The Anatomy of Evil

by Michael H. Stone

  One of the girls became a snitch. The news finally got out as to what was happening in the family, and both parents were arrested. In court, Ed was given a death sentence; Estella-May, life in prison.

  As we saw in chapter 7, blame for an "evil" outcome is at times laid at the doorstep of foster parents or stepparents. On closer look, the stepparents might have been uncommonly caring and supportive, yet were still unable to stem the tide of adverse genetic factors (as with Gerald Stano). But sometimes stepparents really did seem to have been the main destructive force in a killer's early life (as with Charles Schmid). The wicked stepmother of the fairy tales is a figure born of real-life circumstances. Despite how kind and loving most stepparents are, there remains a small proportion-greater, nevertheless, than is true of birth parentswho kill25 or who psychologically ruin their stepchildren. The expression blood is thicker than water comes to life with particular vividness in homes where the natural children are treated with tenderness and the stepchildren with a cruelty beyond the imagination even of Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm.

  Jessica Schwarz, a truck driver in Florida, had two daughters: one by her first marriage, and another by her second husband, David Schwarz, also a truck driver. David brought to the marriage a son, Andrew, from a previous marriage to Ilene Logan.21 Ilene had been a go-go dancer who abused drugs and alcohol-and sometimes abused Andrew: she once, so it was alleged'27 hit him in the ear with a frying pan, leaving him deaf in one ear. She had various lovers, one of whom beat Andrew so badly that he had to be hospitalized. Those were the good times.

  The bad times began when Andrew moved into his new home, with Jessica as stepmother. By all accounts, Jessica took good care of her two daughters, who slept in a well-appointed and well-kept bedroom. Andrew was stuck in a messy, closet-sized room-with a lock on the outside, so Jessica could, in effect, imprison him in his bedroom. Beyond that, the things Jessica did to Andrew, when added together, create a veritable textbook of sadism. She would yell at him, "I hate you," or "I'm gonna tie you up and run you over." She threatened to kill Andrew if he wanted to see his real mother, Ilene. She took to calling him "Jeffrey Dahmer" as though he were some monstrous younger version of the serial killer. She also called him "bastard," "crackhead," "bastard's baby," and "fuck-face." While she gave hardly any responsibilities to her daughters, Andrew was made to do most of the chores and usually with a sadistic twist: she made him clip the hedges of the lawn with a small scissors and clean his father's car with a toothbrush. She drove her daughters to school but made Andrew walk even in the rain, and she allowed no neighbors to take him in their cars. Andrew was made to stand in the yard and repeat over and over, "I'm no good, I'm a liar." Jessica once made him wear a T-shirt at home on which was written "I'm a worthless piece of shit, don't talk to me." The babysitter who was there offered to give him a sweater to put over the T-shirt so he would not have to admit to Jessica later that he had taken it off. Jessica once hit Andrew so hard he ended up with two black eyes and a broken nose, but she made him tell the school he had "fallen off his bike."

  The egregious failure of the local authorities to figure out the actual cause of his injuries and to take proper steps is whole other story. Jessica was once punished and made to do community service-picking up used soda cans-but she made Andrew do that work for her, forcing him to skip school on Thursdays in order to collect the cans. At times she would make the boy run down the street naked and would put tape over his mouth so that he couldn't speak to the neighbor children.

  Jessica was intimidating toward her neighbors, most of whom were too frightened to warn the authorities what went on in the Schwarz household. One girl that did manage to speak to a detective about possible child abuse charges mentioned that Jessica would make Andrew sit at the dinner table with his mouth taped shut, while his sisters ate their dinner. Other neighborhood children spoke of Jessica setting a timer, and if Andrew didn't finish his supper in five minutes, she would put the dish on the floor next to the kitty litter box, making him eat it there like an animal.28

  But what I found most shocking, and what would have brought tears to the eyes of the Marquis de Sade, was Jessica's forcing Andrew, if he failed to clean the kitchen to her satisfaction, to eat a roach. That alone would have earned her the seventy years in prison to which she was eventually sentenced-but she would have escaped justice altogether had she not gone the full distance and drowned Andrew in the family pool when he was ten. This is what the prosecuting attorney, Scott Cupp, had to say when Jessica was finally brought to trial: "I may not be able to define evil for you-not as a black-and-white statement lifted from the pages of a dictionary-but I can say without equivocation that I know it when I see it, and Jessica Schwarz will forever personify it in my eyes."29

  Recently, the author of Jessica's true-crime biography sent me some photographs from her teenage days, when she was Jessica L. Woods at Glen Cove High School in Long Island. The transformation from the sweet face in her high school yearbook to the tough-looking woman in her prison photo twenty-five years later seems at first astonishing, inexplicable. Her parents related in court, for example, that there was "no drug abuse or alcoholism in the family," and that she had not herself been abused.30 But from collaterals we learn that there was indeed alcoholism in the family and that Jessica and her friends "dropped acid" (LSD) while in high school. Jessica moved in a social circle of "tough" young men and was herself known as "tough." The picture that emerges is one that makes her transition into the sadistic bully she became not so inexplicable after all.

  What is particularly poignant about the fate of Andrew Schwarz is that he was singled out for barbarous treatment, while Jessica Schwarz's own daughters, as Andrew could see for himself, were grossly favored. This situation is quite a contrast from the children of Fritzl, Knorr, and Sexton, who lived in what amounted to mini-concentration camps, all treated with equal savagery, almost all denied access to the outside world. They at least did not have to endure the added indignity of radical unfairness. But all these children suffered ego-crushing experiencesAndrew's lot simply being the worst, because Jessica reduced his status to that of a despised animal-not even a human animal-while her own daughters flourished. From a psychological standpoint, the lot of these children was in some respects worse than that of the victims in the Nazi camps-for those people usually came from loving families and knew that there were good people in the world. Many of those who survived made fairly good adjustments once they were liberated.31 The camp victims knew that the evil afflicting them came from the Nazis: a malignant group outside. For the children of Fritzl, Knorr, and Sexton, evil came in the form of one's own flesh-and-blood "protectors"-the parents. And those parents were their entire world. How could they later entrust themselves, as did Tennessee Williams's heroine in A Streetcar Named Desire-to the "kindness of strangers"?

  When children are subjected to physical suffering at the hands of their parents,32 they tend to develop in one of two directions. Most are up to their necks in anger and hatred; some become violent toward others (this happens with boys more than with girls), while others take these strong emotions out on themselves and become depressed or even suicidal (this happens more with girls than with boys). Parental violence meted out to boys is a pretty reliable recipe for violence done later on by those boys. Just how reliable a recipe this is comes out clearly in a beautifully written book by criminology professor Lonnie Athens.33 Athens describes stages through which the battered child may go. First, the child is "brutalized": severely beaten and humiliated or made to witness other family members enduring such treatment, or just encouraged by a parent to injure or kill anyone who "messes" with you. After "brutalization" comes "belligerency." The idea of lashing out at others becomes absorbed into one's personality; it seems the appropriate philosophy for dealing with life's stresses. The next step is "violent performances." At this stage-reached now in adolescence or early adult life-one progresses from violent thoughts to repeated violent acts again
st anyone who presses even lightly on one's sensitive buttons. At the end, we may see "virulence." For Athens, this is a stage, mercifully not the inevitable consequence of parental violence, where some young persons go on to violence as a way of life by now so entrenched, so much a part of their nature, that there is no going back, no corrective treatment still available. The violence will surface as retaliation for the wrongs suffered. One cannot easily predict in advance whether the target will be the offending parent or, as is much more often the case, others on the outside who remind one of that parent. We saw this with Tommy Lynn Sells, when I asked him if he ever felt like killing his mother, given all the troubles he had after she abandoned him. Tommy said, startled that I could even think such a thought: "Anyone touch a hair of her head, he wouldn't last a minute; ya only got one mum!"

  Sometimes, of course, even a daughter subjected to enough neglect and torture can pass through Athens's stages, though seldom as far as "virulence," but certainly as far as "violent performances." This was true in a famous British case of a girl who also "only had one mum" and who took out her hatred on others. She was widely regarded as an evil child, someone on the dark side of celebrity-so much so that everyone seemed oblivious to the primary evil in her case: the violence and sadism of her mother.

  Mary Bell was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in northeast England, not far from the Scottish border. Betty, her mother, was a prostitute who gave birth to her when she was only sixteen. Betty was a professional dominatrix whose specialty was to whip her clients. This was a kind of controlled sadism from which she earned her keep. Her sadism was not confined to those men, however. She tried on many occasions to kill Mary before she even reached her first birthday. When Mary got a little older, she was pressed into service herself: her mother forced her to give fellatio to her "johns," after which she would vomit the ejaculate. The men were invited to insert objects into Mary's rectum, a practice in which Betty also took part. On various occasions Betty would whip her daughter or try to drown her by pushing her head underwater. What few moments of respite Mary had from these atrocious acts were during the times Betty was in a psychiatric hospital. Some time after Mary was born, Betty began living with a de facto, Billy Bell, from whom Mary took her last name, though he was not her father. Betty never told Mary who her father was, nor is it at all likely she knew herself. 14 Billy was a habitual criminal, arrested for armed robbery at some point, yet he treated Mary with gentleness and devotion: he was perhaps the only person in Mary's early life who did so.3' Betty, in contrast, would threaten her with dire consequences if she ever told what went on in the house. Hence the sexual abuse went undetected.

  Her road paved with these jagged stones, it is not surprising that Mary turned to violence herself. She killed birds and cats. There is no indication that she set fires, though she did have one other element of the "triad": she was enuretic and would often urinate on the floor on purpose, and then run away. When Mary was ten she gave the community a foretaste of what was to come: she threw her three-year-old cousin over an embankment. The boy survived, and her act was written off by the police as a childish prank.36 She then tried to strangle some little girls in a play area. But in May of 1968 she strangled to death a four-year-old boy, Martin Brown. Two months later-this time with a friend, Norma Bell (no relation) participating-the victim was Brian Howe, age three. Mary tried (unsuccessfully) to castrate Brian, apparently in revenge for the despicable sexual offenses that she had to endure. She even returned later to Brian's body and carved an "M" on his belly. As the story unfolded, it became known that Betty had tried on several occasions to throttle Mary into unconsciousness, so the murders Mary committed could be understood as reenactments of what had happened to her. And since Mary had survived these attempts, the line between unconsciousness and death was not neatly drawn in her mind-if indeed she grasped the finality of death at all at her age. She used to say that she liked hurting things that couldn't fight back.37

  Both girls were soon apprehended. Norma showed some remorse; Mary did not. The court and the public regarded her for that reason as a vicious psychopath, "evil incarnate," and as an example of Bad Seed. Because of her age, Mary was convicted of manslaughter due to diminished responsibility, rather than murder.38 For ten years she was consigned to a reformatory, then to two years in prison. Though sentenced originally to be detained at Her Majesty's Pleasure (which could amount to an indefinite period of incarceration), she appeared to have shown enough improvement after the twelve years to warrant release. As with the Archie McCafferty case (chapter 5), the public was outraged, all the more so when Mary was granted anonymity and a changed name.

  Mary eventually married and had a daughter (in 1984). Her life storyultimately one of rehabilitation and redemption-was portrayed with sympathy and psychological astuteness by Gitta Sereny, whose earlier writings had focused on evils of a different kind: the Nazi atrocities and Hitler's henchmen. She summed up: "Children are brought to the breaking point, and it is not their fault, but ours." At first Mary herself was perplexed by the way her life had unfolded; she asked: "What made me what I am? What made me capable of evil?" Through Sereny's gentle but persistent efforts, Mary got back in touch with the sexual violation she endured, which she had for so long repressed. And it was when she became a mother herself that she could begin to grasp the enormity of her crime.39

  The most likely paths she could have taken, given her history, were suicide and prostitution. That she became at first violent most likely is a reflection of some genetic influences (perhaps helped along by adverse factors during Betty's pregnancy) that made her impulsive and irritable. That she later became capable of redemption is related most likely to other and more favorable genetic influences that left her with a good capacity for compassion and reflection: these, then, interacted with what little she knew of kindness from her stepfather. Such a mixture of positive and negative influences is not rare. What is not easy to explain is why in Mary's case the good finally triumphed, despite the fact that she came from one of the worst homes imaginable, while in Jessica Schwarz's case, despite coming from a merely bad (though outwardly more ordinary) home, evil triumphed.

  Mary's case also teaches us that, just as with mental illness, youth itself is a mitigating circumstance. And she was not an example of Bad Seed for two reasons: she was subjected to the unspeakable evil of her mother right up until the murders (which, paradoxically, rescued her: the court took her away from Betty and put her in the much more humane environment of the reformatory), and she did not become and remain a true psychopath, inclined to evil actions 24/7 like Jessica. There are cases that warrant the appellation of Bad Seed (as we shall see in the next chapter), but it is meaningless to apply such a label unless the home environment was uniformly favorable, the emerging personality clearly psychopathic, and there were no other factors present to explain it-not even complications during pregnancy-just the genes. Such cases are rare indeed.

  The Mary Bell case illustrates another paradox: the noble principle that each man's house, be it mansion or cottage, is a sacred and inviolable space will now and again be set upside down by the Law of Unintended Consequences. Terrible things may go on in those mansions or cot tages-whether the manor house of Saville Kent or the much humbler abode of Betty Bell-that remain unsuspected and undetected. This is because of the difficulty in learning what goes on in some of these "inviolable spaces" and the reluctance of the police to cross these sacred boundaries even when strong evidence comes to light. The transient evil of Mary Bell cost her twelve years of incarceration. This was fully justified by the circumstances. The perpetual evil of Betty Bell was left unpunished. She should have been sent to prison and had all parental rights terminated. Instead, and in a manner of speaking, she got away with murder. The law that safeguards the good majority protects, unintentionally, the Betty Bells as well.

  Compared with birth parents, adoptive parents and foster parents are more at risk for mistreating the children under their care, just as stepp
arents are, and for the same reason: the lack of a blood tie to the children. Some of the most outrageous situations arise from households in which a young mother with an out-of-wedlock child-whose birth father may not even be known-now lives with an on-again off-again boyfriend. The boyfriend is sometimes referred to as the "stepfather," but, to judge from his behavior, he is not a father in any meaningful sense of the word. His interest is in maintaining a sexual relationship with the young woman. The child in these real-life scenarios is an encumbrance in the path of the boyfriend's sexual ambitions, the more so if the child cries, soils itself, or misbehaves. This is a prescription for disaster. The risk for violent forms of child abuse skyrocket, but when and if the violence reaches the level of evil is unpredictable. We are all familiar with how much difference a half-inch makes in a gunshot case. A person shot in the mid-thigh is on crutches for six weeks with a broken femur. A person struck a half-inch toward the groin bleeds out from a severed femoral artery and dies.40 As with James Gleick's comments on chaos, small differences can make a big difference. If Jessica Schwarz made her stepson swallow some castor oil for misbehaving-and that was all-no one would have said "evil!" But she made him swallow a roach. Suddenly we are in the realm of evil. The next two cases are mansion-andcottage versions of the same depressing story. Stepparents from Hell, Non-Blood-Parents from Hell, shielded by our noble legal system from the prying eyes of neighbors-and from the local Child Protective Services-until the day after tragedy strikes.