The Anatomy of Evil

by Michael H. Stone

  But when we examine the persons who are responsible for the evil acts done in peacetime, we are usually looking at persons who have something decidedly the matter with them. Especially among those in whom mental illness, birth complications, and brain damage are not part of the picture, there will often be a "residue" of psychopathy. And as we have seen, psychopaths will often have abnormalities in certain key brain areas: the top-down areas mentioned in chapter 9, the paralimbic region that Dr. Kiehl is currently studying with fMRL" Dr. Kiehl is optimistic that psychopathy will one day yield to treatment (including medications). I do not share his optimism. Even though brain abnormalities have been detected in some psychopaths via MRI, psychopathy as an aberration of personality is in all of the brain. Whether the condition arose on a genetic basis or on the basis of brutalization or extreme neglect (especially maternal neglect), the predatory nature of the psychopath and his deeply entrenched inability to care about the suffering of his victims will persist. And if the psychopath becomes a serial rapist like Fred Coe or James Bergstrom, or a serial killer like Ted Bundy or David Parker Ray, the idea of pardon and release for such dangerous men is completely out of the question.

  Equally beyond the range of treatment and rehabilitation are the psychopaths who ruin the lives of others through a lifelong pattern of fraud, imposture, deceit, and theft but who either stop short of murder, or whose attempts to murder are thwarted at the last minute. Because murderous assault and actual murder are more likely to trigger the response of "evil," the imposter whose victims survive doesn't often make the headlines. Shock and horror stay confined to a narrower circle. This is evil too-but of a quieter kind. In her book A Dance with the Devil, Barbara Bentley gives a moving account of her marriage to a man, John Perry, who led her to believe he was an admiral in the navy and was the son of the famous Admiral Perry. He told her that he had won, among his many other medals, the Congressional Medal of Honor for his courageous exploits. A charming and clever parasite, he nearly bankrupted her with his extravagance, stealing her credit cards and charging huge sums, promising her that still huger sums were owed him and were about to come in any day, along with a substantial inheritance. Little by little she discovered he had spent three years in federal prison for impersonating an air force officer, that he actually was the son of Admiral Perry but had won no medals, and had used half a dozen aliases (one of the telltale signs of the psychopath). Nor was he was the heir to any fortune. As she began to learn the truth, he tried on several occasions, fortunately without success, to kill her. Barbara had to move mountains to win a favorable divorce (she actually got a law passed in California to protect victims such as herself). John was given five years in prison for attempted murder but was released after twenty-two months. He then continued as the same John Perry, this time tricking a wealthy widow into supporting him. As she began to realize he was defrauding her, he used the same ploy to win sympathy as he had with Barbara: faking a heart attack by taking a cocktail of pills. This time the cocktail killed him-a con artist and a killer manque to the last of his sixty-seven years.19

  Sexual crimes, particularly those involving children, readily trigger in us the "evil" response. Their perpetrators usually come from seriously troubled families, show multiple paraphilias, prime themselves with alcohol or drugs just before the crimes, and may be mentally ill besides. Yet even among them, there are a few who come from unremarkable, or even excellent, families: Dennis Rader and Richard Starrett are two examples.zo Crimes of impulse, including those we regard as evil, often stem from problems in the brain's bottom-up areas. Drives go unchecked by the braking system. Murders committed by adolescents often have this characteristic, including the occasional "thrill-kill" by boys from respectable families. This seemed to be the case with the famous "Crime of the Century" by Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, eighteen and nineteen when they conspired to murder fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks.21

  What is most important to remember, when considering the origins of violent criminal actions, is that the sociological explanations favored by many-that crime is an outgrowth of poverty and bad environment-is simplistic and misleading." Some persons, consistently brutalized by parents in their formative years, do pass into the stage of virulency, described by Lonnie Athens (chapter 8 of Richard Rhodes's biography Why They Kill). But inherited factors may have paved the way for the ensuing brutality to have its devastating effects. Dr. Athens's own life gives the lie to his one-sided theory. He himself had been brutalized by his father in ways that would be sickening to describe here.z" Yet he did not go on to become a violent (let alone virulent or evil) criminal. How can this be? The safest assumption is that Dr. Athens was dealt some genetic high cards that allowed him to endure his father's tortures without succumbing to a life of vengeance and criminality, becoming instead an eminent sociologist with some special insights into the lives of violent felons.

  A similar case of "good seed" concerns Sanford Clark, the halfbrother of Gordon Northcott. When Sanford was thirteen, he was taken by his much older brother (whom he was raised by their mother to believe was his uncle) to a California chicken ranch. There he was raped and beaten regularly by Gordon and forced at gunpoint to participate in the rape-murders of twenty Mexican boys. It was Sanford's job to flay the victims, crush their skulls, and dispose of their remains. After two years of this enslavement, he was able to escape and give evidence against Northcott, who was hanged two years later in 1930. After overcoming immense psychological traumas, Sanford was able to make a good recovery. He married and adopted two boys, afraid lest the taint of the family pass to any children he might have of his own (there were other violent and abusive relatives besides his half-brother). As with Lonnie Athens, Sanford Clark was able to lead an exemplary life-for reasons as mysterious as why Athens's father and Clark's brother were so consistently evil.24

  We will find the fewest abnormalities in those who, driven by jealousy, murder a lover or spouse. This was the case with Clara Harris and Jean Harris, whom I have placed in Category 2 of the scale, where murder is a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence in an otherwise fairly wellintegrated person. So far, we are speaking of the external aspects of evil: actions whose description, when we hear of them, make us wince in horror and disgust.

  Equally important is the most significant internal aspect of evil: lack of compassion. Some professionals prefer the term empathy, but as I explained earlier, compassion is the more accurate word-and it is the word Drakulic emphasizes in her book. The evil acts of peacetime are only occasionally accompanied by a total and across-the-board lack of this vital human sentiment. In my experience the most striking example is that of the cannibal-killer, David Paul Brown/Bar Jonah. Going back to the time when he, while still himself a child, tried to kill another child, there is no evidence he felt compassion for anyone. This "liberated" him to perform the most unspeakable acts with utter nonchalance. Just as there are gradations of evil, there are gradations of compassion.

  Of the persons sketched in this book, some had little compassion in general; others showed a kind of "splitting" in this regard: they had no compassion for their targeted victims, yet they retained a measure of compassion toward certain family members and friends. Serial killer Gary Ridgway, for example, felt close to his third wife (during that marriage, the frequency of his murders declined considerably), yet when interviewed by the authorities after his capture, he spoke of the women he killed as "garbage."

  Sometimes an evil act arises unexpectedly in a person who is deficient though not devoid of compassion when subjected to an unanticipated stress relating to someone viewed as "them" but not "us." A common example is that of the parent who is kind to his own children but cruel to an adopted or foster child. Getrude Baniszewski is a case in point. A divorced and impoverished woman of thirty-seven in Indianapolis with seven children of her own, Gertrude took in other children as boarders to supplement her meager income.15 Embittered, punitive, and mentally unstable, Gertrude was quick to use the switch with her own
children, but her punishments fell short of "evil." When she agreed in the summer of 1965 to take care of a fifteen-year-old girl, Sylvia, and her younger sister while their parents were away, Gertrude's punitiveness suddenly rose to evil proportions. In a crime that was considered the most horrifying in Indiana's history at that time, she, along with her children and some of their friends, embarked on a campaign to torture. Sylvia-a virginal girl whose "offense" was to be prettier than Gertrude's eldest (and already pregnant) daughter Paula-was beaten, burned, scalded, booted in the groin, forced to eat and drink waste matter, and then branded with a hot needle that etched into her abdomen the words "I am a prostitute and proud of it." She was then tied to a bed in the basement and starved to death. At trial the prosecuting attorney, alluding to the branding of the victim, asked his counterpart on the defense side, "Where is the compassion, Mr. Nedeff? "26 As with all those committing evil acts in peacetime, there was no Commander Gojkovic holding a gun to Gertrude's head. Her actions came from within. Gertrude died at age sixty-two still experiencing no remorse for the torture of Sylvia.

  Cindy Hendy, the female accomplice of serial killer David Parker Ray, showed a similar compartmentalization of compassion. She referred to the women she lured to the Toy Box to be tortured by Ray and herself as "packages." A kind of "them"-as distinct from "us"-to be used and then thrown away.

  No one held a gun to Hendy's head either, when she joined Ray in his systematic torture of his victims. In other killer teams-Fred and Rose West, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Gerald and Charlene Gallego, Doug Clark and Carol Bundy, Paul Bernardo and his wife, Karla Homolka-the women were not forced. Theirs was a volunteer army. Many had been incest victims, accustomed to control by an amoral "father figure." Their attitudes hugged the extremes: intense loyalty to, and vengeful feelings toward, the men on whom they depended. They were easily led into taking part in the evil actions of their lovers or husbands. Not all were strangers to compassion, but somehow after they had been sufficiently mesmerized by their men, their compassion went offline, sometimes for good. Myra Hindley had been a kindly, albeit very dependent woman before she met Ian Brady. Once under his influence, she did not demur when he recorded the screams of the children he strangled in front of her. She died years later in prison without a particle of remorse for what she and Ian had done.

  Throughout the book I have placed particular emphasis on actions. Horrifying actions elicit the reaction "evil"-it is the first word that comes to our minds when we learn of these acts of violence or extreme degradation. Yet as I hope to have shown, the persons behind these actions are not all the same. We can think of a kind of spectrum at one end of which are persons so devoid of human sentiments and so driven to commit evil acts repeatedly that we speak of both the person and his actions as evil. At this end of the spectrum, any idea of redemption is unthinkable, treatment ineffective, and release from incarceration a terrible mistake. Most of the persons who share these qualities are psychopaths; a few suffer from extreme forms of psychosis that do not respond to treatments currently available (or, if they were to be released, could not be trusted to continue taking their medications). At the opposite end of the spectrum, we confront persons for whom redemption, treatment, and eventual release back into the community are all feasible. Here are some examples, beginning with the unredeemable and progressing to those capable of rehabilitation:

  • Lacking in human qualities, without compassion, not approachable in conversation, contemptuous of others, mendacious: David Paul Brown/Nathaniel Bar-Jonah; serial rapist, James Bergstrom; serial killers Jeremy Jones and Richard Ramirez

  • Extreme egocentricity, though capable of being superficially friendly and affable but showing no remorse, incapable of redemption or release: Ian Brady, Arthur Shawcross, David Parker Ray

  • Approachable, some capacity for relationships with a few people, remorse is meager and not altogether genuine; some honesty, though with a tendency to minimize or distort when recounting past crimes; still beyond redemption and release: Tommy Lynn Sells

  • A capacity for remorse, candor, and self-reflection is present, as well as a limited capacity to care about others and to sustain friendships; release not appropriate: Dennis Nilsen

  • Remorse and compassion along with improved self-control are present to such a degree that eventual redemption, rehabilitation, and release are possible (though many years may be required for the latter). The persons who share these qualities are usually antisocial-some with a few psychopathic traits-but are not fullblown psychopaths: Archie McCafferty

  • The aforementioned positive qualities are all present; the act that inspired the reaction "evil" occurred just once and during a time of overwhelming stress. Redemption is assured, and eventual release is quite justified. Solid moral values are present, as well as a good capacity for close friendships and intimate attachments: Billy Wayne Sinclair, Clara Harris, Jean Harris

  I hope these examples will illustrate the difference between evil in peacetime and evil in time of war and group conflict. In the latter is the element of subjectivity (with each side convinced that evil lay on their opponent's side). Also, the atrocities that inspire revulsion, that trigger the response of "evil," are most often committed by persons compelled by evil leaders: persons whose lives before and afterward were inconspicuous (though not necessarily innocuous). These are the soldiers and lowerranking administrators of Hannah Arendt's banality of evil; the people who, as Slavenka Drakulic wryly put it, "would never hurt a fly."27 The people behind the evil acts of peacetime often shock us all the more, because they were acting quite on their own. That is, they were not swept up in mob psychology, not caught like Drazen Erdomovic in a kill-or-be-killed situation; they were not like certain narcissistic leaders who, suddenly finding themselves at the top, become unshackled from moral constraints. In addition, there is little or no subjectivity at issue. The only person who would argue against the murder of a child as being evil is another child murderer. I am not being melodramatic here: Joseph Edward Duncan III, who began raping (and later murdering) boys when he was twelve,28 after raping a boy at knifepoint when he was seventeen, spent the next fourteen years in prison. Highly intelligent (he later obtained a Phi Beta Kappa key from college), he authored a blog on the Internet, declaring: "My reaction is to strike out toward the perceived source of my misery, society. My intent is to harm society as much as I can.... As an adult all I knew was the oppression of incarceration. All those years I dreamed of getting out ... and getting even."29 In his blog, Duncan advocated for release of sex offenders and for abolition of sex-offender registries, as well as recording many of his violent sexual fantasies.30

  The other main ingredients of evil-that the act be shocking and that the perpetrator be lacking in compassion-are routinely present in both wartime and peacetime. But even here there is a difference. We grow up knowing the depths to which humanity can sink in wartime. The morning newspaper and the evening news teach us this. To most of us, these events seem far away. Our shock doubles, however, when a serial killer is our next-door neighbor (Gary Ridgway in Seattle), our church deacon (Dennis Rader in Kansas City), or our alderman (John Gacy in Chicago). I can personally attest to this doubling of shock: serial rapist and killer John Royster committed one of his near-murders in Central Park, across the street from where I live.31

  EVIL IN PEACETIME: WHAT CAN BE DONE?

  A great many of the vicious acts we witness in peacetime, the ones we register as "evil," are committed by men (and a few women) who have the characteristics of the psychopath. Some are born that way, as we have noted, others are transformed into psychopaths through environmental adversity. Rob a child of warm maternal nurturance and you rob the child of his humanity-usually. Compassion may fail to develop. Hatred toward the more fortunate majority may easily develop, along with the desire for revenge. But protective genes may prevent a bad outcome even in a brutalized child. There is little to be done, however, with the "born" psychopath-with persons, that is, whose
inherited predisposition to psychopathy overrides even the most compassionate nurturing, as appears to have been the case with Gerald Stano and his adoptive parents. Such persons behave as though wired to break the law, no matter what the law is. A psychopath interviewed by Dr. Stanton Samenow told him, "If they made rape legal, I'd have to do something else."32

  Many socially valuable strengths come naturally, that is, with little explicit instruction. Most young girls don't need to be taught to be maternal: they come by it naturally (helped by the affection and competence of their own mothers). Teaching "maternal adequacy" in our high schools would not likely accomplish much. But we could teach something about the disastrous effects of parental cruelty. We might even be able to get across the idea that corporal punishment meted out to the rebellious, let alone callous-unemotional child (who will usually be a boy), will be more likely to make him into the next Gary Gilmore than into a law-abiding citizen, respectful of the feelings of others.

  Every generation will have a small but irreducible percentage of paranoid schizophrenic and other psychotic persons, a few of whom will commit-often at the urging of "command-hallucinations"-crimes of spectacular awfulness. Such was the case with David Tarloff, murderer of Dr. Faughey (mentioned in chapter 2, note 12), or with William Bruce, who killed his mother with a hatchet.33 Both were paranoid schizophrenic men, released by an overworked and inattentive hospital staff in the first case, and by overzealous "patient advocates" in the second. Patient advocates (who are not trained psychiatrists) sometimes take patient rights to such an extreme as to interfere with a delusional patient taking appropriate medication or preventing hospital staff from communicating with family members-all to the detriment of patient care and to the increase in risk of violence to others. These tragedies could be minimized through better attention to the matter of dangerousness. Mentally ill persons who are chronically dangerous (as suggested by their past history) may need institutional care for prolonged periods. Not all can be trusted to comply with taking prescribed medications once they are released from a hospital. Patient rights need to be respected, yet the rights of the community must also be respected. There will always be some guesswork in the estimation of dangerousness, though the work of Dr. Hare and his colleagues, Dr. Monahan and his group, Dr. Hodgins, Drs. Caspi and Moffitt, and others has made our estimates more accurate than ever before. We can strike a more proper balance between the competing rights of the mentally ill and the community, in such a way as to reduce the violence to which certain patients might otherwise be prone.