The Anatomy of Evil

by Michael H. Stone

  This was not the first of Fritzl's offenses. Earlier, he had tossed one of Elizabeth's babies, allegedly a stillborn, into the furnace.6 He had once been in prison for rape years before. A woman from Linz came forward after the children had been freed accusing Fritzl of having raped her years ago.

  We know very little about Fritzl's early life, other than that he grew up in the Nazi era and had a "domineering mother whom he loved desperately." 7 During his adult life, he had also been domineering, insisting on total obedience. He was good at lying, too-telling his wife that Elizabeth had "run away to join a Satanic cult" when she disappeared (to the cellar bunker just below where his wife was standing!) in 1977. Fritzl had apparently turned away from his wife when he felt the bloom was off the rose regarding her looks; she had also become good and tired of his bul lying. Elizabeth at eighteen was prettier and, once a captive, left her father free from any worries that she would leave him.' As for Elizabeth's children, they had spent their entire lives like the imaginary prisoners in Plato's Republic, chained in such a way that they could only see shadowimages in two dimensions cast by a fire in back of them like puppets between the fire and the prisoners.9 They had hitherto glimpsed the outside world only on the two-dimensional screen of the television and were dumbfounded when, released to the light of the day, they saw real threedimensional cars and houses and, most astonishing of all, the sun. Equally astonishing to those of us familiar with American law, sex offenses older than ten years are wiped off the slate in Austria, and even Fritzl's crime carries a sentence no longer than fifteen years. So we are left with the "why" question.

  Aside from Fritzl's boundless narcissism and psychopathy and his contemptuous disregard for the well-being of his fourteen children (Elizabeth, the six now shamed by their father's scandal, and the seven children born of incest and burdened not only with that shame but also with their enforced ignorance of the real world), was he also hoping to create a new race of people, all with blood-loyalty to Papa Fritzl? There is some precedent for this. In Philadelphia during the mid-1980s, self-styled preacher Gary Heidnick chained a number of black women to the wall of his cellar, where he tried to impregnate them with the goal of creating a race of people loyal to Papa Heidnick.10 The experiment was a flop: the tortured women didn't conceive, and Heidnick killed and dismembered them, burying their remains in the backyard. Heidnick committed suicide in prison, whereas Fritzl, in his post-capture photos, and although called "evil" in the press, appears gleeful."

  I can't help interjecting a note about evolutionary psychiatry at this point. It has to do with the idea of "fitness." Fitness, from the standpoint of evolution, is a measure of how many offspring an animal leaves into the next generation. In the case of humans, this means how many living children you have-even if you've been a dreadful parent. An antisocial man killed in a barroom brawl at age thirty-three but who has fathered four kids he doesn't even know about shows more "fitness" than an eightyyear-old, law-abiding parent of two children. So Papa Fritzl, with his fourteen children (well, half of whom are also his grandchildren) showed greater "fitness"-more strands of his DNA into the next generation than I with my two sons or you, the reader, with however many children you may have, which is probably a good deal fewer than fourteen. This helps explain why there is always a fair percentage of antisocial and psychopathic persons in the community. The less extreme examples manage to be successful: conning and swindling their way through life, doing things that fall a bit short of what we would call "evil." Their number never dwindles; their "type" does not die out.12

  When it comes to harming children, and even more so, to the killing of children, the measure of evil becomes almost meaningless. Nothing seems worse, so there are hardly any gradations. Still, some people-not all-tend to react more strongly when they hear of an older child being harmed than a newborn, because toddlers or young children have already begun to establish themselves as persons and to develop distinct personalities. Likewise, it seems futile to argue whether a parent harming or killing a child is worse than a stranger doing so-or vice versa. When parents kill a child, the act is a transgression of the most sacred bond: evil writ in the largest letters possible. Yet the ripple effect may be smaller, like a pebble tossed into a small pond, compared with a stranger killing a child, where the ripples spread out over a larger lake. For when a stranger kills a child, besides whatever suffering the child may have endured, there is then, added to the picture, the incalculable suffering of the parents and all the other relatives and family friends. Killing one's own child strikes us as monstrous precisely because it was a parent that did it. Killing someone else's child strikes us as monstrous because of the widespread "collateral" suffering by the family members, over and above whatever happened to the child.

  It is the mark of the psychopath that Josef Fritzl, once his story came out, objected to being called a "monster" (as he was by the press and just about everybody else except the defense attorney) and pretended instead to be "crazy." As for the monstrosity of his long imprisonment of his daughter, the incest, the imprisonment of her children, their being cut off from access to the outside world, here physical torture and psychological torture are combined. The horror of torturing of someone else's child has already been confronted in chapter 6.13 Because torturing a child seems like the lowest depth to which a human being can sink (I say "seems," since there is always a depth still lower than any you can imagine), torturing one's own child may be, for most of us, evil's bottom most layer-well below the lowest layer that Dante dared to envision in the Ninth Circle of his Inferno. This brings us to Theresa Knorr.

  Theresa Jimmie Francine Cross Sanders Knorr Pulliam Harris, more conveniently known as Theresa Knorr (after her second husband), was born in California in 1946, the younger of two sisters (plus two older half-siblings by their mother's earlier marriage).14 She was jealous of her sister, even though she was the favorite of their mother, Swannie Cross. But when Theresa was fifteen, her mother collapsed and died in her arms, after which Theresa went into a deep depression.15 Her father became ill a few years later, which spurred Theresa to marry the first man who proposed to her. At eighteen she became Mrs. Clifford Sanders. They quickly had a son, Howard, but Theresa was inordinately possessive of Cliff and accused him of infidelity. On July 6, 1964 (the day after Cliff's birthday), Cliff decided to leave the marriage. As he was just about out the door, Theresa shot him in the back with a rifle, killing him. Already pregnant with their second child, she persuaded the court this was in "self-defense," and she won an acquittal from Judge Charles Johnson. She and the judge were to meet several more times.

  Theresa began to drink heavily, giving birth to a daughter, Sheila, in 1965. A year later she met a marine, Robert Knorr, got pregnant again, and discussed marriage. She gave birth to another daughter, Suesan, two months after she and Robert married. A son, Robert, came the next year in 1967. The marriage was failing because Robert's job took him away frequently. Theresa now became abusive toward the children: she would slap them for not being completely still and would lock them in the closet. At twenty-three she divorced for a second time and remarried two years later, this time to Ron Pulliam. That marriage lasted all of a year, as he resented her making him a "babysitter" for the three children while she went out partying, drinking, and, eventually, cheating on him-with Bill Bullington. Alcohol became her main consolation until she met yet another man willing to marry her: Chet Harris, who married her three days after they met and divorced her three months later. Judge Johnson presided over both the latter two divorces.

  It is not recorded whether the judge was beginning to have second thoughts about the trustworthiness of Theresa's "self-defense" plea after she killed husband number 1. Stuck now with six children and no husband, Theresa began drinking more heavily than ever and became more abusive with her brood. At this point, there were more players in her life than in the average Shakespearean play. I have tried to make it easier for the reader to follow via a family diagram (see figure 8.1). U
nfortunately, the children could do no right by their mother: if they said they loved her, she felt they were trying to appease her; if they failed to say so, she regarded them as evil.16 She beat them, punched the girls repeatedly, and threw knives at them, especially when Suesan ran away for a brief spell. Picked up by a truant officer, Suesan tried to tell the authorities about her mother's abusiveness, but Theresa said the girl was lying, and she was returned to her mother's tender mercies. By now Theresa, grossly overweight and no longer so attractive, became crazily jealous of her pretty daughters and began to force-feed them with macaroni and cheese so they would be fat and unattractive too. She would burn Suesan with cigarettes and claim the girl had "VD" and was a "witch."

  In 1984, when Suesan was eighteen, Theresa and her son Robert took Suesan to a remote spot in California's Sierra Mountains, where Theresa had Robert douse his sister with an accelerant (probably gasoline), setting her afire. Suesan's body was charred beyond recognition; Robert was warned he would be "next" if he ever told. Two years later, it was Sheila's turn: Theresa locked her in a closet and bound her limbs to a metal pole until she confessed that she had "VD." The girl confessed, despite her innocence, but that won her only a brief reprieve. Theresa locked her in the closet again, this time leaving her to starve to death. The youngest daughter, Terry, had run away and was supporting herself by prostitution; when she tried to tell the police what went on in her home, she was not at first believed. Theresa was at last brought to trial and convicted in 1993 and sentenced to life in prison for the torturekillings that the judge called "callous beyond belief." 7 Because Suesan's body could not at first be identified, and because of the enforced secrecy and deceptiveness about Sheila's death, Theresa got away with murder for about seven years. At the time of her arrest she was working as a paid companion of an elderly woman.

  Figure 8.1

  There are many child murders as horrifying as Theresa's, their grotesqueness triggering the reaction of "evil." Two morbidly religious mothers in Texas, for example, shocked the public-one with the murder of her two children by smashing their skulls with rocks; the other, by severing the arms of her ten-month-old daughter, intoning the words "Thank you Jesus, thank you Lord," when the police came to take her away.18 But those mothers were certifiably insane. The level of evil becomes reduced when we take into consideration the mitigating circumstance of their madness. Like other psychotic mothers who murder very small children, the explanation (from a psychiatrist's point of view) for such behavior can lie in the overwhelming tasks of motherhood, coupled with the inability to let this difficulty register in one's consciousness (because of the psychosis). Hence the formation of a face-saving delusion: "I must consign these children to God," or "This child is the devil and must be destroyed in order to save the world." But Theresa Knorr was not insane. Twisted, paranoid, afire with jealousy. . . all of that, but not insane. As a cold and cruel torturer of her own daughters (and corrupter of her sons), Knorr belongs to the extreme end of the Gradations of Evil scale, where those who torture in a prolonged fashion reside, whether or not the end result is death.

  The Knorr case is reminiscent of another case of child burning in 1983. A career criminal, Charles Rothenberg, when involved in a custody dispute with his ex-wife, decided to kill his six-year-old son, David, and himself. To that end, he gave the boy a sleeping pill, poured kerosene over his body in their motel room, kissed him good-bye, and set him on fire. Rescued by another guest, David suffered third-degree burns over 90 percent of his body, losing fingers, ears, nose, and genitals during the attack.'`' Because the child survived (to which end thirty-five skin grafts were needed), Rothenberg received only a thirteen-year sentence for attempted-as opposed to completed-murder. As all too often happens in these "murder-suicide" cases, the parent loses his nerve; Rothenberg did not kill himself. But he at least confessed to what was called at the time "one of the most unforgettable crimes ever committed against a child 1120 (this was a full year before Theresa Knorr swung into action). When he was released after seven years, Rothenberg said in a letter, "Do I deserve to be set free? No! It's an unforgivable act. 1121

  Terribly disfigured at first, David Rothenberg has made an amazingly good adjustment: after completing a film course at the University of California, he now hopes to pursue a directing career.22 He commented, "Charles is an evil man, and I feel that he should just take responsibility, because no one else lit the match."23 That his father was able to confess and express remorse-and had not engaged in systematic torture on any previous occasions-does at least place him on a wider island of humanity than the one occupied by Theresa Knorr. Also the "why" question is a little less elusive in Rothenberg's case. Rothenberg had a worse background than Knorr's: his mother was a prostitute and he was raised in an orphanage. On the other hand, Knorr is the proverbial mystery wrapped in an enigma within a conundrum. There's no straight line one can draw from her mother's sudden death when Theresa was fifteen to the calculated torture of her daughters twenty years later. Rosemary, her sister, turned out well, as did her half-siblings. Alcohol certainly played a role-that was the "accelerant" Theresa used-but she drank to quell demons that were already circulating in her brain: loneliness, jealousy, paranoid thoughts. Perhaps there was some genetic flaw that lay behind her egocentricity that made her daughters, after her fourth husband left her (fifth, if you count her "de facto," Bill Bullington), hated rivals instead of the solace of her lonely days. But we can only guess.

  Perhaps because the concept of evil is so bound up with what is shocking and horrifying, we usually reserve the term for cases that are unlike anything we have ever heard of before. They are unique. Shooting a spouse caught in bed with a lover is murder, but it hardly passes the "uniqueness" test. Having seven children by one's own daughter and keeping them all locked up underground for twenty-four years is unique. A mother torturing her daughters for years on end, finally killing two, is unique.

  Another, and more subtle, feature commonly found in families devastated by abysmal parenting is what I have called the Cat's Cradle Family Tree. The lines of relationship are so complex: so many marriages, divorces, children born of casual encounters, siblings, halfsiblings, step-siblings, incest children, and the like, that there is no way to draw the family tree neatly on a piece of paper. The lines that go every which way-criss-crossing and overlapping-reflect the chaos and instability of these families. Often there is no set of values and rules that guides people's behavior and morals. If incest is "right," then what is "wrong"? Murder is not "wrong."

  I once worked with a young woman in therapy whose father shot her mother to death in front of her and then told her, "What you saw didn't happen, and if you tell anyone, I'll kill you too!" The Cat's Cradle Family scenario shows up in the lives of many murderers, not just in cases of "Parents from Hell." Other examples of complex family trees include Sante Kimes and Scott Peterson (chapter 4), Charles Manson (chapter 5), Ken McElroy and Tommy Lynn Sells (chapter 6), and David Ray and Leonard Lake (chapter 7). In the case of Sells, for example, who was Tommy's mother? His birth mother? The aunt his mother gave him to? The pedophile his aunt gave him to? And who was his father? Perhaps several of his "caretakers" read to him from the Bible, told him the right things to do. But children learn more from parental example than from words. Absent enduring, socially proper examples from loving parents, a child (especially a son) may grow up with little trust, great hatred, and no inner restraints. Anything is possible. Robert Knorr, the son Theresa Knorr ordered to burn his sister to death, later murdered a bartender.

  The next Parents from Hell case has these same chaotic features: unique cruelties and a twisted family tree. Figure 8.2 shows my best attempt to draw the undrawable.

  Ed Sexton, born in 1942, was raised in the coal mining area of West Virginia. He was one of nine children, though there was an unknown number of half-siblings from his father's affairs with perhaps four other women. When he was ten, he set fires and killed cats and dogs. We don't know if he had the
whole "triad" that included bed-wetting.

  A juvenile delinquent, Ed was involved in thefts and robberies for which he spent some time in prison. Briefly in the army, he was given a dishonorable discharge for bad conduct.14 Once out of prison at twentynine, he married Estella May. They had a large number of children, as shown in Figure 8.2, but one was Estella May's by a soldier she met while he was en route to Vietnam, and another was fathered by Ed via incest. This daughter, Pixie, was forced to marry a man her age, so it would appear that her son was by her husband rather than by her father. Incest was rife in rural West Virginia, so it was said, and Ed tried to impregnate another daughter, Machelle, whom he raped when she was thirteen or fourteen-apparently without success (that is, without her conceiving).

  Machelle may have tried to intervene when Ed went after her two younger sisters, Kim and Lana. Ed punished Machelle so severely, she had to be hospitalized. He had warned her: "You get the belt till you're sixteen, then my fist." Actually, all the children got whipped and beaten regularly, as did Estella May, who gave as good as she got: she beat her sons continuously as well. She also held the girls down when they were being raped. Ed would beat his son Charles until he bled, making him stand naked in front of the whole family, and did the same with the other children. Ed himself ran around the house naked and encouraged the children to have sex with one another.

  Figure 8.2

  Another of Ed's punishments was to lock the children in a closet and spray roach-killer into the closet space. Now and then there would be a complaint, and inspectors from the health department would come over. Ed would then fake a disability, like multiple sclerosis or muscular dystrophy, and perch in his wheelchair as though unable to walk until the inspector left. Another of Ed's punishments was to tie the children up; some of them ended up lying in their own waste. He threatened to kill any of the children who dared talk to people on the outside. Ed smoked marijuana, and he was not stingy with the whiskey. He killed cats and dogs and, in the case of his daughter Sherri, he killed her pet rabbit-and then forced her to eat it. Ultimately he killed Pixie's husband, Joel, and she in turn killed the incest-child she had been made to pretend was Joel's.