The Anatomy of Evil

by Michael H. Stone

  24. American Journal of Psychiatry 157 (January 2000): 3.

  25. A. Bechara et al., "Insensivity to Future Consequences Following Damage to the Human Prefrontal Cortex," Cognition 50 (1994): 7-15.

  26. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbitofrontal_cortex.

  27. Lecture at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, 2007.

  28. Lee Butcher, To Love, Honor and Kill (New York: Kensington Publishers, 2008).

  29. Examples would be Tommy Lynn Sells, Leonard Lake, and David Parker Ray-serial killers sketched in chapter 7.

  30. Emile Durkheim, "Forms of Social Solidarity," in Selected Writings, trans. Anthony Giddens, 29th printing (London: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 124.

  31. Larry J. Siever, "Neurobiology of Aggression and Violence," American journal of P.vychiatry 165 (April 2008): 429-42.

  32. http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/asperger/detail_asperger.htm. Others have also pointed to the tendency of clinicians not familiar with Asperger's to misdiagnose persons with this syndrome as "schizophrenic": B. G. Haskins and J. A. Silva, "Asperger's Disorder and Behavior: Forensic-Psychiatric Considerations," journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law 34 (2006): 3 74-84. About one such patient in five was preoccupied with violent themes (p. 377).

  33. V. S. Ramachandran and L. M. Oberman, "Broken Mirrors," Scientific American, November 2006, pp. 63-69.

  34. Tania Singer of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, cited in http:// www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/3 1400/title/Asperger%E2 %80% 99s -syndrome.

  35. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070418/ap_on_re_us/virginia_tech _shooting.

  36. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cho_Seung-Hui.

  37. www.freelibrary.com/Fetal+Alcohol+Syndrome+National+Workshop +2002-a0l12129793.

  38. A. Badawy, "Alcohol and Violence, and the Possible Role of Serotonin," Criminal Behavior and Mental Health 13 (2006): 31-44.

  39. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, act 1, scene 7, 11. 59-61.

  40. Ibid., 11. 8-10.

  41. Edmund S. Higgins, "The New Genetics of Mental Illness," Scientific American Mind, June/July 2008, pp. 41-47.

  42. http://www.francesfarmersrevenge.com/stuff/serialkillers/martha johnson.htm. She is considered a serial killer of the nonsexual type, because the four murders took place over a five-year span between 1977 and 1982.

  43. Terrie E. Moffitt, "A Review of Research on the Taxonomy of LifeCourse Persistent versus Adolescent-Limited Antisocial Behavior," in The Cambridge Handbook of Violent Behavior and Aggression, ed. D. J. Flannery, A. T. Vaz- sonyi, and I. D. Waldman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 49-74.

  44. Sheila Johnson, Blood Lust (New York: Pinnacle Books, 2007).

  45. S. Kapur and P. Seeman, "NMDA Receptor Antagonists Ketamine and PCP Have Direct Effects on the Dopamine D2 and Serotonin 5HT2 Receptors. Implications for Models of Schizophrenia," Molecular Psychiatry 7 (2002): 83344. Also, M. A. Fauman and B. J. Fauman, "Violence Associated with Phencyclidine Abuse," American journal of Psychiatry 136 (1979): 1584-86.

  46. J. M. Kretschmar and D. J. Flannery, "Substance Use and Violent Behavior," in The Cambridge Handbook of Violent Behavior and Aggression, ed. Flannery, Vazsonyi, and Waldman, pp. 647-63.

  47. A. J. Reiss and J. A. Roth, "Alcohol, Other Psychoactive Drugs, and Violence," in Understanding & Preventing Violence, vol. 3, Social Influences (Washington, DC: National Academy Press), pp. 182-220.

  48. R. Myerscough and S. Taylor, "The Effects of Marijuana on Human Physical Aggression," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 49 (1985): 154146.

  49. Higgins, "The New Genetics of Mental Illness," p. 46.

  50. In any case marijuana had been implicated in a 40 percent increase in the development of mental illness by adolescents who use it; the incidence of suicidal thoughts also is greater among adolescent marijuana smokers. These effects can in certain young persons contribute further to criminal (including violent) behavior. Cf. Jennifer Kerr, "Teen Pot Use Can Lead to Dependency and Mental Illness," http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080509/ap_on_he_me/ teens-drugs. The persistent effects of marijuana and other drug use in adolescence has also been highlighted by Brenda Patoine in "Teen Brain's Ability to Learn Can Have a Flip Side," Brain Work/Neuroscience News, November/ December 2007, pp. 1-2.

  51. D. Murdoch, R. O. Pihl, and D. Ross, "Alcohol and Crimes of Violence," International Journal of the Addictions 25: 1065-81.

  52. Corey Mitchell, Pure Murder: A Deserted City Park, A Vicious Killing Frenzy (New York: Pinnacle Books, 2008).

  53. From the observations of Dr. John Harlow, http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/Phineas-Gage.

  54. Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1994), p. 33.

  55. P. Ratiu and I.-E Talos, "The Tale of Phineas Gage, Digitally Remastered," New England Journal ofMedicine 351 (December 2004): e2 1.

  56. A "stable family home is a protective factor against crime"-as emphasized by Gail S. Anderson in Biological Influences on Criminal Behavior (New York: Simon Fraser University Publications, 2007), p. 112.

  57. Joanna Schaffhausen, "The Biological Basis of Aggression," http://www.brainconnection.conVtopics/?main=fa/aggression2.

  58. G. Lavergne, A Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman Murders (Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press), 1997.

  59. L. Fosburgh, Closing Time: The True Story of the Goodbar Murder (New York: Dell Books, 1975).

  60. Though when an intruding male lion does succeed, he behaves according to the script for new male lions, as mentioned in chapter 3.

  61. Debra Niehoff, The Biology of Violence (New York: Free Press, 1998), p. 153.

  62. Ibid., p. 155.

  63. R. Rowe et al., "Testosterone, Antisocial Behavior, and Social Dominance in Boys: Pubertal Development and Biosocial Interaction," Biological Psychiatry 55 (2004): 546-52. A similar finding was made earlier by B. Schaal and colleagues in Montreal: "Male Testosterone Linked to High School Dominance but Low Physical Aggression in Early Adolescence," Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 35 (1996): 1322-30.

  64. J. D. Higley et al., "Cerebrospinal Testosterone and 5-HIAA (Serotonin) Correlate with Different Types of Aggressive Behaviors," Biological Psy- chiatiy 40 (1996): 1067-82.

  65. S. Rajender et al., "Reduced CAG Repeats Length in Androgen Receptor Gene Is Associated with Violent Criminal Behavior," International Journal for Legal Medicine (March 2008).

  66. Schaffhausen, "The Biological Basis of Aggression." She discusses predatory aggression (seen also in animals who stalk and kill other species), defensive aggression (as when a person or animal is "cornered"), and social aggression (associated with testosterone and the quest for social dominance).

  67. Paul Aitken, "XYY-One Chromosome Too Many," http://www.alt- penis.com/penis-news/xyy.shtml.

  68. P. Briken et al., "XYY Chromosome Abnormality in Sexual Homicide Perpetrators," American Journal ofMedical Genetics (January 2, 2006). It should be noted that XYY is not even a heritable condition. It results from a random mutation when the sex cells (sperm and egg), each with twenty-three chromosomes, line up to reconstitute the full forty-six-chromosome cells of our species. One sperm cell in this rare mutation ends up with two "Y's" instead of just one; the fertilized egg becomes XYY. Cf. Anderson, Biological Influences on Criminal Behavior, p. 82.

  69. Otto Kernberg, Aggression in Personality Disorders and Perversions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 77.

  70. "Global," Time, June 16, 2008, p. 10. Another example is the documentary by Ernestina Sodi Miranda, who had been kidnapped-and later freed-in Mexico in 2002: LJranos del Mal (Deliver Us f -om Evil) (Mexico City: Aguilar, 2006).

  71. Maria Eftimiades, Sins of the Mother (New York: St. Martin's Paperbacks, 1995).

  72. A powerful study of empathy in this sense has been conducted by Professor Simon Baron-Cohen of Cambridge University in The Essential Difference: Male and Female Brains and the
Truth about Autism (New York: Basic Books, 2004), pp. 187-99.

  73. James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: Free Press, 1993), pp. 29-54.

  74. M. William Phelps, I'll Be Watching You (New York: Pinnacle Books, 2008). He refers to Snelgrove as the "embodiment of pure evil" (p. 9).

  75. A. Raine et al., "High Rates of Violence, Crime, Academic Problems and Behavioral Problems in Males with Both Early Neuromotor Deficits and Unstable Family Environments," Archives of General Psychiatry 53 (1996): 544-49.

  76. A. Raine et al., "Reduced Prefrontal and Increased Subcortical Brain Functioning Assessed Using Positron Emission Tomography in Predatory and Affective Murderers," Behavioral Science and the Law 16 (1998): 319-22. In a related study, psychopathic criminals showed overactivity in the fronto-temporal cortex for processing affective stimuli: Kent Kiehl, A. M. Smith et al., "Limbic Abnormalities in Affective Processing by Criminal Psychopaths as Revealed by Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging," Biological Psychiatry 50 (2001): 677-84.

  77. A. Raine et al., "Reduced Prefrontal Gray Matter Volume and Reduced Autonomic Activity in Antisocial Personality Disorder," Archives of General Psychiatry 57 (2000): 119-27.

  78. A. Raine and P. H. Venables, "Tonic Heart Rate Level, Social Class, and Antisocial Behavior," Biological Psychiatry 18 (1984): 123-32.

  79. A. Marsh et al., "Reduced Amygdala Response to Fearful Expressions in Children and Adolescents with Callous-Unemotional Traits and Disruptive Behavior Disorders," American journal of Psychiatry 165 (2008): 712-20.

  80. J. Moll et al., "Morals and the Human Brain: A Working Model," Neu- roreport 14 (2003): 299-305.

  81. E. C. Finger et al., "Abnormal Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Function in Children with Psychopathic Traits during Reversal Learning," Archives of General Psychiatry 65 (2008): 586-94.

  82. H. Larsson, E. Viding, and R. Plomin, "Callous-Unemotional Traits and Antisocial Behavior: Genetic, Environmental and Early Parenting Characteristics," CriminalJustice and Behavior 35 (2008): 197-211.

  83. J. Taylor, W. G. Iacono, and M. McGue, "Evidence for a Genetic Etiology of Early-Onset Delinquency," journal of Abnormal Psychology 109 (2000): 634-43. Also, L. Arsenault et al., "Strong Genetic Effects on Cross-Situational Behavior among 5-Year-Old Children According to Mothers, Teachers, Examiner-Observers, and Self-Reports," journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 44 (2004): 832-48.

  84. T. C. Eley, P. Lichtenstein, and J. Stevenson, "Sex Differences in the Etiology of Aggressive and Nonaggressive Antisocial Behavior: Results from Two Twin Studies," Child Development 70 (1999): 155-68.

  85. Anderson, Biological Influences on Criminal Behavior, p. 112.

  86. Deborah Spungen, And I Don't Want to Live This Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1983).

  87. Niels Habermann, Jugendliche Sexualmorder (Uuvenile Sexual Murder) (Lengerich, Germany: Pabst Science Publishers, 2008).

  88. David J. Pelzer, A Child Called "It": An Abused Child's journey from Victim to Victor (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, 1995).

  89. S. K. Loo et al., "Genome Wide Scan of Reading Ability in Affected Sibling Pairs with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder," Molecular Psychology 9 (2004): 485-93.

  90. Finger et al., "Abnormal Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Function," p. 593.

  91. A. Caspi et al., "Role of Genotype in the Cycle of Violence in Maltreated Children," Science 297 (2002): 851-54.

  92. C. M. Filley et al., "Toward an Understanding of Violence: Neurobe- havioral Aspects of Unwarranted Physical Aggression," Neuropsychiatry, Neuropsychology and Behavioral Neurology 14 (2001): 1-14; also R. Cadoret, L. D. Leve, and E. Devor, "Genetics of Aggressive and Violent Behavior," Psychiatric Clinics ofNorth America 20 (1997): 301-22.

  93. A. R. Hariri et al., "A Susceptibility Gene for Affective Disorders and the Response of the Human Amygdala," Archives of General Psychiatry 62 (2005): 146-52.

  94. Sheila Hodgins, lecture at the Jephcott Forensic Symposium, Royal Society of Medicine, London, UK, April 22, 2008.

  95. Ibid.

  96. Vincent Bugliosi, Helter Skelter (New York: W W Norton, 1974/ 1994), p. 125.

  97. Anna C. Salter, Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, & Other Sex Offenders (New York: Basic Books, 2003).

  98. The full story is found on pages 98-99 in ibid.

  99. Ibid., p. 100.

  100. This man, who would be at Category 22 on the Gradations scale, represents a particularly heinous form of evil because his victim was his own son. If a stranger had abducted and violated the boy in a similar fashion-provided the boy's parents were warm and loving-the boy's capacity to trust others would not be as shattered as it would be knowing that he was violated by his own father, who was supposed to be his guardian and protector.

  101. Examples are the serial killers Edwin Snelgrove Jr., mentioned above, and Dennis Rader (known in the press as BTK-for bind-torture-kill). Both these men came from normal homes and became sexually aroused from sadistic fantasies when still quite young. Dennis Rader was able to lead a "split" life, marrying and raising a family, while also leading a secret "double-life" as a sadistic killer. Edwin Snelgrove was a loner, unable to relate intimately with women-whom he grew to hate, as though it were their fault that he couldn't form close attachments to them.

  102. Francine du Plessix Gray, At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), p. 30. Aristocrats could not be executed in those royal times; this was the same reason why the Countess Bathory was simply immured in her castle, when arrested, rather than being executed.

  103. Salter, Predators, p. 114.

  FINAL THOUGHTS

  1. Irvine Welsh, Crime (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008), p. 255. "Nonce" is Scottish slang for "pedophile."

  2. Slavenka Drakulid, They Would Never Hurt a Fly (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 189.

  3. Drakulid, They Would Never Hurt a Fly, p. 111. The very same story about Erdomovid is also mentioned in a book by German social psychologist Harald Welzer, who discusses how ordinary men can end up committing mass murder: Tdter-Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmorder werden (Perpetrators-How quite normal men become mass murderers) (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2008), pp. 242-45.

  4. Niklas Frank, Der Vater: Eine Abrechnung (Munich: Bertelsmann, 1987). Later translated as In the Shadow of the Reich (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1991).

  5. One of Eichmann's sons condemned his father's actions but did not write a book about him, http://www.jewishf.com/content/2-0-/module/display/ story_id/2 0954/edition_id/431 /format/html/displaystoryhtml.

  6. My translation from his 1992 letter.

  7. Frank, Der Vater, p. 350.

  8. Lieutenant Calley's character structure left something to be desired even before he went to Vietnam. Outwardly, however, he certainly seemed like an "ordinary man." Not surprisingly, when he was brought to trial for the massacre, he showed his moral meagerness when he said in his defense, "What the hell else is war than killing people?" This was cited in Welzer, Tdter, p. 245.

  9. The officer was one Daniel Mitrone. Martha Huggins, Mika Haritos- Fatouras, and Philip G. Zimbardo, Violence Workers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 239.

  10. Huggins, Haritas-Fatouras, and Zimbardo, Violence Workers, p. 240.

  11. Cited by Rita Maran, Torture: The Role ofldeology in the French-Algerian War (New York: Praeger, 1989), p. 83.

  12. Bruce Falconer, "The World's Most Evil Man," American Scholar 77 (2008): 33-53.

  13. Niels Habermann in his book on adolescent sexual murder (Jugendliche Sexualrorder [Berlin: Pabst Science Publishers, 2008]) drew attention to how a third of the nineteen adolescent murderers he studied had deformities of one sort or another that contributed to their poor self-image and shyness, and played a role in their eventual crimes.

  14. One of the rare forms of evil in peacetime partakes of this dynamic: consider Hinckley's attempt on the life of President Reagan, or David Mark Chapman's murder of John Lennon. A brilliant comment on this k
ind of anomie-driven evil was made by Martin Amis in his piece "Terrorism's New Structure," Wall Street Journal, August 16, 2008, pp. W-1, 6.

  15. Among myriad examples: Napoleon's troops committed atrocities against the Spanish when they invaded Spain (1807-1812); the Spanish citizenry retaliated by flaying alive or sawing in two some of the invading troops. David A. Bell, The First Total War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), p. 290.

  16. As Welzer (Tater, p. 263) points out, killing (whether of soldiers or civilians) in wartime is reduced to a job that unfortunately has to be done. Here he echoes Himmler's pep talk to the SS (cited in ibid., p. 23) in referring to the mass murder of the Jews as an unpleasant task that the Fatherland needs to perform for its salvation. In his address to SS leaders in 1943, Himmler waved aside any accusation of "anti-Semitism," speaking of the Jews as "lice"; their eradication simply a matter of cleanliness, or "delousing" (Katrin Himmler, The Hirnrnler Brothers [New York: Macmillan, 2007], p. 231). Violence, in this perverse and topsy-turvy schema, is no longer something destructive but rather a "constructive" exercise in social hygienics.

  17. I am using the word "men" here, for brevity's sake, to refer to both men and women. Men enormously outnumber women when we speak of evil, whether in peacetime or war. And as we have seen, serial sexual homicide and mass murder are anyway almost exclusively male phenomena.

  18. John Seabrook, "Suffering Souls," New Yorker, November 10, 2008, pp. 64-73.

  19. Barbara Bentley, A Dance with the Devil: A True Story of Marriage to a Psychopath (New York: Berkley Books, 2008), pp. 351-52.

  20. Professor of English Harold Schechter insists that "there is no such thing as a serial killer who has come from a healthy, happy home. All of them are the products of distinctly dysfunctional backgrounds." The Serial Killer Files (New York: Ballantine Books, 2003), p. 256. Schechter is simply wrong. Examples of the contrary come not only from my own records and clinical experience, but also from the clinical observations of Niels Habermann (7ugendliche Sexualmorder). He gave vignettes of nineteen adolescent sexual murderers, including a few who became serial killers. Most did come from dysfunctional homes, but several, such as his case of "Matthias," did not. These boys did tend to be schizoid loners from birth-meaning that they inherited risk genes for this personality type that interfered severely with their ability to connect with, and develop intimacy with, girls as they entered puberty. They came from good homes, as did US serial killer, adoptee Joel Rifkin, whose schizoid personality also stood in the way of his developing closeness with women.