People at the time of her trial felt that nothing short of insanity could account for evildoing on such an appalling scale.60 A remarkable feature of her murders was that she experienced orgasm when her victims were dying from her poisons. In this respect she resembles Countess Erzsebet Bathory (mentioned in chapter 1), the only other woman I know of who can be described as a female serial sexual killer. As Jane rounded the turn of fifty, she showed paranoid traits, fearing that the hospital staff were, of all things, trying to poison her. Even toward the end of her long life (she died in the hospital in 193 8), she would sometimes beckon to one of the nurses, urging her to "get the morphine, dearie, and we'll go out into the ward. You and I will have lots of fun seeing them die."61 On the topic of evil, and comparing Jane with men who have committed serial sexual homicide, her biographer estimated that "though degrees of evil are difficult to gauge, the sheer malignancy she embodied was equal to that of her better known male counterparts."62
In a book that attempts to rank the hundred most evil people ever to have lived, Jane is assigned the fiftieth spot, well below Hitler, Ivan the Terrible, and the Countess Bathory, but well above Leonard Lake, Ian Brady, and the Marquis de Sade.63 Though the Toppan name is no longer that well known among the public, Jane lives on secretly as the inspiration for the novel The Bad Seed by William March. This was later turned into a play and movie about a sociopathic child, who, despite having normal parents, became a serial poisoner at a young age. 14 The real Jane Toppan may have been something of a Bad Seed, inheriting some unfavorable genes from her father, but as we have seen, there were many other negative forces acting on her after her birth: the untimely loss of her mother and her years as an orphan and then maidservant to the Toppans.
JEREMY BAMBER
Heredis fletus sub persona risus est. An heir's grief is laughter under the mask.
-Publilius Syrus65
Coincidence or fate? On the very day I was writing this page about the murders of the Bamber family in a farmhouse northeast of London in August 1985, I thought it a good idea to check with Google about Jeremy Bamber's current fate. It had just been posted earlier that day, May 16, 2008, that Justice Tugendhat had declared, "These murders were excep tionally serious," and added, "In my judgment, you ought to spend the whole of the rest of your life in prison, and I so order."66
Jeremy, one of two children adopted by wealthy English landowners in Essex, was convicted of killing his adoptive parents, Neville and June Bamber, his adoptive sister Sheila, and her twin six-year-old boys, Dan and Nick Caffel by her ex-husband, Colin Caffel. The instrument was a rifle with a silencer. Jeremy was twenty-four at the time, and with all other heirs to the Bamber estate now dead, Jeremy was due to inherit their £400,000 estate. Both Jeremy and Sheila (twenty-seven at her death) had been adopted when they were about six months old from people who were considered normal and reputable. His birth father, for example, had been comptroller of stores at Buckingham Palace. Sheila had several nervous breakdowns after the twins were born and was felt to be a "paranoid schizophrenic," though the illness may have been a postpartum psychosis of some sort. Earlier, she had enjoyed a modest success as a model in London. After a threat that she might have to give the boys into fosterage, she reacted with a flare-up of her illness.
Jeremy, at all events, insisted he was innocent, claiming that the killer was his "nutter" of a sister, who killed the other four and then turned the rifle on herself. Evidence gathered at the time suggested otherwise, and as there were no others in the house besides the family (including Jeremy), the only possible assailant was Jeremy himself.67 That is the way the Crown saw it, anyway, and Jeremy was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison-the sentence extended just now to life without parole.
The judge at the original trial said that Jeremy represented "evil almost beyond belief. "68 If Jeremy, who has protested his innocence all these years, is indeed guilty, he would be a better example of Bad Seed than Jane Toppan. By his own acknowledgement, he had enjoyed a secure and comfortable childhood, free of any neglect or abuse; his childhood memories were happy ones.69 And since he was not mentally ill, his psychopathic traits presumably must have stemmed from inherited or other prenatal sources. Some students of this famous crime currently favor Jeremy's claim and put the blame on the (allegedly) suicidal and mentally disturbed sister.70 Sheila, who also had a happy childhood, could not be considered a Bad Seed because she was not at all psychopathic. Her "inheritance" was simply a tendency to mental illness. So either Jeremy really is innocent after all, or he almost managed to stage the "perfect murder."
We see a picture of him (readily available on the Internet) looking appropriately sad at the funeral. Was this feigned grief (as suggested by the Latin maxim above)? Or is the judge wrong all these years later, calling Jeremy "evil," when he may not be? If Jeremy is ever released, albeit truly guilty, we can invoke another maxim by the same Latin author: Judex damnatut ubi nocens absolvitut-The judge is condemned when the guilty is absolved. Until such time as we know the truth, we at least know that in this case the only two possible suspects did what they did based solely on factors (psychopathy or psychosis) already in place the day they were born. To drop yet another Latin phrase used often at trials: Cui bono? Who benefits? If Sheila were truly suicidal at the prospect of losing her boys, she might have killed herself and maybe even the boys.n But why the parents? No benefit to her there, even psychologically. But Jeremy almost got his hands on that £400,000. That's a lot of money even today; it was a lot more in 1985.
PATTIE COLUMBO AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE
In what seemed at first to be a Bad Seed case-a young woman of nineteen raised in an excellent family, then conspiring with her lover to kill that family-on closer look doesn't appear so simple. Pattie Columbo was the elder of two children in a working-class Chicago family. Her father, Frank, was of Italian American and Catholic background; the mother, Mary, of English, Irish and Baptist background. When Pattie was seven her parents had a son, Michael. The parents were loving, generous, and indulgent but also strict and unyielding when it came to moral standards. The latter qualities didn't really come into the picture until Pattie reached puberty when she was ten or eleven. Like her mother, Pattie had terrible cramps before her period. She began to have nightmares in which her favorite dog fell into a roaring fireplace. Her formerly sweet behavior underwent a change: she became wildly aggressive-once smashing a hair dryer over the head of one of her girlfriends. Already at twelve she wore a lot of makeup and dressed in a vampish way. A doctor suggested birth control pills to her mother as a means of controlling Pattie's premenstrual pains, but her mother refused, thinking this would legitimize Pattie's premature experimentation with sex. Her father would make her change into more demure attire before going to school. Pattie rebelled, packing a miniskirt and low-cut blouse in her backpack, changing into her sexy clothes the minute she arrived.
A real head-turner, Pattie was statuesque, looked older than her age, was sultry and tough in front view; quite beautiful in profile. At sixteen she had a boyfriend, with whom she was at once seductive and moralistic. She refused sex and was vehemently opposed to his using pot or other drugs. For a time he dated another girl, which excited jealousy in Pattie to the point that she threatened to beat that girl up. She grew resentful when her parents would ask her to babysit for her brother. Her mother had to undergo an operation for colon cancer; when she returned home, Pattie was asked to help out around the house with chores. She refused, and her father became so angry he slapped her hard in the face. Feeling that she was no longer "Daddy's girl" and that he loved Michael more than her, she threatened to call the police. This was the beginning of the vicious circle. She made her erstwhile gentle father furious, his slap made her enraged and defiant, which made him even more furious, the whole situation spiraling out of control.
Pattie worked as a waitress at a restaurant next door to a Walgreen's drugstore, where she met the manager, Frank DeLuca, who was forty years old and marr
ied with five children. It was love, or at least lust, at first sight. They became inseparable. He taught her things about sex she never knew; she was the beautiful young girl he had hitherto only dreamed about. Pattie dropped out of high school a few months before graduation, much to the consternation of her parents, who were becoming aware of her infatuation with DeLuca.72 At eighteen Pattie moved in with DeLuca and his family. She and DeLuca would have sex in the marital bed while his wife, Marilyn, was out in the yard playing with the children. Pattie's father was so enraged at his daughter's immoral conduct and betrayal of his values that he charged over to Walgreen's with a rifle and threatened to kill DeLuca. Stopping just short of that, he swung the rifle at DeLuca, knocking out one of his teeth. Pattie retaliated by signing a warrant against her father for aggravated battery. The vicious circle was getting wider.
Finally, on May 4, 1976, Pattie and DeLuca, who by then had moved into an apartment of their own, went over to Pattie's parents' home and shot to death her parents and thirteen-year-old brother. Michael was also stabbed ninety-seven times, apparently by Pattie. The shooting was probably done by DeLuca. The scene was amateurishly staged to look like a burglary gone bad. The police know that overkill of that sort indicates rage and hatred; professional criminals kill when they feel they have to, using much neater and more efficient means.
Pattie and DeLuca feigned innocence but were eventually arrested and tried in court. Both were convicted of triple murder and sentenced to two hundred to three hundred years in prison. The prosecution contended, "She killed her father and she killed her mother, and she killed her brother, which is the hat-trick of evil."73 The judge told Pattie's relatives after the sentencing: "You're going to want to figure this out. Don't. Don't even try to understand the criminal mind. You can't understand it. Only criminals understand it."74 Yet we do have to try to understand it. When Pattie's father once asked his priest, "What did we do wrong?" the priest told him: "Nothing. It could just be Bad Seed."75 I don't think so. Maybe Pattie inherited some of her father's volatile temperament, which would have made the "raging hormones" of puberty more inflammatory than in a calmer girl. Then there was the vicious circle of parents and daughter each offending the sensibilities of the other, each handling the stronger stresses by physical means rather than by reaching accommodations through talking things out. Add to all this the important element of synergy: two impetuous lovers acting together in a way neither would have acted alone, and the path to murder becomes not so incomprehensible after all.76
In the thirty intervening years, Pattie has had a long time to cool down. Ensconced in Illinois' Dwight Prison for Women, she has now completed college and spends her time fashioning study guide computer courses for some inmates and teaching other inmates to read. Dwight Prison lacks only a moat and a drawbridge to resemble a medieval castle. When I visited it, I noted that it was also uncommonly (for a prison) pretty on the inside. Pattie, it is said, still shows little remorse (and thus fails her chances at parole), but is popular among the women housed there: she is the queen of her new castle.
SPOUSES FROM HELL
In previous examples of husbands and wives whose spousal murders gained wide attention-and whose stories raised the specter of evil-we see people who were able to live for a time, if not in harmony, then at least in a kind of fragile truce. Nothing terrible happened until some event shook the marriage to its foundation and inspired murder. Discovery of infidelity was the triggering event for Clara Harris (chapter 2), whose behavior at work and at home was otherwise exemplary. Exposure of a reputation-shattering fraud was the turning point in the lives of Jean-Claude Romand (chapter 3) and Mark Hacking (chapter 4, note 44), neither of whom was quite the physician he made himself out to be. The desire for escape from a marriage gone stale into the excitement of an illicit affair, as it reached the boiling point and then some, propelled Kristin Rossum (chapter 4) and Jonathan Nyce (chapter 2) over the edge. It was debt that turned the moralistic crank John List (chapter 4) into a murderous crank. When he was finally identified eighteen years later, List's new wife swore that he had been a decent, honorable husband.
Besides these more celebrated cases, there is a much greater number of "spouses from hell" unsung and unnoticed, except by their unfortunate partners. In my forensic work I have dealt with several wives caught up in ugly divorces-"gaslighted" (that is, tricked into thinking they were going crazy) by their husbands-who spoke of these men as "evil." Two of these men were pedophiles: one molested a daughter; the other, a son. The men, knowing that a good offense is the best defense, used their considerable wealth to get their wives labeled "paranoid" or "delusional," since there was not a shred of evidence that they were psychologically disturbed. Manipulating the courts to their advantage, the men won out: bad fathers got custody; good mothers lost it. Several wives, equally manipulative and unscrupulous, were able to gain custody by tarring their husbands with the incest brush-claiming that their husbands had molested a daughter when there was not the slightest evidence to support such an accusation. The courts are not well equipped to ferret out the truth in many of these situations, with the result that Oliver Wendell Holmes's prayer, "May justice triumph over law!" went unanswered.77
One of the major impediments to justice in spousal cases, as we saw in the previous chapters, is the general reluctance to tell the truth when ever the victim of one's abuse or violence is a loved one or one's child. Most psychopaths will go to any length to avoid the public condemnation awaiting them if they admit to killing a family member. The aptly named Jimmy Ray Slaughter, for example, cheated on his third wife with four mistresses at the same time, one of whom (Melody Wuertz) refused to abort a pregnancy and gave birth to his daughter Jessica (proven his by DNA). Infuriated when she sued for child support, Slaughter shot to death Melody and their one-year-old daughter. After his conviction, far from confessing to the double murder, he sent out a notice from his Oklahoma death row cell in hopes of attracting the attention of some sympathetic woman. He wrote:
My name is Jimmy Ray Slaughter. I've been accused of murder and it's not true. It was a lie from the beginning. You people will know it's true some day. May god [sic] have mercy on your souls.... I have an incurable romantic heart. I need to communicate with a warmhearted lady who also desires something extra special in life and beyond. I am a realist and have a story to tell, capable of shattering anyone's belief in the present justice system.78
Men like Jimmy Ray know better than anyone how easy it is to con others into believing their story. As we have seen in previous chapters, some are convincing enough to win an ill-advised release and with it the freedom to do again what they did before.
The main stories I have chosen for this section are about spouses who were impossible to live with throughout the length and breadth of the marriage. They created a hell so dreadful and suffering so excruciating that they converted the "real" hell, as depicted by Dante or Hieronymus Bosch, into a refuge devoutly to be wished for.
GENEROSA AMMON
Generosa took her name from her birth father, Generoso, an Italian sailor with whom her mother had had an affair. Her mother, who had once contemplated entering a convent, made a 180-degree switch, and became instead a wild party girl. Before giving birth to Generosa, she had two children by her first marriage and a daughter by her second. Generosa, besides being the one out-of-wedlock child, was also sexually abused by a man (possibly an uncle) who warned her to tell no one. Her mother died of breast cancer when Generosa was nine. She then learned of her illegitimate birth, after which she became insolent, irritable, and demanding.79 She was expelled from school because of her incorrigible behavior and developed a ferocious temper, much of it directed at one of her half-sisters. She eventually completed college and moved to New York, where she hoped to work in the field of art and design.
In New York she met and married Ted Ammon, who became a multimillionaire in the finance industry. Wealth often serves as an emollient to an abrasive temperament-but not in Genero
sa's case. Quite the opposite, she became a snobbish bully, arrogant, insufferable, and with a talent for alienating everyone she came in contact with-especially people she hired for various tasks. She flew into blinding rages at any criticism or opposition. When she and Ted bought a large house in the swanky Hamptons of Long Island, she threw out thousands of tulips the gardeners had planted because they were "the wrong shade of yellow," then demanded thousands of replacements of the "right" shade. Unable to have children following an ectopic pregnancy, she and Ted adopted two fraternal twins from the Ukraine. The simplest word to describe her brand of mothering would be sadistic. When, for example, her adopted daughter ate a cookie before dinner, Generosa forced the rest of the cookies down her throat. With the marriage deteriorating like a bear market before a crash, Ted could take no more of her and began an affair. Generosa began meddling in Ted's business and made verbal threats to have him killed.
The Anatomy of Evil Page 32