The Anatomy of Evil

by Michael H. Stone

  Bad Seed?

  In chapter 8 we asked, were any of the persons mentioned examples of Bad Seed? This is the same as asking, Were any of them raised in families and in circumstances so free of abuse, neglect, negativity, head injury, hostile cultures, and so on, that we would have to ascribe their evil actions to heredity alone. We would even have to exclude cases where the mother abused alcohol, cocaine, or other such drugs during pregnancy, or where there was fetal distress, birth complications, and other unfortunate events that could adversely affect the developing brain. When I read Deborah Spungen's book And I Don't Want to Live This Life about her daughter Nancy (Nancy was the American girlfriend of the Sex Pistols' Sid Vicious and was found stabbed to death at the Chelsea Hotel), I thought Nancy might be an example of Bad Seed. She turned out to be an uncontrollable, unsoothable, angry, violent child who was raised by warmly devoted, affluent, totally nonabusive parents. But Nancy was born a "blue baby," that is, she suffered from cyanosis due to the umbilical cord having been wrapped around her neck, plus she was born jaundiced from blood-group incompatibility.86 This was the source of the brain damage (perhaps in both the bottom-up and top-down structures) that made her the "wicked" child she became (despite her genius-level IQ). This was not Bad Seed. I think cases of Bad Seed are rare. But consider the following case. It comes close.

  The story is about a boy of twelve whom I shall call Edward. He was the only child of his mother's first brief marriage to a man who abused alcohol, and who even gave some alcohol to Edward when the boy was only two. Because her husband was at times menacing, at times physically abusive to her, Edward's mother left him to marry another man in what has so far been a stable and harmonious relationship. The couple now has a daughter of eight. The mother learned in the meantime that her first husband was an ex-con before she met him, though she does not know what he was incarcerated for. Because of his violent streak, she is still afraid he might come by one day and harm her or their son, though he has made no contact with her since she left him and moved to a different state. I was able to discover through Internet prison searches that her ex-husband had been imprisoned once again, this time for murder, and was serving a life sentence. His own father was also in prison for a violent crime. I thought she would be reassured to hear that she would never be in harm's way because of her ex. But her real fear came from Edward's behavior. He has all the traits of the callous-unemotional children of the research studies mentioned above. Edward talks continuously of hurting and killing people, which he finds highly amusing. He already shows the triad we referred to earlier, seen in a number of serial killers and other sexual criminals: he has tortured and killed cats and dogs, he still wets the bed, and he sets fires all over the house, which his mother has tried to deal with by putting extinguishers in every room. He has stolen large sums from other children at school and talks often of "revenge," though against what or whom is never clear. His parents find him manipulative, deceitful, and increasingly withdrawn and aloof. On several occasions he tried to strangle his sister. Edward knows nothing about his biological father but gives every sign of developing along very similar lines to those of him. There has been no abuse or neglect by his mother and stepfather; his intelligence is in the "brilliant" range.

  At twelve Edward has not even reached puberty, let alone adulthood. Yet he has all the characteristics, in a less fully developed form, of a sadistic psychopath and, because he is so aloof and socially withdrawn, one with schizoid features. His personality, in other words, already places him at the epicenter of risk for becoming a violent criminal of the sadistic type. It is too early to tell whether his fantasies will take on sadistic sexual overtones. In the typical picture of an adolescent who commits sexual murders we see a boy who is "asocial, lacking in empathy, withdrawn to the point of isolation, and preoccupied with fantasies with sadistic sexual imagery."87 Granted that Edward was exposed to some negative influences (his father letting him drink alcohol, perhaps beating him at times) before his mother remarried, those incidents from his first two years cannot account, as far as I can tell, for the frightening picture he now presents. Even if he does not represent a "pure" example of Bad Seed, this is as close as we are likely to encounter: a person whose predisposition to sadism, violence, and (if he continues along the same lines in the future) the actions we call eviloriginated almost entirely from hereditary influences.

  Bad Seed is of course a dreadful phrase, used in the popular language to condemn rather than to understand certain unfortunate, though dangerous, children. The phrase also tends to blind us to the realization that there are other children who survive prolonged parental torture, yet they emerge as healthy, integrated adults, highly valued for the benefits they bring society because of what we might metaphorically call Good Seed. Because of a lucky draw from the genetic lottery, these people remain resilient, invulnerable to the bad effects of abysmal parents, and are able, one feels like saying miraculously, to transcend the horrors of their early years. We don't get to hear so much about them. Virtue is not as fascinating as Evil.

  There is a particularly heartwarming example of a "Good Seed" in the true story of Dave Pelzer.88 A retired US Air Force crew member, Mr. Pelzer now lives with his wife and son in California, writing and lecturing about child abuse (including what he himself had endured) and what can be done about it. He had survived about ten years of torture beatings, starvations, burnings, stabbings, humiliations-from his sadistic alcoholic mother, while his passive father looked on and did nothing. Some kindly, understanding teachers finally caught on to what was happening (since as a schoolboy he was too afraid to talk to anyone), called Child Protective Services, and rescued him from his mother. If Mr. Pelzer did not have those special protective genes (about which we as yet know very little), he could easily have turned out to be a confirmed criminal. And people would have said: "Ah well, with a mother like that, small wonder ..."

  Some Hints about Protective Genes

  We already know from research in the last few years that some children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity (ADD/H) are prone to either property crimes or violence and often end up in trouble with the law. Other ADD/H children settle down eventually and never get in trouble. ADD/H runs in families presumably from genetic influences in most cases.89 One factor that makes a difference: the ADD/H children who also had conduct disorder (unruliness, wildness, aggressive behavior) were the ones likely to end up in trouble. The ADD/H children who did not have conduct disorder had no higher rates of criminal behavior, when examined years later, than did ordinary children.90 Since the tendency to childhood conduct disorder is itself often related to genetic influences, this suggests that the "combined" (ADD/H with conduct disorder) group of children (most of whom will be boys) will be especially at risk for criminal behavior as they enter their adult years. Did the boys who stayed out of trouble have some hitherto unsuspected "good" genes, or did they come from homes where there was no abuse? Or both? These questions have inspired research into a newly developing area concerning the interaction of genes and the environment. The old (simplistic and misleading) Nature or Nurture controversy is, finally, being replaced by the study of Nature and Nurture.

  Avshalom Caspi and his wife, Terrie Moffitt, are at the forefront of research on gene-environment interaction as it relates to violence. In one of their approaches, they studied the gene for the monoamine oxidaseA enzyme (MAOA) whose task it is to metabolize (in this case, to inactivate) the neurotransmitters norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine.

  These neurotransmitters help convey nerve impulses from one neuron to another as the first impulse is conveyed to the thin barrier-the synaptic cleft-separating the first from the second neuron. In certain key pathways in the brain, the neurotransmitters may build up in the synaptic cleft to too high a level, leading to overexcitation of the next neuron-unless MAOA is doing its job efficiently, keeping the neurotransmitter level "just right." Plate 19 in the insert represents this process pictorially.

  Deficie
nt MAOA activity may predispose to hyperreactivity to threats of various kinds.91 When MAOA levels were measured in a large group of boys and girls, some had high MAOA activity; others, low levels. The genes in question were found to have differences in their chemical composition, some persons inheriting a version of the gene that led to high activity; others, inheriting the less-favorable version, showed low MAOA activity. What is important for our purposes is their observation that boys who had been maltreated during their early years AND who had low MAOA enzyme activity (making them less able to inactivate excessive amounts of neurotransmitter in pathways related to impulse strength) were more likely to develop conduct disorder. Here, in other words, is a genetic link to the understanding of childhood conduct disorder. As these children were followed into adult life, the low-MAOA males were much more likely than their high-MAOA counterparts to be convicted of a violent crime. The children with high MAOA activity tended not to develop conduct disorder (not to get arrested for violence later on) even if they had been maltreated. Only one child in eight had the combination maltreatment + low MAOA, but those children were responsible for almost half the violent convictions.

  Figure 9.2 shows in graphic form the relationship between the inherited MAOA pattern and childhood maltreatment. Because the neurotransmitters (such as serotonin92 and dopamine) that MAOA acts on are involved especially in the bottom-up brain centers, we might expect that the ill effects of low activity would be linked with high drive or impulse strength, including (as in maltreated persons) the impulse to violent behaviors. In keeping with this idea, others have shown that persons who inherited a "small" allele from both parents for the serotonin-transporter gene have an overactive amygdala response to stress.93 The job of the transporter is to carry serotonin that had been released into the synaptic cleft back into the first neuron where it originated. Inadequate function of the transporter would be another way of the transmitter piling up where it shouldn't, leading to overactivity and overfiring in the circuitry.

  We don't know whether Dave Pelzer was blessed with inheriting the gene for high MAOA or whether there were other inherited protective factors that helped him survive the protracted torture at the hands of his mother. The fruits of contemporary research are seldom available to the people we read about in the crime literature. We have to hope that in the coming years tests of the sort Caspi and his colleagues are working on can be given to ever-larger numbers of young people, so that we may be able to spot "high-risk" children when there is still greater opportunity to help them cope more adaptively with the violent impulses they struggle with. Even so, there will probably be a residue of young persons (again, mostly boys) of the "life-course persistent" antisocial type, who, though they make up only 5 percent of the population, commit 50 to 70 percent of the crimes.94 The problem, even with early detection, will be especially severe with the callous-unemotional youngsters: those with the strong genetic underpinning, low heart-rate and skin conductance, and so on-on whom parental punishment or admonition has little effect. Though such children cannot be punished into behaving better, it is becoming clearer now that some of them can improve socially with consistent and patient teaching.95 Many of these children, in other words, respond favorably to parents who sit down and talk with them, calmly and without rancor, about the benefits of socially acceptable behaviors and the disadvantages of offensive behaviors. A young person with psychopathic tendencies who can be trained to do the right thing because it's to his advantage-even if he never feels it in his heart of hearts to do the right thing-may over time develop habits that incline him away from actions that are morally wrong and violent.

  Figure 9.2

  If you have read this far, you may be asking, where does neuroscience fit into the picture? It is a long and tortuous road from enzymes to evil. None of the unfavorable genes, frontal lobe abnormalities, limbic system irregularities, neurotransmitter peculiarities, and the like mark out a clear and predictable path toward evil actions. Instead of neat and unmistakable causes, we must settle for factors, such as the ones we have been looking at, that heighten the risk for someone to commit the kinds of acts-in peacetime-that so offend the "collective conscience" that we label them as evil. We have concentrated in this chapter on sadistic psychopaths since they have the "chemistry" and the personality that make them the most numerous occupants of the lowest circle-where evil is clearly present-of whatever Inferno that we might, in emulation of Dante, wish to create.

  But some of the occupants of that circle are young runaways, lost souls with no moral center (but with no prior history of violence either, let alone of sadism), who find meaning through their worship of a truly evil leader. Easily led, they, too, enter this dark realm. How else to understand the former San Francisco go-go dancer Susan Atkins? Herself the mother of a one-year-old son, Atkins, under the spell of Charles Manson, broke into the home of the pregnant Sharon Tate, stabbing her to death while making sure the last words Sharon ever heard were: "Look, bitch, I don't care about you.... You're going to die, and I don't feel anything about it."96 The sadism inherent in a young mother cruelly murdering a pregnant woman is baffling. Envy-the most corrosive of the Deadly Sins-was probably there, just as it was when Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon to death. But envy is common. Murders like the ones committed by Atkins and Chapman are rare. There must be other ingredients. For similar reasons, I find the sadism component of the sadistic psychopath harder to explain than the psychopathy-to which neuroscience has now turned so much attention. As I was finishing this chapter, however, I stumbled upon a book written by a psychologist who has studied sadism for a long time and who has some answers I find more convincing than most explanations I've come across thus far. "Stumbled" is the right word, because my discovery of her work was pure serendipity.

  SOME HINTS ABOUT SADISM AND THE CORE OF EVIL

  One of my colleagues at the forensic hospital was packing up his books, on his way to a much-deserved job promotion. On top of one of the boxes was Dr. Anna Salter's Predators.97 It could just as easily have been at the bottom of the box, where I would never have noticed it. As I flipped through it, I found I could hardly put it down-it is that well written. But at the same time, it is hard to read, because the stories of the sadistic men and women she has encountered are extremely disturbing, in the same way I found David Parker Ray's taped monologue to his torture victims unbearable to read. A few days later I spoke with Dr. Salter by phone, and she graciously granted me permission to quote one of her examples here. I chose the same story I fixed on as I browsed through her book that has haunted my colleague, Vincent Spizzo, who has not been able to get it out of his mind since he read it five years ago. The story is that of a man who repeatedly suffocated his nine-year-old stepson, which I repeat here with some abbreviations. 98 The man made these revelations voluntarily.

  After about two years of molesting my son ... I got my hands on some "bondage discipline" pornography with children involved. Some of ... the pictures that I had seen showed total submission. Forcing the chil dren to do what I wanted. And I eventually started using some of this bondage discipline with my own son, and it had escalated to the point where I was putting a large Zip-loc bag over his head and taping it around his neck ... and raping and molesting him ... to the point where he would turn blue, pass out.... I was extremely aroused by inflicting pain. And when I see him pass out and change colors, that was very arousing and heightening to me, and I would rip the bag off his head and then I'd jump on his chest and masturbate in his face and make him suck my penis.... While he was coughing and choking I would rape him in the mouth. I used this same sadistic style of the plastic bag and the tape two or three times a week, and it went on for I'd say a little over a year.

  This man acknowledged to Dr. Salter that he knew he was going to continue this way, to victimize people "until someone killed me or I got locked up." He spoke of himself as "evil ... I believed myself evil. Possessed by a demon ... anything to justify my actions."99 In the strange candor of t
his man, he went a step further than Tommy Lynn Sells (chapter 7)-who spoke openly of the "adrenaline rush" he felt when slitting the throats of young women. This man identified himself the way the public would-as "evil." 100

  Dr. Salter went on to say that she has noticed how many sadists talk about the "high" they experience when committing a sadistic actlikening it to the high of cocaine or a similar drug. Cocaine, as we learn from neuroscience, creates an impregnable blockade, preventing dopamine in the synaptic cleft from being taken up again by the first nerve in the pleasure pathway-thus magnifying the pleasure sensation. There are some sadistic persons who, having been victimized cruelly as children, later on take pleasure in victimizing others. This might underlie a psychoanalytic explanation for someone turning sadistic. But as Dr. Salter states, many confirmed sadists have no such history.ioi They may instead be the low-arousal, low-heart-rate, easily bored psychopaths who crave a "high" to make them feel alive and powerful. It helps, of course, to lack compassion and remorse and to be utterly callous-but this answers to the psychopathy part of the equation.

  Some people, as we know, find the high in cocaine or meth and stop right there. For others, sex, food, or gambling fit the bill. And for some, this sought-after rush comes only from killing and from experiencing the godlike power that murder confers. This is not a new phenomenon. Reading Salter's comment about the sadist's high put me in mind of a French aristocrat who lived during the time of (who else?) the Marquis de Sade. Of Count Charolais it was said: "His heart was cruel and his actions were bloody.... Drunk more often than not, he killed peasants for sheer sport the way other men went hunting, and fired at workmen repairing roofs near his castle.... He once begged Louis XV's forgiveness for such murders. The monarch replied, `The pardon you seek is granted ... but I shall be even more pleased to pardon the man who kills you." 102