized, bound with ligatures, strangled, and murdered in the Vienna woods. He even managed to go to Los Angeles, ostensibly to "study" prostitutes in that city, and murdered three prostitutes in the same fashion as the female victims back home.

  Like many serial killers, Jack had a "signature" killing method: he strangled his victims with their own bras. A classic sexual sadist, he experienced orgasm at the moment of strangling the women to death. When he was finally arrested, his former supporters were dumbstruck at how they had been conned and betrayed. When rearrested and put back in prison in 1994, he showed his loyalty to the choking method, twisting the strings in his prison clothing into a noose-and hanging himself. There is yet a final twist. Because he died before he could appeal the verdict for his eleven murders, the verdict-according to the peculiarities of Austrian law-is not valid. So in Austrian eyes, he is still, officially at least, "innocent." 77

  There are eerie similarities between the Unterweger case and that of another accomplished psychopath, Jack Henry Abbott. Born to an American soldier and a Chinese prostitute in 1944, he was in and out of foster homes, became a juvenile delinquent, and served time in Utah for forgery. His stay there was extended after he stabbed a fellow inmate to death. Inspired by Norman Mailer's book about Gary Gilmore's murder and eventual execution, Abbott wrote In the Belly of the Beast. Thanks to Mailer's support (but despite the misgivings of the prison officials), Abbott won release on parole in 1981. A scant six weeks after winning his freedom, Abbott, lunching in a small New York City cafe, argued with the aspiring playwright Richard Adan, son-in-law of the owner, and stabbed him to death.78 Back in prison, he wrote another book-but this one was unsuccessful. He came up for possible parole in 2001 but was turned down because he expressed no remorse for the murder. A year later, fashioning a noose with shoelaces and bedsheets, Abbott hanged himsel£79

  Chapter Eight

  THE FAMILY

  AT ITS WORST

  Canto XI, 11. 25-27

  Ma perche frode e de l'uorn proprio male, piu space a Dio; e pero stan di sotto li frodolente, e piu dolor li assale.

  But because fraud is an evil proper to man it is more displeasing to God, and therefore the fraudulent have a lower place, and greater pain assails them.

  he serial killers whose backgrounds and deeds we analyzed in the last chapter could easily be labeled as evil: all of them murdered repeatedly, and half of them subjected their victims to prolonged torture. Predictably, the word evil was used in the courtroom, in the media, and in the comments by the public when describing either the pain these victims were made to suffer or the men who had inflicted this cruelty. The victims of serial killers are almost invariably strangers; when their deaths are discovered, law enforcement and crime scene investigators become involved, headlines get written, and the community is alerted (and understandably frightened). This is public evil. But there are similar acts that take place within the family-and that often go undetected for long periods because the family is a sacrosanct unit not readily invaded by those outside.

  English law is particularly famous for advancing the thesis that a man's home is his castle. This was underlined in a famous murder case in the English midlands in 1860, when a three-year-old boy, Saville Kent, was murdered and mutilated by one of the inhabitants in an upper-middle-class manor house. The local police were loath to examine the family, let alone to point the finger at one of its members. With great reluctance a Detective Wicher from London was finally summoned to investigate, even though this meant "violating a sacred space."' One of the local papers had this to say: "Unlike the tenant of a foreign domicile, the occupier of an English house, whether it be mansion or cottage, possesses the indisputable title against every kind of aggression upon his threshold.... It is this that converts the moorside cottage into a castle."2 Thanks to Detective Wicher's unwanted intrusions, he was able to piece together who was the responsible party and why it was that the sleeping boy's throat was slit in the middle of the night, his body unceremoniously dumped in the family cesspool. It was not the butler. It was his sixteen-year-old half sister Constance, who had become morbidly jealous of the attention bestowed upon the little boy by her stepmother-her own mother having died, insane, when Constance was eight. What Wicher had the misfortune to uncover had been hidden behind a "mesh of deception and concealment."3 His detective work earned him the opprobrium of the townspeople, who now had to confront the fact that "one of their own"-from the highly respectable family of Road Hill House-had murdered the boy. Just as in detective stories and murder mysteries-which the Road Hill House case actually inspired4-many family members were initially suspects, and each had something to hide, which led them to lie, dissimulate, and refuse to cooperate with the police, even if they were innocent.

  Fast-forward 150 years, and the family is still the sanctuary and safe house it is-under ideal circumstances-supposed to be and usually is. But sometimes terrible things can go on inside the home that none on the outside are at all aware of. Similarly, when murder, mutilation, torture, crushing humiliation, and other forms of inhumane treatment within the family are eventually brought to light, we are as quick to respond with the term evil as our instant reaction-just as though the same kind of crime were committed by a stranger. Often our reaction is even stronger, because we inherently assume that parents, for example, would be far less likely to commit such an outrage against their own flesh and blood.

  I had planned at first to title this chapter Parents from Hell, but I had to acknowledge that terrible crimes, including torture, may have their source in family members other than the biological parents: spouse
s, for instance, or siblings, surrogate parents and caretakers, and even children. Some of the examples here come from newspapers and magazines rather than from full biographies. From these briefer sources, we get to know more about the who and the how than about the why. Since this is a book that explores the "why" question, I apologize in advance for not being able to share as much about the underlying causes as you and I would like to know.

  PARENTS FROM HELL

  Recently in Austria, an incident came to light (literally) that is unparalleled in the annals of crime. Josef Fritzl, a seventy-three-year-old engineer in the southern Austrian town of Amstetten,s fathered seven children by his wife Rosemarie. In 1977 he imprisoned one of his daughters, Elizabeth, age eighteen, in a bunker he had carefully constructed underneath his house (a project begun several years before her imprisonment). He first drugged her with ether, then dragged her into the bunker, handcuffing her at first to a metal pole-there either to be raped and fed, or not raped and starved. We can hear the words of Leonard Lake echoing in the walls: "Your choice!" She "chose" incest. In that dark cellar, Fritzl fathered yet another seven children through incest with Elizabeth. His daughter and her children did not see the light of day until twenty-four years later, when Elizabeth was let out for the first time, at age forty-two, because her first-born (then nineteen) had become gravely ill and was obviously medically unattended. The story came out when the girl was hospitalized.