In April of 1996, forty-nine-year-old James Patterson Smith entered a police station in the Gorton area of Manchester, England, to report the death of his seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Kelly Anne Bates. He explained that, during a fight in a shared bath, she somehow inhaled water and asphyxiated, despite his gallant attempts to revive her. Upon investigation, police found blood on the walls and floor of virtually every room of Smith's house, belying his dubious tale of a lovers' quarrel gone badly awry.1
Dr. William Lawler, a seasoned pathologist who had previously examined nearly six hundred cases of homicide, remarked that the wounds Bates sustained were the most extensive he had ever encountered.2 She had been found naked in Smith's bedroom, covered in over 150 distinct injuries. She spent the last month of her young life bound in the house with a ligature around her neck, or tied by her hair to chairs or radiators. She had lost about forty-four pounds due to starvation and was deprived of water for days before her death. Smith had systematically tortured and disfigured her, singeing her with a hot iron and boiling water; repeatedly piercing her with multiple sharp implements; crushing her hands and kneecaps; and mutilating her face, mouth, and body. Her scalp was partially removed. As much as three weeks before her death, Smith had blinded her by gouging out both of her eyes. Finally, he bludgeoned her with a showerhead and fatally drowned her in a bathtub filled with water.3 Throughout the subsequent murder trial, Smith accepted no responsibility, claiming that, before her purely “accidental” death, Bates had routinely harassed him, dared him to hurt her, and inflicted injuries upon herself to falsely suggest abuse and to impugn his reputation.4 Remarking upon the sadistic killer's “catalog of depravity,” the judge in the case sentenced him to life imprisonment, with a minimum of twenty years.5
How are we to make sense of a tragedy so utterly grotesque and heartbreaking? What psychiatric, psychological, or medical diagnosis could possibly account for the actions of a man like James Patterson Smith, who had a long history of aggression toward women, including beating a pregnant girlfriend and trying to drown two others during violent attacks?6 Is there anyone among us who would not view his actions as a moral evil, beyond all human understanding? Indeed, the victim's father, who had the terrible task of identifying her brutalized body, remarked of her killer, “People called him an animal, but an animal wouldn't do that to another animal. He is a very evil man.”7
Dr. Stone and I contend that the concept of evil, which is universally sensed on a basic level, and yet extremely difficult to articulate and comprehend, is worthy of serious inquiry. We have dedicated significant portions of our careers to this area, spending years evaluating, studying, and sometimes even treating violent killers, rapists, child abusers, and other offenders—people whose crimes few would hesitate to call “evil”—in prisons, hospitals, and other settings. Within this larger context, Dr. Stone has made a specialty of what are known as personality disorders, characterized by inflexible, maladaptive patterns of behavior, thought, and inner experience, which, as we shall see, constitute a key aspect of violent behavior. My own area of expertise, following forensic training and experience, has been psychosis, or abnormal states of the mind, in which perceptions, thoughts, and emotions are impaired to the point that one loses contact with reality. In my clinical work, as well as in my research with a team of investigators, I explore the relationship between violent thoughts and behaviors, and psychotic illness, especially as the latter first emerges in adolescents and young adults.
By “evil,” we are not referring to spiritually sinful or societally forbidden acts, per se, since what is deemed abominable by one religion or culture might be fully accepted by another. Rather, we refer to the types of actions that virtually anyone, regardless of faith, time, or place, would find unspeakably horrible and utterly depraved. Moreover, we note that acts commonly called “evil” share three other core elements, in that they are generally preceded by malice aforethought or premeditation, inflict wildly excessive degrees of suffering, and would be considered altogether incomprehensible to the average individual. We find that, whatever one maintains to be the cause or origin of evil, on a psychological, biological, or spiritual level, atrocities to which this term is applied will universally possess these four fundamental features. Indeed, each can be readily observed in the methodical, protracted torture and murder of Kelly Anne Bates and in the ensuing reaction of the shocked and bewildered public. It should be noted that, when, in common parlance, the word “evil” is used to describe someone, the implication is that the individual has habitually and often committed evil acts. We find, however, that even the most egregious repeat offenders do not spend from dusk to dawn of each and every day perpetrating evil deeds. Some persons of the latter type demonstrate pleasant and innocuous relationships with family, neighbors, coworkers, and others for years, while leading “double lives” in which terrible crimes are secretly committed. Thus, the term “evil,” as we will be using it, will not generally refer to people themselves but rather to actions that are so violent and horrifying as to evoke the typical emotional reaction we have just described. Only in rare instances do certain persons commit heinous, sadistic offenses with such frequency and regularity as to perhaps justify being called evil people, and not merely individuals who perpetrate evil acts.
With these key concepts in mind, we turn to the basic questions of whether some individuals’ acts and core drives are more evil than others’ and, if so, how we might classify them into distinct, meaningful categories that can then be ranked by severity. In The Anatomy of Evil, Dr. Stone proposed a Gradations of Evil scale, whereby, for the first time, we might endeavor to quantify the degree of evil associated with an individual's violent and/or homicidal actions.8
Using a twenty-two-point continuum, the instrument takes into account the morality of the prime motivation underpinning an individual's crime or repeated criminal acts, ranging from the justifiable to the groundlessly cruel. While the rankings cover a wide array of offenses, murder, within a number of contexts and associated with a variety of motivations, is particularly emphasized. The scale weighs, for instance, whether a homicide is driven by self-defense or feelings of helplessness in the context of abuse. It captures those who take lives due to feelings of jealousy or rage that are intense and difficult to control. It considers those who kill out of blind loyalty to another person or party, or who aim to eliminate anyone impeding the achievement of some selfish end. As it moves into its upper limits, the scale ranks individuals who commit murders for sport, to conceal evidence of a crime, due to loss of contact with reality, or for perverse sexual gratification. At the extreme end are those who subject victims to prolonged, unimaginable torment, without a hint of compassion or regret, sometimes followed by killing and sometimes not. Stated another way, higher rankings reflect more severe levels of psychopathy—a constellation of personality traits and tendencies, such as deceit, callousness, lack of remorse, manipulation, grandiosity, glibness, and superficial charm, while the highest levels also involve sadism, the derivation of pleasure from the pain and humiliation of others. In addition to these often overlooked distinctions, the scale's categories delineate “evil” actions to which the average onlooker might respond less strongly, perhaps even with a measure of understanding and sympathy, and ones that are likely to elicit horror, bafflement, and disgust, such as intentionally drawn-out torture, necrophilia, or the sexual assault or killing of children.
Thus, Dr. Stone's scale has real value for understanding why murderers, for instance, should not be grouped into a single category merely because they have killed. This is especially true of those we call serial killers, a topic we will discuss at some length. Serial murder is presently defined by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as “the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s), in separate events.”9 As we shall see, this definition is problematic, in that it disregards entirely the notion of motive, such that an individual who has shot to death two homeowners during separate burglaries would be grouped alongside double murderer Ed Gein, who exhumed corpses from graveyards and created articles of clothing and household items from their bones and skin. It also disregards the time frame between homicides, which eliminates a key distinction between serial killers and what we call mass or spree murderers, classifications we will define later in this book. According to an earlier definition, a serial killer is one who murders three or more individuals, usually in the service of abnormal psychological gratification, with the killings occurring over more than a month and with a significant period of time between them.10 Here, the issue is that “abnormal psychological gratification” is vague, failing to distinguish between what specific drives one might be satisfying when one kills, such that John Wayne Gacy, the sexually sadistic torturer, rapist, and murderer of thirty-three boys and young men,11 might be categorized alongside Dorothea Puente, who swindled social security checks from elderly and developmentally disabled guests in her boarding home, killing nine of them with poison.12 We shall see that, in fact, serial murderers can be motivated by several different psychological processes or exhibit highly distinct personality profiles. Dr. Stone's categories help elucidate these important disparities.
It is critical to note that the scale's focus is isolated to crimes that occur in peacetime, since wartime can alter the justifiability of an “evil” act in an individual's mind. For instance, someone who detonates an explosive device during a military conflict, causing untold destruction and death, may later, in civilian life, experience pangs of conscience at the thought of swatting a fly. Acts of terrorism, which tend to be committed by persons who view themselves as parts of religiously or philosophically motivated armies, are also not evaluated by the scale. Similarly, organized crime activity is excluded, in that it constitutes routine business within some wider enterprise, in which one criminal syndicate is at constant “war” with various others.
Throughout our first several chapters, we will discuss each ranking in the scale, describing the key distinctions between them in detail. The twenty-two categories are as follows:
Killing in Self-Defense or Justified Homicide
1. Justifiable homicide (killing was in self-defense, not psychopathic)
Impulsive Murders in Persons without Psychopathic Features
2. Jealous lovers; egocentric, immature people committing crimes of passion
3. Willing companions of killers, impulse-ridden, some antisocial traits
4. Killing in self-defense, but extremely provocative toward the victim
5. Traumatized, desperate persons who kill relatives or others, yet have remorse
6. Impetuous, hotheaded murderers, yet without marked psychopathic traits
Persons with a Few or No Psychopathic Traits; Murders of a More Severe Type
7. Highly narcissistic persons, some with a psychotic core, who murder loved ones
8. Murders sparked by smoldering rage, resulting sometimes in mass murder
Psychopathic Features Marked; Murders Show Malice Aforethought
9. Jealous lovers with strong psychopathic traits or full-blown psychopathy
10. Killers of people who were “in the way” (including witnesses); extreme egocentricity
11. Fully psychopathic killers of people who were “in the way”
12. Power-hungry psychopaths who murder when “cornered”
13. Inadequate, rageful psychopaths, some committing multiple murders
14. Ruthlessly self-centered psychopathic schemers
Spree or Multiple Murders; Psychopathy Is Apparent
15. Psychopathic, cold-blooded spree or multiple murderers
16. Psychopathic persons committing multiple vicious acts (including murder)
Serial Killers, Torturers, Sadists
17. Sexually perverse serial killers; killing is to hide evidence, no torture
18. Torture-murderers, though the torture element is not prolonged
19. Psychopaths driven to terrorism, subjugation, intimidation, rape, etc., short of murder
20. Torture-murderers, but in persons with distinct psychosis, such as schizophrenia
21. Psychopaths committing extreme torture, but not known to have killed
22. Psychopathic torture-murderers, with torture as the primary motive; the motive need not always be sexual
Experience tells us that those using the scale typically grasp, with no difficulty, the first eight categories, in which non-psychopathic persons commit murder or other serious acts of violence in self-defense, or in the contexts of abuse, impulsiveness, or intense feelings of jealousy or anger. Categories 9 through 22 tend to prove more challenging, since they require moving beyond motivations that are clear-cut, situational, and human in tone to ones that are selfish, perverse, and cruel to degrees generally unfathomable by the average individual. Moreover, understanding of these categories requires familiarity with and the ability to distinguish between psychological concepts such as psychopathy, narcissism, psychosis, and sadism, all of which we will define and discuss in the coming chapters.
To clarify the distinctions between the scale's sometimes complicated categories, we have provided highly detailed case histories of a number of individuals designated to each. The names and facts provided are all matters of public knowledge, having been openly reported by the media, including, in some instances, offenders’ specific psychiatric diagnoses. These are interwoven with insights regarding the respective individuals’ established motivations and how these may have related to formative experiences, as well as signature elements of their crimes—that is, features that were not necessary components of their modi operandi but, rather, psychologically required by the perpetrators for personal, psychological reasons. For example, a killer's method might be to murder women by strangulation, but his signature might be to do so with a black nylon stocking, constituting a sort of “calling card.” Such elements in crimes provide key clues as to a given repeat murderer's underlying needs and drives, and are sometimes so idiosyncratic as to facilitate criminal profiling, establishment of a suspect in a series of linked homicides, and, ultimately, apprehension by authorities. We will also review points drawn from the academic literature on the genetic, dispositional, and environmental antecedents to violence, as well as various systems for categorizing criminal behavior. Wherever possible, we will include samples of offenders’ actual written or spoken language, culled from published interviews and personal writings. Some examples of the latter have been reproduced alongside original artworks by various serial murderers, in a selection of illustrations elsewhere in this book. At the close of part I, which constitutes the most comprehensive exposition of Dr. Stone's ranking system published to date, we will introduce an algorithm we have developed, which greatly facilitates the process of determining a violent individual's most appropriate ranking in the Gradations of Evil scale.
In part II, Dr. Stone will discuss the increased frequencies and unprecedented heinousness of rapes, serial murders, and other violent crimes since the turbulent era of the 1960s, illuminating a number of cultural, psychological, and philosophical factors that we feel may have fundamentally contributed to these disturbing trends. He will also catalog several types of violence that have first emerged during this era of “new evil,” as we have termed it, including mass shootings by civilians involving semiautomatic weapons, internet-related crimes, fetus-snatching, and other contemporary atrocities.
As we move along Dr. Stone's continuum, it moves upward through higher numbers, but it might best be envisioned as traveling downward, the way Dante Alighieri, in his immortal Inferno, is escorted by the poet Virgil lower and lower into the bottommost circle of hell, where the devil, himself, resides. Indeed, Dante's depiction of the netherworld, with its nine circles of torment for various moral abominations, inspired Dr. Stone to create the instrument. Readers are forewarned that, as we make this descent, some of the details of the crimes we describe will be difficult to read. It is important to hold in mind the relative rareness of cases of extreme evil, especially serial killing. Across time and space, and billions of people, past and present, it has always been the worst of human behavior that garnered the most attention. Let us never forget that there are wonderful, selfless people in the world, who are worthy of their own scale, circling through the heights of heaven, as Dante ultimately did.
Finally, let us pause a moment to remember the men, women, and children who have fallen victim to the monstrous behaviors of the offenders we will encounter here. We will meet young people, sleeping in their beds or playing in public places, who were suddenly snatched up and carried away into unimaginable darkness. We will encounter women who happened to cross the paths of sexually depraved predators who took away their choices, and yanked them from their lives and loves and other destinies. We will discuss people who had never harmed a hair on a single head, no less those of their torturers or killers. These stories will force us to reflect on the stark reality that these victims were real people who could have been our own children, grandchildren, parents, siblings, spouses or significant others, friends, or neighbors—you or I. Any of us. Let us remember, still, that the existence of evil proves, incontrovertibly, its counterpart, which is goodness, motivated by denial of the self and by love.