The Anatomy of Evil

by Michael H. Stone

  In 2000 she filed for divorce, and, besides poisoning the children's minds against their father, she had Ted surveilled via secret video devices planted throughout the Long Island house, in hopes of catching him "in flagrante" with his mistress. This scheme was not entirely unsuccessful: the camera did indeed yield some footage of Ted in bed-with their puppy. Generosa now started her own affair-with an ex- (and future) con, named Dan Pelosi. In yet another outburst of rage she, with Dan's help, went to the Hamptons and tossed thousands of dollars' worth of antique furniture out the window, then set fire to it all. Finally she hired Dan to kill Ted. Dan carried out that job, using a blunt-force instrument.

  Their perfect crime was a flop in two ways: Dan was caught and convicted, and she died soon thereafter of breast cancer-a disease she had neglected just as her mother had. So any plans she had for a life with Ted's money but no Ted went unrealized. From the standpoint of character aberrations, she had, to an intense degree, the traits of paranoid, borderline, narcissistic, and sadistic personalities, along with the callousness, lack of remorse, and manipulativeness of the psychopath.

  JOHN RAY WEBER

  The story of John Ray Weber is chilling beyond words. Even if there are words adequate to tell the full story, they would be too graphic for a book aimed merely at explaining evil, while avoiding the obscene.80 I faced this same dilemma in the previous chapter when trying to describe the tortures inflicted by David Parker Ray. One writer, in reviewing a book about Weber, commented: "There is no other word for John Ray Weber except evil," adding that "it could be argued that the word describes what Weber did, not what he is. The other side of the argument, however, is that John Ray Weber started doing evil things from the time he could walk, almost as if it were an inborn capability."81 A similar sentiment is expressed in yet another book about Weber: the killer taunts his wife, Emily, whom he tortured and nearly murdered, with the remark, "Oh, you didn't know I killed [his wife's sister] Carla, did you?" Until that moment, "Emily had never realized how evil John was."82

  I spoke of David Parker Ray as appearing to be the most cruel and sadistic of the serial killers, barring the existence of another whose tortures exceeded those that took place in Ray's Toy Box. Granted that there is no accurate yardstick for gauging the extreme ends of suffering, we cannot readily compare Ray with Weber, because much of what Ray did to his victims in the Toy Box remains unknown. The bodies of his victims have not been found; we assume he killed many, but we do not know precisely how. We do know that the suffering of Ray's victims was protracted. What Weber did to his sister-in-law and wife was, I think it is fair to say, worse than what we know Ray did-but not necessarily worse than what Ray may have done to his victims before each woman was finally murdered.g"

  Weber grew up in Phillips, Wisconsin, a working-class town of 1,500 people some fifty miles from Lake Superior. He had an older sister, Cathy, and five half-siblings from his mother's first marriage. His mother, Marguerite, had suffered two nervous breakdowns of an unknown type. By age four, Weber was already setting fires in his house and in his aunt's house. Bed-wetting remained a problem until he was fifteen, and later, he strangled a dog. Thus he showed the whole "triad" of behaviors considered to be a predictor of future violence.

  At the ages of ten and sixteen, he suffered head injuries-the first in a car accident-though we do not know how serious these were. By age ten he was hearing voices, experiencing nightmares of drowning in blood, and assaulting his friend's sister in the vaginal area. He also began to have fantasies of eating a girl who lived next door. A misfit at school, at age twelve he wrote down various sadistic fantasies and placed them on his teacher's desk. She is said to have left town afterward. Weber cross-dressed in his sister Cathy's clothing and became consumed with morbid sexual obsessions. These thoughts related to bondage, pornography, cannibalism, torture, burning people, shocking people with electricity, shoving needles or even wheelbarrow handles into their body parts, and squeezing other body parts with pliers. He used to mutilate his sisters' dolls in what would be their "sexual" areas.

  At thirteen he struck Cathy with a beer bottle; three years later he threatened to kill her with a .22 rifle-this prompted the first of two psychiatric hospitalizations; his parents now realizing that there was something "not right" with John. A psychologist who had examined John presciently predicted that he would "commit a hostile act against a woman by the time he was eighteen."84 Before that, at perhaps fourteen, he would attempt sexual acts during the night with Cathy, with whom he was infatuated. She would awaken and discover that "things were done to her." He stole panties and bras from Cathy, and money as well, including large sums from the family's store where he worked for a time. This was actually his grandmother's store, which later went bankrupt. He once smeared his grandmother's dresses with feces. Cathy was terrified of him and moved away to live with relatives. But when she returned home after graduating high school, he attacked her again, which brought about his second hospitalization. Weber then went into the army in 1981. During his three-year stint he stayed out of trouble, though he did begin to use alcohol and LSD and, eventually, marijuana and angel dust as well. He primed himself with alcohol before the sexual crimes he was later to commit.

  In 1986, when he was twenty-three, he married Emily Lenz and worked as a laborer. His bed-wetting resumed, and he was impotent with his wife. Weber became preoccupied with her younger sister, Carla. Three months into his marriage he abducted Carla at gunpoint, tortured her, and then killed and buried her in the woods. Her body was not found until he confessed to the crime two years later. He seems to have put the blame for his impotence on Emily, since he later exclaimed that "women are nothing.... They flaunt their bodies and think they can get anything by being a cock-tease."

  Picturing himself a "star," he boasted at his 1989 trial, "I'll bet they make a TV movie out of this." The trial came only after he had tried, two years later, to murder Emily in the same fashion as Carla. It came out at the trial that he had taken Emily to the same secluded area in the woods, had tortured and beaten her, cut her with a knife, and raped her with a wheelbarrow handle-just as he had done with her sister. John had also forced his wife to write and sign letters, postdated some months ahead and addressed to her family, which he planned to send later on as if to substantiate the claim he would make that she had simply run off and abandoned him.

  Emily, though she barely survived, had gotten off easy: she was unable to open her eyes when she was found, had serious internal injuries, and was black and blue over her entire body. Carla had suffered all the tortures Emily had, but in addition suffered more extreme tortures, including being burned in her sexual areas and having needles inserted in her breasts. At first John put duct tape over her face so she could neither see nor speak. But at the end, he ripped off the tape, forcing her to see what he was going to do to her next: he severed part of her breast tissue with a knife and cut part of her left leg. He then suffocated her with his foot and buried her in the woods. Responding to the accusation of cannibalism, he claimed and later denied that he ate the tissues he had cut off. So whether Weber's depravity reached the level of cannibalism remains somewhat in doubt. What is not in doubt is the degree of his lifelong obsession with sadistic fantasies, about which he said, in a manner typical of sexual sadists, "The act is never as good as the anticipation."85 No matter how excruciating and savage the tortures, that is, they always fall short of the scene that the sadist, like a failed artist whose canvases never measure up to his inner vision, had hoped to "create."

  Currently serving a life sentence in Wisconsin's Green Bay Correctional Institution, Weber-his six-feet-six-inch frame just a few inches short of Ed Kemper's six-feet-nine-is as docile in prison as he was intimidating on the outside.86 Though declared mentally ill by his defense attorneys-partly on the strength of his previous hospitalizations-Weber is not psychotic. As proof, he is able to write in a terse but logical fashion.

  For me, one of the strangest facts of the Weber cas
e concerns the criminal complaint by the Wisconsin Circuit Court, issued against him after the attempted murder of his wife. In an eerie and of course totally unintentional coincidence with David Parker Ray's sixteen-page singlespaced message to his victims-cited in the last chapter as being too repugnant to read-the Wisconsin complaint also consists of a sixteenpage single-spaced document. It is written by the police in graphic vernacular terms that render their account of the tortures also too repugnant to read.g" In another similarity with Ray, Weber had made a cassette tape that set forth in detail just how he had killed Carla Lenz, who was reported as missing on November 12, 1986. The tape had been prepared with the intention of Emily being forced to listen to it, just as was the case with the victims of David Parker Ray.

  The extraordinary depravity of the Weber case is in many ways a carbon copy of the David Parker Ray case, albeit worse, primarily because we know he committed a murder of the most degrading sort, while we only suspect Ray did likewise (and much more often). For some, the Weber case raised the question whether the evil embodied in his actions lay so far outside the human domain that a supernatural explanation was required-as though the ancient religious writers were correct after all.88 Only if some malefic god of evil-Satan perhaps-had infiltrated the soul of John Weber could he have harbored such evil ideas from merest childhood, finally putting them fully into action during his twenties. Would that it were so. This would get John Weber and the rest of humanity off the hook; he was just a puppet on the devil's strings. Unfortunately, human beings are capable of actions just as devilish and demonic as those of Weber.

  Despite the similarities of the actions of Ray and Weber in their extreme sexual tortures announced by sadistic taped messages, the two men differed in important ways. David Parker Ray was a loner but not a social misfit; he married, fathered children, was a reliable and steady worker and, of course, an all-too-skilled mechanic. He was in no sense crazy. John Weber had everything going against him: a mentally ill mother, head injuries, parental physical abuse, alcohol and drug abuse, as well as bondage and torture fantasies from early childhood. Like Richard Chase, Weber may have made his psychological state worse by drug and alcohol abuse, but he appears neither schizophrenic, as Chase was, nor as coldly rational as Ray. He was, rather, somewhere in between. He could also be considered a serial killer of the "disorganized" type (careless, for example, in letting his wife survive) and therefore more readily caught. We would have to say he was a serial killer manque, since he had all the psychological features of a serial killer but killed only one person that we know of, another that we suspect, and his wife, who survived-all of which falls short of the FBI's standard of a minimum of three murder victims. How the various risk factors interacted in Weber to twist him into becoming a serial killer is the topic we will discuss in greater detail in the next chapter. Meantime, we must acknowledge that it is this interplay of adverse factors that answers-as much as can be answered-the "why" question about Weber's evil. Curiously, in his youth, Weber had an imaginary friend with whom he conversed in his head and whom he called Natas-"Satan," that is, spelled backwards. That seems to have been his explanation for his evil mind, but it should not be ours. We do not need to invoke Satan.

  Chapter Nine

  SCIENCE LOOKS

  AT EVIL

  Canto III, II. 72-78

  "Maestro, or mi concedi ch'i' sappia quali sono, e qual costume le fa di trapassar parer si pronte,

  "Master, now grant that I may know who those are, and what disposition makes them seem so ready to cross over, as I can discern despite the weak light." And he to me: "These things will be made known to you when we stay our steps on the gloomy shore of Acheron."

  coin' I' discerno per to fioco luine." Ed elli a me: "Le cose ti fier conte

  quando not fermerem li nostri passi su la trista riviera d' Acheronte."

  t should be clear by now, from reading the vignettes of the various men and women whose actions were considered evil, that there is no common route they all traveled to reach the place they did. Even among the men who became serial killers-the group most likely to garner the appellation of "evil"-their histories are quite dissimilar. Tommy Lynn Sells and the serial killer manque John Ray Weber both had many different risk factors: Sells had an abysmal childhood full of abuse and abandonment; Weber's childhood included physical abuse, head injury, a mentally ill mother, and what are called "risk genes" for some sort of mental illness. Here the phrase risk genes is a technical term meaning genes that are believed to increase the risk for developing a particular condition (in Weber's case, the risk for a serious mental illness such as schizophrenia).

  But Richard Starrett and Dennis Rader both came from what appears to have been rather ordinary, nontraumatic home environments. Head injury seemed to be the only factor in Starrett's case, whereas none of the common risk factors was present in Rader.

  For an act to reach the level of evil-whether violent or murderous or simply humiliating or sadistic in the extreme, though without violencean intense narcissism is almost always part of the personality makeup: the red thread that runs through all the persons we have encountered earlier. This characteristic stands out unmistakably, for example, in the men who "stage" the murders of their wives, hoping to make the murder appear as an accident or as the act of some other assailant. These men do not always show the full picture of psychopathy (as was sketched in chapter 1).

  Given that the pathways to what we call evil are so diverse, we are moved to ask: Can modern research provide any useful clues, let alone firm answers, as to what factors count the most as precursors to evil actions? How much, and in which cases, are heredity (of mental illness and unfavorable temperament), maternal drug abuse, fetal distress, and low birth weight the prime culprits? How much, and in which cases, are maternal neglect, parental brutality, sexual abuse, head injury, alcoholism and drug abuse, and hormones the main culprits? Some factors span both heredity and environment: personality is said to be half related to genetic influences, half to "non-shared" environment.' Being male or female makes a big difference: males are far more likely to commit violent, including "evil," acts. Gender is something we inherit, but once we start out in life as a male or a female, expectations and experiences begin to differ-to a significant degree because of the sex we were born into.

  If we want to look at evil from a scientific perspective, we need to take another factor into consideration. This is because the actions we call evil are usually not very different from degrading or murderous actions in general yet we don't call all of them "evil." When we look at evil actions, or at those few people who strike us as evil personified, we begin to realize there is a cultural or, in other situations, a sociological element in the equation that we often overlook. Actions that are unpleasant or even outright criminal-but that don't wound anyone physically or emotionally-are seldom spoken of as evil. This goes for embezzlement, selling fake watches, stock manipulation, even most instances of corporate skullduggery. Perhaps the many employees who lost their pensions because of the higher-ups at Enron, whose manipulations caused the whole firm to go under, regard those men as evil. I wouldn't argue with them. But "evil" is not the term customarily applied to those men. Arrogant, greedy, rapacious, unscrupulous, Ponzi-scheming fraudsters ... all that. But not evil. To rank as evil, something else is required: the element of shock and horror that touches the public in a special way. There are two broad categories we need to look at. One is the nature of the act. The other is the nature of the victim.

  Here are some crimes and other acts likely to be regarded as evil:

  • Rape of a stranger

  • Serial sexual murder

  • Serial murder of patients in a hospital

  • Mass murder'

  • Torture, especially of a child

  • Kidnap, especially of a child'

  • Murder with malice aforethought, especially of a wife, with such motives as greed (Justin Barber, who killed his wife, April, for insurance money4); to
avoid the responsibilities of fatherhood (Scott Peterson); or to avoid fatherhood and be free to be with a mistress (Charles Stuart, who shot his pregnant wife to death, then himself-superficially-and pretended they had been accosted by a (nonexistent) black man in Boston5)

  • Mutilation of the body, especially of a live victim (e.g., John Ray Weber)

  • Horrific crime with mutilation by a mentally ill person'

  • Jealousy murders of a spectacular (hence unusual) sort?

  • Certain revenge-inspired acts even in the absence of violence'

  "Evil" will likely be the reaction if the victim fits any of these categories:

  • Beautiful women'

  • Celebrities (performers, famous politicians)10

  • Child/children"

  • Elderly persons

  • Physically disabled persons

  • Persons in an "honorable" profession: judges, doctors, teachers, priests (or other religious figure: nuns, ministers, rabbis) 12

  • Victims of a terroristic crime13 (this will include the wife whose husband engages in "gaslighting" in hopes of driving her into submission or even suicide)

  • Victims of a hate crime14

  • The victim is an iconic and widely revered art object"

  To get a sense of the difference that fame and social class of the victim make in our view of evil, let us contrast the hate-crime murder mentioned in chapter 1, in which a bigoted Vietnam vet stabbed a homeless black man (in his belief that the "blacks were taking over"), with the Matthew Shepard case. Shepard was a (white) student from a good family, who was murdered in a novel and spectacular fashion by two bigoted men. The Shepard case came to national attention both because of the shocking manner of the murder and the fact that Matthew was a wellliked and talented young man with whom people (irrespective of their sexual orientation) could sympathize and identify. Both murders had the quality of evil, but most people had heard only about the Matthew Shepard case. The public knows evil when it sees it. My purpose here, and throughout these pages, is to look for the nuances of evil and to refine that search.