The Anatomy of Violence

by Adrian Raine

  This initial research suggests a methodology for further study of psychopaths in society. Clearly, “success” in these psychopaths—avoiding detection— is relatively modest, and our findings may or may not apply to successful psychopaths who are businessmen, politicians, academics, or terrorists. Nevertheless, we are for the first time obtaining some clues to the makeup of the unstudied psychopaths we know almost nothing about—those that are circulating closely with us in the community.

  HOT-BLOODED SERIAL KILLERS

  The findings on successful psychopaths may also offer us other insights. It is conceivable that they could give some clues on the makeup of serial killers. What makes someone a serial killer is not just an unanswered question, it is a greatly under-researched one, because it is next to impossible to collect systematic experimental data on a significant number of them. Beyond some very basic facts—that they tend to be white and male, to target strangers, and to use guns infrequently—we really don’t know too much about what makes a serial killer.81

  The predominant tendency is to classify serial killers as “cold-blooded.” But might some of their cold-blooded acts be a product of their “hot-blooded” bodies? My speculative working hypothesis is that some serial killers have many of the characteristics of successful psychopaths. As a murderer once told me, it’s not that easy to kill a person for the first time. But once you have stepped over that threshold, the idea of killing someone else does not carry the same baggage that it used to.

  If you manage not to get caught the first time around, you’ve crossed a major threshold and can make your second killing. You have learned from your first attempt, seen how you nearly slipped up, and adjusted your behavior to become more effective. That’s precisely what we found in our successful psychopaths on the executive-functioning task we gave them.82 You know when to make a move—and when to hold off. What makes for such a capacity? As outlined earlier, it’s having a well-functioning autonomic system that provides you with somatic markers—the bodily alarm bells that signal impending capture and the time to beat a hasty retreat.

  And perhaps there is a paradox here. I have argued that low heart rate is a well-replicated marker for antisocial behavior—at least in a resting state. What would your heart do if you had just killed someone? I hope you would say it would be beating as fast as a scared rabbit’s. Would you feel terrified at what you had done? Very likely. So what would you say a serial killer’s heart rate would do after a murder, and how would he feel? I think you would say that his heart rate would be about as normal as could be—he would be cold-blooded. Yet that was not the case for Michael Ross.

  Ross was an intelligent serial killer who, just before graduating from Cornell University, started a series of rapes and murders of eight young women in New York and Connecticut. He describes three things that he felt after he had committed homicides:

  I remember the very first feeling I had, was my heart beating. I mean really pounding. The second feeling I had was that my hands hurt where I always strangled them with my hands.83 And the third feeling was, I guess, fear, and the kind of reality set in that there was this dead body in front of me.84

  Ross is not the exception that you may think. You can imagine that the act of killing someone is utterly revolting, and if you really had to kill someone with your bare hands, the whole experience would be so disgusting that you would vomit. You may imagine that serial killers don’t think this way. But you’d be wrong.

  That is exactly what happens with some serial killers too. I’m currently working with the Singapore Prison Service. In walking past the building in Changi Prison Complex where they execute murderers, I was reminded of one serial killer they had executed. That was John Scripps—the first Westerner to be hanged in Singapore for committing several homicides. Scripps had all the trappings of a cold-blooded psychopathic killer. After beating senseless his victim Gerard Lowe, an innocent man who had done him no wrong,85 he proceeded to take his head off:

  Just like a pig, it’s almost the same. You cut through the throat and twist the knife through the back of the neck. There ain’t much mess if you do it properly.86

  Scripps was utterly heartless—and yet he threw up. When asked if his victim knew what was going on, he replied:

  He pissed and shit himself. It made a stink. He was shitting himself. Yeah. Right. It wasn’t good and I spewed up. He really shit himself, but he couldn’t do much about it, could he?87

  This vomiting reaction is surprising given that the offender was heartless, cruel, and seemingly cold-blooded. One explanation based on twelve case studies of single and multiple murderers suggests that “kindling,” or stimulation, of the emotional limbic system can in some cases occur during the killing. This causes hyperactivation of the autonomic nervous system—resulting in nausea, vomiting, profuse sweating, incontinence, or even vertigo.88 This limbic kindling perspective is very speculative and must be treated with caution. At the same time, it is clear at least that John Scripps was not a man entirely lacking in fear. He was more like one of our successful psychopaths—except that he eventually got caught.

  So you may not be as different from a serial killer as you think. Michael Ross demonstrates the autonomic stress reactivity that characterizes our successful psychopaths from temporary-employment agencies. This visceral cardiovascular feedback and heightened emotional awareness constitute the somatic, bodily markers that provide the ventral, or underneath part of, the prefrontal cortex with sound awareness of the social context the person is in. Ross showed the anticipatory fear in a stressful situation that our successful psychopaths showed in the emotional stress task. He had the good executive functions and decision-making ability to plan carefully, stalk his victims, and ensure that the social context was appropriate for what he would do next. Like successful psychopaths, he had the lack of remorse and the egocentricity that are key features of the psychopath, as well as the disturbed parenting that we find characterizes the homes of successful psychopaths—perhaps it is in that way that he really differed from you and me.

  So Michael Ross’s heart was beating fast as he killed people, and it was beating fast again when he was put to death in Connecticut, on May 13, 2005. But unlike John Scripps, it was not just because he was scared. The lethal injection of potassium chloride used on death-row inmates in several states produces death by speeding up ventricular repolarization of the heart and raises the resting electrical potential of the cells of the heart muscle.89 Ironically, the sluggish cardiovascular functioning that landed these inmates on death row gets speeded up to end their lives. Execution is one way to deal with the problem, but one wonders whether a more effective solution would have been to deal earlier in life with the autonomic factors predisposing some children to adult violence. We’ll see in a later chapter how it may well be possible to alter antisocial adolescents’ low arousal levels and turn them around in life—without the use of potassium chloride.

  FEARLESSNESS OR COURAGE?

  There are no simple answers for why people kill, why some are one-off killers, why some are serial killers, or why Theodore Kaczynski went on his campaign of public terror. We have argued that autonomic dysfunction is one component, and that low resting heart rate is a well-replicated risk factor for antisocial and violent behavior. It can predispose some to kill in cold blood. Ted Kaczynski epitomizes the cold-hearted violent offender, as he had a resting heart rate of 54 beats per minute,90 which would place him in the bottom 3 percent of my temporary-employment-agency sample—a sample already biased toward low heart rates.91 He had the same sense of fearlessness and low resting heart rate that bomb-disposal experts have. Yet to chalk his violent offending and that of other killers up to one simple bodily process would be wrong.

  I once discussed the heart-rate hypothesis with Dan Rather, the anchorman for CBS Evening News and host of 48 Hours. I was working with him on a 60 Minutes interview in New York on the genetics of homicide, and he clearly resonated with the idea of under-arousal and fearlessne
ss. He explained that he too had a low heart rate, and had in his earlier days taken up boxing. He had his own sense of fearlessness and bravado. And perhaps this is illustrated in part by his fierce, relentless, and courageous badgering of American presidents during interviews, for which he has been heavily criticized. Despite possessing a biological risk factor for violence, like Miss Mauritius he was able to find other outlets for his predispositions—by verbal aggression and probing, rather than physical violence.92

  So the answer to the Unabomber puzzle and others like it has to be more complex and go beyond low physiological arousal. We have clues. Kaczynski had at the minimum multiple features of both schizotypal personality disorder and paranoid personality disorder—features that include odd beliefs, paranoid ideation, no close friends, eccentric behavior, and a blunted affect. Several psychiatrists for his defense, including Raquel Gur, of the University of Pennsylvania, went further, viewing him as having paranoid schizophrenia. Even prosecution psychiatrists admitted he had schizotypal and schizoid personality disorder. We’ll see later that these biologically based clinical disorders are themselves risk factors for antisocial and violent behavior.93 Moreover, according to his mother, Kaczynski was separated from her and the family when he was hospitalized at the age of nine months. This resulted in his afterward being withdrawn, unresponsive, and fearful of separation. Interestingly, separation anxiety disorder can lead to detachment, isolation, and difficulty developing relationships—all of which strongly characterized Kaczynski.94 We will see later how disruption of bonding due to institutionalization during a critical period of development can affect the brain and, alongside other biological risk factors, trigger violence.95 There is at least a part solution to the puzzle of this bomber.

  The greater puzzle, perhaps, is to understand the fine line between psychopaths and national heroes—why some under-aroused, fearless individuals end up as offenders who take lives, while others with the same predisposition are selfless, courageous, and save lives. Tom Hanks’s character in the movie Saving Private Ryan displays enormous bravery and heroism in the line of fire in his rescue of Private Ryan, but as we detect from his shaking hand in the opening scenes in the landing craft just before the storming of Omaha Beach on D-Day, he experiences very significant fear. This is the distinction. He is courageous—despite significant feelings of fear, he performs acts of heroism and selflessness.

  In The Hurt Locker, Sergeant William James—played by Jeremy Renner—blurs this distinction between courage and fearlessness even further. As the leader of a bomb-disposal unit in Baghdad, is he a bombastic, stimulation-seeking, rule-breaking psychopathic personality? Or is he a superbly professional hero, hell-bent on saving Americans and Iraqis alike at the risk of his own life? Like many psychopaths, he has difficulties connecting at an emotional level with his ex-wife and child. And like many violent offenders, James turns out to be a complex entity who defies any simple classification.96

  What one sees here—both in these fictional portrayals and in the real-life case of the Unabomber—is a key theme in the anatomy of violence that we will return to. Different biological, psychological, and social risk factors can interact in shaping either violence or self-sacrificing heroism. Violence and terrorism are not just low physiological arousal,97 yet this is certainly one of the active ingredients that, when combined with other influences, can move us toward a more complete understanding of killers like Kaczynski.

  The previous chapter outlined how poorly functioning brains can predispose someone to violence. This chapter moved us from the central nervous system into the functioning of the more peripheral autonomic nervous system. In this component of the anatomy of violence we have seen how broken hearts can result in heartbreaking violence. We will now continue our journey back into the brain to look at its physical construction. Lombroso had believed when he peered into the skull of Villella that he had the answer to the cause of crime—a physical, structural abnormality in the brain. Was Lombroso entirely out of his mind? Or might he have been right? Did he have a mind to crime and why the autonomic- and central-nervous-system processes that we have just seen are not working properly? Might violent offenders have broken brains?

  5.

  BROKEN BRAINS

  The Neuroanatomy of Violence

  Don’t you sometimes find that Christmas is just a bit too much? We all get on each other’s nerves cooped up at home during the holiday period. That bloated feeling with all the Christmas pudding and turkey. The endless watching of sports on TV. The hangovers and stuffy atmosphere. The unwanted presents that you know you’ll have to recycle back for someone else’s birthday. The hopelessness of those New Year’s resolutions you cannot possibly keep. Yes, we all know how “merry” Christmas can be. In those moments, we can really empathize with Ebenezer Scrooge.

  Herbert Weinstein, a sixty-five-year-old advertising executive, was no exception. As soon as the twelve days of Christmas were over, on the evening of January 7, 1991, he and his wife, Barbara, had a major argument in their twelfth-floor Manhattan apartment. This was the second marriage for each, and you may know what that can be like. Disrespectful comments over the other partner’s progeny were flying. Herbert’s response was to disengage from the arguing and withdraw from the battleground. So far, so good. But disengagement can have an uncanny way of winding up one’s partner. After all, everyone likes a good fight once in a while—it lets the steam out. So, not being one to bow out of a fight that easily, Barbara let fly, coming after Herbert and scratching at his face.

  Something snapped inside Herbert. He grabbed his wife by the throat and throttled the life out of her. There she was, dead on the floor. That did not look too good, so Herbert opened the window, picked his wife’s dead body up, and threw her out. She did a free fall twelve floors down onto East Seventy-second Street, landing on the sidewalk below. Herbert thought it would look like an accident, but on reflection he realized it still didn’t look very good. So he crept out of the building, only to be nabbed by the police. They charged him with second-degree murder.

  Things were looking bad for Weinstein, but he was a wealthy man and had a good defense team. And his lawyers suspected something unusual in the case. He did not have any prior history of crime or violence. They referred Herbert for a structural brain scan using MRI.1 They followed this up with a PET scan, which maps brain functioning. If you could see the images you wouldn’t have to be the world’s leading neurologist to notice that his brain is broken. It was incredibly striking—there was a big chunk missing from the prefrontal cortex. What exactly was happening here? Unknown to anyone—including Weinstein himself—a subarachnoid cyst was growing in his left frontal lobe. This cyst displaced brain tissue in both frontal and temporal cortices.

  The neurologist Antonio Damasio was consulted during a pretrial hearing to render his opinion on Weinstein’s ability to think rationally and control his emotions. Skin-conductance data were admitted alongside the brain-imaging data to argue that Weinstein had an impaired ability to regulate his emotions and make rational decisions. The defense team went with an insanity defense, and Judge Richard Carruthers was favorably impressed by Damasio’s arguments and the testimony of the imaging experts. In a novel pretrial bargain, the prosecution and defense agreed to a plea of manslaughter.2 This carried a seven-year sentence in contrast to the twenty-five-year sentence Weinstein would have served if he had been convicted of second-degree murder.

  It was a monumental decision. No court had ever used PET in this way in a criminal trial.3 For the first time, brain-imaging data had been used in a capital case prior to the trial itself to bargain down both the crime and the ensuing punishment.4

  The case of Herbert Weinstein highlights yet again the importance of the brain in predisposing someone to violence. More specifically, the case suggests that a structural brain deficit in the left prefrontal cortex results in a functional brain abnormality that in turn results in violence. Cysts such as Weinstein’s have an unknown cause and ca
n grow for a long time. They can also be benign, but experts in the case testified that the cyst resulted in brain dysfunction that substantially impaired Weinstein’s ability for rational thinking. That bolstered the credibility of his insanity defense.

  Recall from chapter 3 that impairment to the frontal cortex is particularly associated with reactive aggression. Revisiting the events from that night we can see that Weinstein’s violence was reactive in nature. Arguments had preceded the attack, and his wife had attempted to scratch his face. These are the aggressive verbal and physical stimuli that provoked Weinstein’s violent response. Recall our earlier argument that spousal abuse can be caused by a lack of prefrontal regulatory control over the limbic regions of the brain, resulting in reactive aggression in the face of emotionally provocative stimuli. Factor in to the equation that Weinstein had no prior history in any shape or form of aggressive or antisocial behavior. In terms of timing, it seems reasonable to suppose that the onset of this medical condition was a direct cause of Weinstein’s extreme reactionary violence.

  In this chapter we’ll build on Weinstein’s case in four different ways. We will burrow further into the anatomy of violence by arguing that the brains of some offenders are physically different from those of the rest of us.

  First, for Herbert Weinstein the structural brain abnormality is so striking that we can all see it. But I’ll argue that many violent offenders have structural abnormalities. They may be so subtle that even highly experienced neuroradiologists cannot detect the abnormality, yet they can in practice be detected using brain imaging and state-of-the-art analytic tools.

  Second, while Weinstein’s brain abnormality likely had its onset in adulthood, I’ll suggest that for most other offenders, something has gone wrong with their brain development very early in life. I’ll advance a “neurodevelopmental” theory of crime and violence—the idea that the seeds of sin are sown very early on in life.