The Anatomy of Evil
Page 46
68. Smith, The BTKMurders.
69. In my experience, serial killers were at least four times as likely to have killed or tortured a cat than were the men who killed their wives.
70. Curiously, the triad was not noted in any of the fifteen homosexual serial killers I have studied-none of whom had set fires and only four of whom had tortured animals. The whole triad, and the combination of fire setting and animal torture, was noted only in the men who went on to kill women.
71. David Reichert, Chasing the Devil: My Twenty-Year Quest to Capture the Green River Killer (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2004).
72. http://www.kingcountyjournal.com/sited/story/html/148496.
73. I had occasion to see the tapes at the International Congress on Serial Killing, held in San Antonio in 2005 under the auspices of the FBI.
74. We saw this with Archie McCafferty and George Hennard, in chapter S.
75. This point is convincingly argued by psychoanalytic experts in the field of sexuality Richard Friedman and Jennifer Downey in their article "Sexual Differentiation of Behavior," journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (to be published).
76. Original title: Fege_ Feuer, oder die Reise ins Zuchthaus. The story of his life is well told in John Leake, Entering Hades: The Double Life of a Serial Killer (New York: Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2007).
77. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/jack-Unter-weger.
78. http://members.tripod.com/Fighting9th/History5.htm.
79. Recounted by Brucejackson,http://buffaloreport.com/02030tabbott.htrnl.
CHAPTER EIGHT. THE FAMILY AT ITS WORST
1. Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr Wicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective (New York: Walker & Co., 2008), p. 37.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., p. 75.
4. Wilkie Collins's famous novel The Moonstone (1868) owed a debt to the Road Hill House case.
5. A half-hour's drive to the east of Hitler's birthplace in Linz, one cannot help noticing. Linz was also home to another former mechanic with a talent for "disappearing" people: Adolf Eichmann.
6. http://in.ibtimes.com/articles/20080430/austria-incest-scandal-fritzl - father-daughter-cellar.
7. New York Times, May 9, 2008.
8. New York Post, May 3, 2008, p. 14.
9. The Republic, Book VII, the section sometimes called the Allegory of the Cave.
10. K. Englade, Cellar of Horrors (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988).
11. Sacha Batthyany, "Das Bose ist unter uns" (Evil is underneath us), N22 Online, http://www.nzz.ch/nachrichten/international/das_boese_ist_unter_uns _1.725225.html.
12. Cf. D.J. Cooke and C. Michi, "Psychopathy across Cultures: North America and Scotland Compared," Journal of Abnormal Psychology 108 (1): 5868. D. J. Cooke, A. E. Forth, and R. D. Hare, eds., Psychopathy: Theory, Research & Implications for Society (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 1998), pp. 1345. Cooke cites Cleckley's famous book on the psychopath, where the author mentions that "like the poor, psychopaths have always been with us" (p. 13).
13. The case of Latasha Pulliam and her boyfriend.
14. Wensley Clarkson, Whatever Mother Says: A True Story of a Mother, Madness, and Murder (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995).
15. http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/family%E2%80%99 theresa_cross/2 htinl.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. The mothers were Deanna Laney and Dena Schlosser. Their story is told by Jane Velez-Mitchell in Secrets Can Be Murder (New York: Simon & Schuster/Touchstone Books, 2007), pp. 41ff.
19. http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=2005042822320990003.
20. Charles Carillo, New York Post, June 23, 1990.
21. Ibid.
22. http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/1996/05/17/1996-05-17 _facing_father_from_hell_bur.html.
23. Ibid.
24. Lowell Cauffiel, House of Secrets (New York: Kensington, 1997).
25. Cf. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Homicide (New York: Aldine DeGruyter, 1988), pp. 83ff.
26. Carol Rothgeb, No One Can Hurt Him Anymore (New York: Pinnacle Books, 2005). Ilene Logan is not her real name but one used by the author to safeguard her identity
2 7. By Andrew's father. Ibid., p. 2 7.
28. http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-4414492/Prosecutor-writes -about- an-u n forg ettabl e. html .
29. Rothgeb, No One Can Hurt Him Anymore, p. 249.
30. Ibid., p. 299.
31. According to German psychiatrist Dr. Thomas Bronisch, the suicide rate among Holocaust victims was actually lower than average, after the war, compared with the rates in the general populations of the countries they had come from.
32. Any parents. I am not fond of the clinical word caretakers, so I am including under the label "parents": natural parents, stepparents, adoptive parents, foster parents, mother's boyfriends, etc.
3 3. Lonnie H. Athens, The Creation of Dangerous Violent Criminals (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press), 1992.
34. Gitta Sereny, Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1998).
35. Beth Kephart, "The Bad Seed," http://dir.salon.com/story/rnwt/fea- ture/1999/04/14/childkillers/index2.html.
36. Ibid.
3 7. Sereny, Cries Unheard.
38. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Bell.
39. Beth Kephart makes this point in her essay.
40. To make it less abstract, Theresa Knorr once shot her daughter, Suesan, in the shoulder and then (being a nurse) extracted the bullet, patched up the wound, with no one the wiser. Had the bullet struck an artery, Suesan would have died then and there; her mother's crime would have been that much more depraved.
41. New York Times, http://wwwnytimes.com/2008/03/18/nyregion/18cnd -nixzmary.html?_r=1.
42. http://kalimao.blogspot.com/2008/02/children-parental-abuse_11 .html.
43. http://newsday.com/news/local/crime/ny-mynixz0202,0,5361314 .story.
44. http://aolsvc,news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=2005022014150999 0002.
45. http://exchristian.net/2/2005/09/detective-speaks-out-on-dollar.php.
46. http://nobloodforhubris.blogspot.com/2006/08/in-nightmares-begin- responsibilities.html.
47. http://aolsvc.news.
48. http://cnn.usnews.
49. http://nobloodforhubris.blogspot.com/2006/08/in-nightmares-begin- responsibilities.httnl. The power of religion cannot be underestimated in the area of Tennessee from which the Dollars hailed. Of interest: the famous Scopes Trial of 1925 took place in Dayton, Tennessee, on the other side of Knoxville from the Dollars' former academy.
50. http://mydatanet.com/story/64536317.html.
51. http://exchristian.net/2/2005/09/detective-speaks-out-on-doll ar.php.
52. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk news/england/bradford/7203382.stm.
53. Ibid.
54. Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto XXXII 65-66. Sassol was a member of the Florentine family of Toschi. He murdered his cousin for the sake of an inheritance, which then fell to Sassol when the uncle died shortly thereafter. As Durling mentions in his 1996 translation for Oxford University Press, Sassol was punished by being rolled through the city in a barrel full of nails and then beheaded (p. 510).
55. Rachel Pergament, http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious -murders/famous/menendez/murders-2.html.
56. Ibid., p. 9.
57. The defense attorney persuaded some of the jury that Jose had "sexually molested" the boys, hence their rage and thirst for retribution. This was farfetched, especially in light of the fact that Jose had many mistresses; sodomizing his sons was not on his mental map at all, ever.
58. Harold Schechter, Fatal: The Poisonous Life of a Female Serial Killer (London: Pocket/Star Books, 2003), p. 60.
59. Emily Allen, Alana Averill, and Emmeline Cook, "Jolly Jane," http://maamodt. asp.radford. edu/Psyc %2 0405/serial%2 0killers/Toppan, %2 OJa ne%20-%202005.pdf.
>
60. Schechter, Fatal, p. 201.
61. Ibid., p. 3 05.
62. Ibid., p. xii.
63. Martin Gilman Wolcott, The Evil 100 (New York: Kensington Publishers, 2003), p. 156. Since Wolcott conflates political killers with persons operating only in private life, his schema is not at all relevant to this book and is quite arbitrary. Jane is noteworthy because of the sheer number of victims, plus the unusual attribute of being "turned on" sexually by close contact with her dying victims-most of whose deaths were relatively painless (the arsenic cases aside). She does not compare in the malignancy of, or in the excruciating suffering caused by, the likes of David Parker Ray, Leonard Lake, Theresa Knorr, Herman Mudgett, John Weber, and many another "peacetime" sadistic killer reviewed here.
64. The novel was by William March; the play, by Maxwell Anderson, http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/jane_Toppan.
65. Publilius Syrus, writer of Latin maxims, 1st century BCE.
66. http://www.fenlandcitzen.co.uk/latest-east-anglia-news.
67. Roger Wilkes, Blood Relations: Jeremy Bamber and the White House Farm Murders (London: Pocket/Star Books, 1994).
68. Ibid., p. 440.
69. Ibid., p. 42.
70. For example: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-455875/Is -Bambis-killer-innocent.html.
71. Some mothers who are truly overwhelmed with the prospect of losing their children or of being unable to care for them do commit murder-suicide. A few such mothers survive their own suicide attempt, are usually considered mentally ill, and are sent to a forensic hospital. Those mothers who kill their children for "wicked" reasons-like getting back at a husband who has left themare the ones seen as "evil" by the public. An example: Dr. Debora Green (Ann Rule, Bitter Harvest [New York: Simon Schuster, 1997]), who burned down her house with her three children in it, two of whom died.
72. Bonnie Remsberg, Moen, Dad, Mike and Pattie: The True Story of the Columbo Murders (New York: Bantam Books, 1992).
73. Ibid., p. 340.
74. Ibid., p. 315.
75. Ibid., p. 127.
76. This special "chemistry" of obsessive love when thwarted is thoroughly discussed in Helen Fischer, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (New York: Henry Holt/Owl Books, 2004). Relevant points about her research will be mentioned in the following chapter.
77. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-193 5): famous American Jurist and Supreme Court justice.
78. http://www.ccadp.org/jimmyrayslaughter.htm. Slaughter was executed on March 15, 2005. The full story of his psychopathy and his crimes is told in Bill Cox, Over the Edge (New York: Pinnacle Books, 1997). The father of Melody Wuertz said at Slaughter's trial: "He's not a man. He's an evil and he must be destroyed. What this man has dumped into our lives is nothing short of a toxic bomb of evil," http://www.clarkprosecutor.org/html/death/US/slaughter955.htm.
79. Kieran Crowley, Almost Paradise (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005).
80. Obscene is an apt word in this context. The origin of the word is obscure. The large Latin dictionary by Lewis and Short suggests the roots are ob plus caenum, the latter word conveying the meanings of "filth" or "loathsomeness." My Latin professor at university used to say the derivation was related to the Greek, meaning "tent," or "stage" (from which we get our word scene), the idea being that, as Aristotle advised, certain actions during a theatrical play were too horrifying or indecent to portray on the stage and therefore could only be hinted at offstage; i.e., ob plus scaenum. Because the actions of John Ray Weber were to a great extent obscene (by whichever root meaning), they are properly alluded to only indirectly-off stage, as it were, not literally.
81. Lynard Barnes, in his 1995 review of Ray Garton's In a Dark Place (New York: Dell Publishing, 1992).
82. Peter Davidson, Death by Cannibal (New York: Berkley Books, 2006), p. 84.
83. As the philosopher Wittgenstein said, in a very different context, "Whereof we cannot speak we must be silent."
84. Barnes, review of Garton, In a Dark Place.
85. Cf. Hazelwood and Michaud, Dark Dreams. The authors point out that the longer the time the sadist fantasizes about the acts he wants to commit, the more specific the victim's characteristics will be (as to age, size, etc.), p. 3 6. As to the components of a ritualistic sadist like Weber, there are certain subtypes one encounters. Weber fits into the "paraphilic" sexual sadist category, practicing bondage, sexual sadism (with sexual excitement during killing), and cannibalism, p. 43.
86. Steven Daniels, coordinator of Annual Homicide Conference, personal communication.
87. Submitted by Wayne Wirsing for the Price County district attorney, as part of the case of Wisconsin v. John R. Weber.
88. Barnes, review of Garton, In a Dark Place.
CHAPTER NINE. SCIENCE LOOKS AT EVIL
1. Non-shared environment related to the fact that even siblings led largely separate lives, were in different classes at school, had different friends and different skills and interests, etc. "Shared" environment (the whole family sitting down to the same dinner table, taking a vacation together) accounts for barely 3 percent of the difference in our personalities.
2. Example: ex-con Jess Dotson killed his brother in an argument-plus five other family members. New York Times, March 9, 2008.
3. An exception might be in places like Brazil, where kidnap for modest sums of ransom money is something of a cottage industry. I once treated a Brazilian patient whose wife was kidnapped for about three days. This was fairly traumatic for him, since he had no idea when she would be released. The wife was rather calm throughout the ordeal, knowing that the kidnappers were not asking for much money and that her father was wealthy and easily able to afford the extortion.
4. Lee Butcher, To Love, Honor, and Kill (New York: Pinnacle Books, 2008).
5. Joseph Starkey, Deadly Greed (New York: Prentiss Hall, 1991).
6. Such as the man in chapter 1, who beheaded his father and threw the head out the window, for fear it might get reattached. Another example would be that of China Arnold, a mentally unstable woman in Dayton, Ohio, who in 2005 killed her baby daughter by burning her in a microwave because she was worried that her boyfriend would leave her if he found out the baby wasn't his. The reaction of the community ("evil-pure evil") may well have been more intense than in cases of infanticide where the child suffered no mutilation or disfigurement.
7. Such as Coy Wesbrook in Texas, who was invited for a supposed reconciliation with his estranged wife, only to discover that she was having sex with two men at once when he entered her apartment. Two other people were there also, both of them mocking Mr. Wesbrook. He went to his car, got his rifle, and shot all five to death. Had he caught his wife in flagrante delicto with just one lover and shot either the wife or the lover, a Texas jury would have been lenient (if they convicted him at all). But with five bodies, they could not in good conscience look the other way.
8. Example: a Jewish Vietnam vet was unable to afford the fee for Yom Kippur services at his temple. In a vengeful rage, he drew a swastika on the temple door. His arrest was attended with a lot of publicity.
9. As we saw with Sharon Tate in the Manson case.
10. As in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and of Martin Luther King Jr.
11. In previous chapters we mentioned Richard Jahnke Jr., who shot his father to death but had been abused severely (as was his sister) by the father; also Mary Bell, whose mother had tried numerous times to kill her daughter, and who at age eleven killed two boys. The true victim in either case was the child.
12. As in the murder of psychologist Kathryn Faughey by the paranoid schizophrenic David Tarloff. New York Times, Feb. 13, 2008. Or the murder of the judge in an Atlanta courtroom by prisoner Brian Nichols in March 2005. Another example concerns the murder of Tennessee pastor Matthew Winkler by his wife, Maryann, as described in Ann Rule, Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder (New York: Pocket Books, 2008), pp. 386-484.
13. Ken McElroy, mentioned in c
hapter 6, is an example.
14. Among the numerous examples: the murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming by Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, who tied Shepard to a wire fence after stabbing and burning him.
15. As in the intentional bombing of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan by the Taliban in 2001, or the mallet attack on Michelangelo's Pieta by the para noid Australian geologist Laszlo Toth in 1972. Toth was later declared "insane" and deported back to Australia.
16. Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979).
17. F. L. Coolidge, L. L. Thede, and K. L. Jang, "Heritability of Personality Disorders in Childhood," journal of Personality Disorders 15 (2001): 33-40. If a twin has conduct disorder, for example, his co-twin is about twice as likely to have conduct disorder also if the twins are "single-egg" (monozygotic), as compared with dizygotic. Twins from two different eggs are no more alike than two siblings born at different times.
The close relationship between childhood conduct disorder and (adult) antisocial personality disorder (or at the extreme, psychopathy) can he glimpsed by noticing the similarity of behaviors: children (boys, usually) with conduct disorder are prone, for example, to lying, stealing, assaultiveness ("bullying"), cruelty to animals, arson, property destruction (such as vandalism), and aggression that may reach the level of severe violence.
18. Mikal Gilmore, Shot in the Heart (New York: Viking Press, 1994).
19. This was the view expressed by Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman in Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi, A Universe of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 38; also in Gerald Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of Mind, chap. 3 (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
20. A useful summary of her work can be found in "The Neural Basis of Addiction: A Pathology of Motivation and Choice," American journal of Psychiatry 162 (August 2005): 1403-12.
21. Hippocampal damage and its attendant memory impairment is one of the key abnormalities in Alzheimer's disease.
22. Joseph LeDoux, article on the amygdala in Scholarpedia 3, no. 4: 2698.
23. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleus_accumbens.