The Anatomy of Evil

by Michael H. Stone

  THE "COTTAGE" CASE

  Cesar Rodriguez became the last of Nixzaliz Santiago's lovers and was the father of her two youngest children-both boys born twelve months apart. She lived with Cesar in a two-bedroom apartment in a poor section of Brooklyn, but she had been born in Puerto Rico in 1979, the same year Cesar was born. By the time she was twenty-seven, she had had six children by four different lovers-and almost a seventh, but the last pregnancy ended in a miscarriage in November 2005.41 What raised this couple from obscurity to nationwide public attention was the torturemurder of Nixzaliz's seven-year-old daughter, Nixzmary Brown, on January 10, 2006. Her mother did not know the father's full name; this was learned only at the subsequent trial. The family tree and its bewildering complexity are shown in figure 8.3, drawn to the best of my ability and with as much information as I could gather.

  The biological father played no role whatever in the girl's life. She took her name (and not much else) from yet another of her mother's lovers, Edward Brown, by whom Nixzaliz had two other children. Nixzmary, who weighed only thirty-six pounds at her death-half what a normal seven-year-old girl should weigh-had tried to get some yogurt from the refrigerator one night. This was for the obvious reason: having been systematically starved by her "caretakers," she was hungry. She also inadvertently jammed Cesar's computer printer with some of her toys. Enraged at her "badness," Cesar stripped the child, plunged her head into cold water in the bathtub, and hit her head against the faucet. The latter blow gave her a hematoma (a pocket of bleeding in the brain) from which she died the following morning.

  Figure 8.3

  Poverty was not the reason Cesar and Nixzaliz reacted so strongly to the girl's attempt to take some food; the refrigerator was full. It was rather that they had not allowed her to eat a proper amount of food. In addition to not getting enough food, Nizmary was often locked in her room with only a litter box for a toilet. Earlier, Cesar had been in the habit of punishing Nixzmary on a daily basis by strapping her to a chair with duct tape, rope and bungee cords-and beating her. Her bruises were noticed by her teachers at school, who notified the ACS (Administration for Child Services). The ACS made no meaningful contact with the family; worse yet, the caseworker assigned to look into the family after hours, on January 10, decided to wait until the next morning. By that time, the girl was dead. Nixmary's body bore bruises all over, as well as "ugly cuts."42

  Cesar was tried first in court, and, as is customary in such cases, each adult blamed the other for inflicting the decisive wounds. It is much more likely that Cesar did the bulk of the damage, for which he was convicted only of first-degree manslaughter. The jury could not agree about the more serious possible charge of second-degree murder. It makes an interesting comment on the special semantics-just plain antics would be a better word-so often heard on the defense side in these cases. Cesar acknowledged in court that he slapped, spanked, and whipped Nixzmary with a belt, but "he didn't do it with intent to hurt."43 No comment is necessary. By the time Nixzaliz and Cesar put in a call for medical help, the girl had already been dead for at least seven hours, so the mother, too, has much to answer for. As for the backgrounds of either adult, we know very little, so we cannot begin to answer the "why" question. Given the degree to which violence breeds violence, we can speculate that gentleness was not the main characteristic of their upbringing either. This seems like a good guess, because Cesar spoke as though Nixzmary was a wildly naughty child for whom the (as we experience it) monstrous pun ishments to which he subjected her were somehow normal, par for the course. At the murder trial of the mother, who blamed her daughter for her miscarriage and had called her a "devil," Nixzaliz was convicted in October 2008 of manslaughter.

  THE "MANSION" CASE

  John and Linda Dollar's latest home (they changed residences many times) was in a small community some seventy miles north of Tampa, Florida. A spacious 3,800-square-foot abode with a three-car garage and a pool in the backyard, it was worlds away from the poor Brooklyn setting of Nixzaliz and Cesar. By the time the Dollars came to the world's attention, John was fifty-seven, an affluent real estate appraiser; his wife of fifty-one, a former businesswoman with a master's degree in educa- tion.44 Unable to have children of their own, they began adopting and ended up with eight children, mostly during the 1990s. The first, a daughter, was grown and out of the house by the time, in January 2005, the "troubles" came to the surface regarding the remaining seven kids.

  The Dollars had started out in Tennessee, where they ran a private Christian school: the Mountain View Christian Academy in Strawberry Plains, a village of seven hundred some twenty miles northeast of Knoxville. They attended a nearby church but had a falling out with the pastor when he disagreed with their conviction that the world was coming to an end in the year 2000.45 If that were their only manifestation of religious fanaticism, the Dollars would have continued to live out their lives (even beyond 2000) in obscurity. But they had seriously twisted notions of how best to discipline children-though even these notions seem destined to remain unexposed, for they were in the habit of home-schooling their children and of confining them to the housebeyond the ken even of their neighbors, let alone any schoolteachers or caseworkers from Child Protective Services.

  Of the seven children still in the Florida home, all were adolescents between twelve and seventeen. Two were the favorites of their adoptive parents and were treated well. The other five were treated quite differently. This would not have come to light but for the sixteen-year-old boy requiring the services of the local emergency room because of a head wound. He also had red marks around his neck. In addition, he was extremely underweight-and this sparked an investigation by the Citrus County sheriff's office.`~6 Meantime, the Dollars fled to a remote part of Utah in their SUV, only to be apprehended, thanks to their having made calls on their cell phone. They were apparently unaware that these gadgets also serve as global-positioning devices.

  The authorities then discovered that all five of the less-favored adolescents were more than underweight: they were near death's door from being deliberately starved by the Dollars. Twin boys of fourteen, for example, had weights of thirty-six and thirty-eight pounds-eighty pounds less than they should have weighed, but quite in keeping with the standards of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Besides starving the children, and to ensure obedience, the Dollars took to torturing them with electric cattle prods, chains, bondage equipment, and hammers. They ripped out the toenails of one of the children with pliers, which made John Dollar's protestation in court that "it was not intentional that they be harmed in any way"47 doubly horrifying: once, because it simply is; and once again, because the Dollars, out of their morbid religious fanaticism, actually believed what they said. They were not liars.

  The Dollars hit the feet of the five children with rubber mallets and canes and made them sleep in a closet with (shades of Jessica Schwarz) a lock on the outside. Or they affixed wind chimes to the bedroom door, so that if any of the unlucky five dared to sneak out in the middle of the night to garner a few extra calories from the refrigerator, the Dollars would be alerted and would swing into action. As for the boy whose condition called for emergency room intervention, investigators believed that John Dollar had grabbed the boy by the neck, raised him in the air, and then dropped him, such that he struck his head on the fireplace, sustaining a laceration.48

  What it was about the three boys and two girls that made them fall out of favor with the Dollars was not made clear. At their trial the Dollars argued that they were merely carrying out their religious convictions. As John put it, "We are firm believers in the God almighty ... and because of those principles, we were led to do certain things."49 For their aggravated child abuse/torture of five children, the Dollars were each sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Linda Dollar informed the court that she had left home at sixteen because of her abusive and alcoholic father, and that her first marriage had ended because of (an unspecified) abuse.so Given the millions of people whose early histories are re
plete with such conditions and worse, this cannot be the full explanation for Linda's behavior. Detective Lisa Wall sounded the right note on this matter when she said, "I will always remember the children, but will never understand what led the parents to such abuses.""

  As for the Dollars invoking God's name to justify their evil acts (what else can we call them?), one would like to think that religion-based, selfserving rationalizations about improving people by killing and torturing them have become a bit tiresome, especially after 9/11. But this is not so. I will burden you with one more example. In the West Yorkshire city of Bradford, the Crown Court found a Nigerian couple guilty of unlawful wounding and cruelty to their two sons.52 Their father had put pins through their tongues and lips, as well as pressing the tongue of one son with a pliers until the tongue swelled. The boys' mouths had been cut with scalpel blades; both had also been bound and beaten. They were kept at home during school holidays so their wounds would not be seen. The father was a fanatical Christian preacher; his wife, also a religious extremist, would watch while her husband inflicted the injuries. He did so, he told the court, because, according to his reading of the Bible, God had had his tongue cut out. The judge, no more able than you or I to find any such passage in the Good Book, told the man: "You are calculated, determined, persistent, and cruel in the extreme.... You have sadistic tendencies and took pleasure in inflicting pain on your children. To all right-minded persons, in particular parents, the idea of causing injury to children is almost beyond belief."53 Amen.

  The parents described in the above vignettes all subjected their children or stepchildren to prolonged torture, meriting placement at the extreme end of the Gradations scale: Category 22. That category includes the act of physical torture, so the Fritzl case is atypical. Fritzl subjected Elizabeth to some physical torture in the beginning, but what followed was a predominantly psychological torture: imprisonment in a cellar for over half of her forty-two years, as well as the imprisonment of her children. We don't even know if he added, over and above the sexual torture of rape, a little nonsexual physical torture along the way, but the complete ruination of Elizabeth and the seven children surely puts him at the extreme end, regardless.

  CHILDREN FROM HELL

  The relationship between parents and children is a two-way street. So far we've seen some extreme examples of how parents' acts can push their children to violence, but there are also children with genetic disadvantages, birth defects, or brain damage during pregnancy whose behavior is difficult, at times uncontrollable, and who have a very negative impact on their parents. The parents may become too punitive in response to a child's "wildness" or disobedience, resorting to harsh measures that only make things worse. A vicious cycle gets started, and one or the otherparent or child-may spin out of control, with tragic consequences. In still other families, the parents may remain in good control, consistently kind and understanding, with a disruptive child who goes on to become antisocial, even murderous. There are, in other words, a few "children from hell," with whom the parents have done nothing out of the ordinary. These are children whose behavior, nevertheless, may even reach the level of "evil" because of some shocking act of manipulativeness or violence. Such an outcome is seen most clearly when an adopted child with many prenatal disadvantages is raised from day one by loving parents who manage not to lose control no matter what the child does. But this can certainly happen in families where the children are brought up by their birth parents. One of the examples I have chosen here concerns children raised by their birth parents; the other is about an adopted child.

  THE MENENDEZ BROTHERS

  E fu nomato Sassol Mascheroni Se Tosco se, ben sai omai chi fu.

  And his name was Sassol Mascheroni If you are Tuscan, you know who he was.

  -Dante, Divine Comedy: Inferno54

  The mansion-and-cottage analogy I used for the last two parent examples was a bit figurative. Nixzaliz and Cesar didn't live in anything as commodious as a cottage; the Dollars' spacious home was a little short of a mansion. More literally, Lyle Menendez and his three-years-younger brother, Eric, murdered their parents in their twenty-three-room nothingshort-of-a-mansion mansion in the posh Beverly Hills section of Los Angeles. This was in August of 1989, when Lyle was twenty-one and Eric not quite eighteen. Their father, Jose, was forty-four; his attractive wife, Kitty, forty-seven. Their boys killed them execution style, using a 12gauge Mossberg shotgun. They shot Jose first, then turned to Kitty, who found herself spattered by her husband's blood and brain tissue, before she, too, was dispatched with ten shots to various parts of her body. Mindful of the details required of a "perfect crime," one of the sons then fired shots at the left knee of each parent, so that the murders would take on the appearance of a Mafia hit man at work." These touches did throw the police off the scent, who were reluctant to implicate the sons in this gruesome murder. The truth emerged only slowly over the ensuing months.

  The Menendez parents were not perfect: Jose, a refugee from Castro's Cuba, was an ambitious, self-made millionaire who expected his sons to succeed at the best schools. He was as demanding of his sons as he was of his subordinates at work, which gave him the reputation of being a boss from hell. Kitty, American-born, supported her husband in these demands and contributed to the pressure that the boys felt to meet their parents' high standards. Both parents helped the boys more than was appropriate with their homework; teachers noticed that the work they handed in from home was much better than what they were able to do in class. In their early teens, the brothers tried, unsuccessfully, to rape one of their young female cousins.

  Lyle managed to get into Princeton, thanks to his father's influence, but he plagiarized a paper and was suspended for a year.56 Then, while working for his father, Lyle alienated people and was considered "nasty, arrogant, and self-centered." Back at Princeton, Lyle got a friend to write papers for him, so he wouldn't fail. Kitty, meanwhile, was busy completing much of Eric's homework. Eric, too, was acquiring the reputation of being arrogant, loud, and rebellious. The year before the murders, the brothers began burglarizing homes in the exclusive area where their parents lived. The full recitation of their criminal actions would be too long to recite here; suffice it to say that Jose and Kitty were now threatening to write their sons out of their will, by way of convincing them how seriously they took their behavior. Kitty had learned from a therapist she had been seeing that her sons were "sociopaths," lacking in conscience, and narcissistic. This was just a month before the murders. In retrospect it becomes clear that with the threat of disinheritance, the parents had signed their own death warrant.

  Since the brothers were not at first considered guilty, they did inherit-and lost little time (four days to be precise) in engaging in a major spending spree, buying new cars, Rolex watches, jewelry, and ... shotguns. Eric eventually confided in his therapist that "we did it," adding that they took care to create the "perfect crime." He mentioned that they were reluctant to kill their mother, but had to, since she was resting on his shoulder the night of the murder-and besides, he noted, with uncharacteristic compassion-she would be devastated with her husband gone. Eric's confession sounds disingenuous: after all, unless both parents were killed, the brothers would not have inherited everything. There was a long path between the murders, the realization by the police that the sons were the guilty parties, and the lengthy trials. The first trial actually ended in a mistrial, owing to the unfounded assertion of the defense attorney that the brothers had been violated sexually by their father.57 It was only at the second trial that both brothers were given life sentences. Since the Menendez parents were nothing at all like the Sextons, the Dollars, Betty Bell, or Jessica Schwarz, the "evil" in this case resides squarely in the sons. This was a case prompted by greed; specifically, what I call "accelerated inheritance," such as Dante alludes to in the above passage regarding Sassol Mascheroni. There is no justified parricide (murder of a close relative) here, as there was in the case of Richard Jahnke Jr. (chapter 1).
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  "JOLLY JANE"

  Though never formally adopted, Jane Toppan took the last name of Anne Toppan, the woman to whom she became an indentured servant around the time she was eight. Originally she was Honora Kelley, born in 1857, the younger of two daughters (there may have been other siblings) to Peter Kelley in Boston. Her father was a violent man and a severe alcoholic, who gave the two girls to an orphanage when Honora was six, their mother Bridgett having died of tuberculosis some years before. Ensconced two years later with the Toppans, Honora changed her first name also-to Jane. Both her father and her sister, Delia, died "insane," which in that era meant some kind of psychosis, whose precise nature we do not know. Though Jane herself was not mentally ill until the end of her life, she began showing unmistakable psychopathic traits while at school. She was a pathological liar who spread nasty rumors about her classmates and told tall tales of a grandiose nature to the effect that, for example, her (nonexistent?) brother was a hero at Gettysburg singled out for honor by Lincoln, and that her (insane) sister was a legendary beauty affianced to an English lord.'s Released from her indentured status at eighteen, she trained as a nurse but was dismissed from nursing school for the same kinds of reasons that marred her reputation at grammar school: malicious gossip, compulsive lying-and perhaps also thievery. That dismissal was one of what seems in retrospect two turning points in her life at roughly the same time. She was also jilted by a prospective fiance, following which, she became depressed and made several suicide gestures.

  It was from this imperfect chrysalis that Jane emerged as the serial poisoner that we know today: responsible for the deaths of at least thirtyone persons, perhaps as many as a hundred. Most of these murders came in the course of her work as a private-duty nurse who, though never licensed in her profession, did manage to learn a thing or two about morphine, atropine, and arsenic. She killed almost exclusively those whom she knew. Her victims included her landlord (she then moved in with his widow) and her foster sister (whom Jane envied and hated), Elizabeth Toppan, who was at that time married to a Mr. Brigham. Later described as a pyromaniac, Jane set fires to several of the houses where she had worked. It was only after she had killed, one by one, the entire Davis family (with whom she had moved in with earlier), that suspicions were aroused enough to exhume the bodies. Though not mentally deranged at that time (she was forty-four), she was declared not guilty by reason of insanity, and was sent for life to an institution for the criminally insane in Taunton, Massachusetts. 59