I wonder if the course of narcissism through the ages would have been any different had Narcissus first peered into a cesspool. He probably did.

—Frank O'Hara, Early Writing, 1977

Categories 7 and 8 of the Gradations of Evil scale shift us away from unplanned, impetuous aggression related to self-defense, jealousy, rage, or adverse circumstances. Here, we first encounter individuals whose basic underlying personality structures—not merely proclivities to be hotheaded or impulsive—partially set the stage for murder or other acts of extreme violence. As we shall see, there are key distinctions between the types of individuals assigned to Categories 7 and 8. However, both involve persons who, after a period of chronically feeling overlooked or slighted, and possibly nursing long-term grudges, feel driven to violence. The killing is generally more severe in nature than would be associated with the earlier categories, and—critically—there is some scheming and planning involved. Furthermore, while some aberrant personality traits are present, these individuals do not exhibit full-blown psychopathy.

CATEGORY 7

Individuals ranked here are driven to kill by intense degrees of narcissism—that is to say, grandiosity, extreme self-centeredness, and a constant craving for the admiration of other people. Such needs can sometimes lead these types to become caught up in grandiose ideas that are partially or even fully delusional, such as thoughts of having a special bond with a celebrated person or God, or being the center of other people's attention. They are also sometimes capable of killing or acting out aggressively for no reason other than the satisfaction of their own egotistical needs. For instance, the objective may be to gain notoriety or, in some cases, the staging of a victimization situation in order to draw the sympathies of other people. This lends them a quasi-psychopathic quality. When individuals ranked in this category kill in the context of intense jealousy, it is generally due to wounded pride and resentment associated with feeling less desirable than someone else. Let us consider the following widely publicized case.

In October of 1980, twenty-five-year-old Mark David Chapman purchased a .38-caliber revolver, leaving his wife and their Hawaii home to travel to New York City. His aim was to kill the singer and songwriter John Lennon, whose 1966 remark that his band, the Beatles, was “more popular than Jesus” offended Chapman's Christian sensibilities.1 Additionally, over the past two years, the disturbed loner had become fixated upon J. D. Salinger's 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, in which an angst-ridden teenager tackles feelings of alienation, existential confusion, and the loss of childhood innocence.² Lennon had begun to seem to him like one of the “phonies” bemoaned in the book, the type who spouts platitudes about simplicity and fairness but lives a lavish lifestyle while other people struggle and starve.³ Chapman's identification with the novel's young protagonist, Holden Caulfield, had grown so intense that he tried to legally adopt the character's name as his own.⁴

On December 7, 1980, Chapman spent several hours staking out the Dakota, the fabled Manhattan apartment building where Lennon; the singer's wife, Yoko Ono; and their five-year-old son, Sean, resided. When his target failed to appear, Chapman mimicked the actions of his beloved Holden in Salinger's book by heading back to his hotel and contacting an escort service, paying his female companion $190 to merely listen as he spoke. The following day, he opened up the Bible to the Gospel of John and wrote the surname Lennon after the name of the evangelist. Resolving to kill the star, he headed back to the Dakota, picking up fresh copies of the Bible and The Catcher in the Rye on his way.⁵ In the latter, he wrote, “To Holden Caulfield, This is my statement. Holden Caulfield.”⁶

Later that day, Chapman met Lennon's housekeeper and young Sean on the street.7 Around five in the evening, Lennon and Ono left the Dakota for a recording session, and, as they made their way to their limousine, Chapman shook Lennon's hand and acquired his autograph on a record sleeve. When the couple returned nearly six hours later, Chapman was still there. Waiting until they had turned away from him, he shot Lennon four times in the back and shoulder. When police arrived at the scene, they found Chapman reading The Catcher in the Rye. Lennon was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital,⁸ and the world, plunged into mourning, struggled to fathom what type of man could wish to silence such a beloved musical icon.

The killer was born in May of 1955 in Fort Worth, Texas. His reportedly “unemotional” but occasionally volatile father was a US Air Force staff sergeant, alleged to have been abusive toward Chapman's mother. The latter, described as “dreamish” and “moody,” worked as a nurse. He had one younger sister.⁹ His family lived for a period in Purdue, Indiana, before settling in Decatur, Georgia, where Chapman had a few meaningful friendships. When Chapman was eleven, his IQ was found to be in the superior range. An intellectually curious, active adolescent, he worked in a library, collected coins, started a local newspaper, and earned money by washing bicycles. He enjoyed burying time capsules and sent up helium balloons containing messages he hoped would reach distant places. Chapman also became an avid Beatles fan in his youth, charging friends a fee to watch him perform a lip-synched version of “She Loves You.” His father taught him how to play the guitar.¹⁰

From childhood through early adolescence, Chapman had a tendency to shake and rock his body, sometimes resulting in head injuries. Starting in the third or fourth grade, when he experienced some bullying at school surrounding his poor athletic abilities, he retreated into a vivid fantasy world in which he was not a misfit but a figure of great admiration. He would later say that he fantasized about being the king of a world of “little people” whom he imagined lived in the walls of his home. He explained, “I was their hero and was in the paper every day, and I was on TV, their TV, and that I was important.” By age fourteen, Chapman was sniffing glue and lighter fluid, and abusing marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. He began skipping school and stopped bathing, adopting an “anti-parent, anti-everything” stance. He once ran away from home to live on the streets of Miami for two weeks. He spent one night in jail during an LSD trip.¹¹

In 1971, Chapman joined a Christian group geared toward healing drug addiction, and he began disseminating tracts, wearing a large cross around his neck and proselytizing to friends. At seventeen, he was once again a diligent student and found work as a camp counselor for the YMCA. Seeking to restore his sullied innocence—a theme that he would find echoed in The Catcher in the Rye—he refused to play the Beatles anymore, considering Lennon's statement regarding the fame of the band blasphemous. In 1975, Chapman worked overseas in Beirut and then at an Arkansas resettlement camp for refugees from Vietnam. There, he met and began dating Jessica Blankenship, and the couple became involved with a charismatic Christian group that performed exorcism rituals and spiritual healings.12

At this time, Blankenship began noticing a peculiar division in Chapman's personality. Part of the time, he was morally rigid, refusing to be flirtatious, play the guitar, or consume junk food. Elsewhere, he enjoyed performing music, drank, and lost his virginity with a coworker behind Blankenship's back. He depicted these as a battle between his flesh and his spirit, which gave rise to intense feelings of guilt. Then, after he enrolled in a conservative Presbyterian college in Tennessee, he became preoccupied with thoughts about death and suicide, cried after making any sort of physical contact with Blankenship, and described a fantasy about having sex with a prostitute while his girlfriend looked on. He took a job as a security guard, which led to firearm training. Eventually, he outfitted his car with a spotlight, some tear gas, a club, and a gun. By this point, Chapman had become so on edge that even a minor provocation could set off explosive anger. Profound despair overtook him, and he made up his mind to commit suicide in Hawaii, relocating there in 1977. He phoned a suicide hotline and entered psychotherapy, but not long thereafter, he drove to a deserted area and used a vacuum cleaner hose attached to his car's exhaust pipe to try to end his life by carbon monoxide inhalation. A fisherman found him before he succeeded, and, furthermore, the exhaust had burned through the hose, all of which he interpreted as signs of God's will. He was treated in a hospital and, following discharge, took up a job there. Around this same time, his parents divorced and his mother came to join him in Hawaii.¹³

In 1978, Chapman took a six-week trip around the world, entering into a relationship with his travel agent, Gloria Abe. They married the following year. In the course of his hospital work, he was isolative and argumentative, and began to drink heavily. It was then that he became fixated on Salinger's novel and the idea of killing a celebrity. John Lennon was only one name on his list of possible victims, which also included actress Elizabeth Taylor and TV host Johnny Carson, among several others.14

At Chapman's murder trial in 1981, back-and-forth between the defense and prosecution surrounding his mental state at the time of the killing came to a halt when he entered a guilty plea. Although he framed his desire to kill in spiritual terms, there was some indication that he believed that murder, especially of an eminent person, would make him “somebody,” forever elevating him from invisibility and anonymity. Indeed, when an assassin kills a celebrated individual, the two become permanently conjoined in history, such that it becomes impossible to tell the story of one without making mention of the other. Chapman received a sentence of twenty years to life.¹⁵ When later asked by a parole board what motivated him to kill the beloved Beatle, he replied, “Attention, bottom line.”¹⁶ Here, laid bare, we find the narcissistic brand of motive underlying murders categorized at level 7 of the Gradations of Evil scale.

We encounter a disturbing second example of attention seeking at the high cost of homicide in the case of Marybeth Tinning, born Marybeth Roe in Duanesburg, New York, in 1942. Little is known about her early childhood, beyond that she had one younger brother and that her mother worked while her father fought overseas in the Second World War. This resulted in her being placed in the care of various relatives, one of whom callously informed her that she was an accidental, unwanted child. This led her to feel that her parents were happier about her brother's birth than her own. When her father returned from duty, taking up work as a press operator, he reputedly beat Tinning, smacked her with a flyswatter, and locked her in a closet.¹⁷

Tinning was an average student and considered plain, temperamental, and attention starved by her schoolmates, who shunned her en masse, such that a former teacher would remember her as “almost a nonentity.” In an effort to gain other people's interest, she took to concocting outlandish stories. Tinning graduated from high school in 1961 and worked various odd jobs until she found steadier work as a nursing assistant at a Schenectady hospital. She married Joe Tinning, a man in the same field as her father. In 1971, her father died, never having supplied the attentiveness and loving concern she long desired. She found his passing emotionally overwhelming.18

The Tinnings would have thirteen children between 1972 and 1985, but nine would tragically die in infancy or early childhood, beginning with her daughter Jennifer, who succumbed to acute meningitis at just eight days old. Three weeks later, two-year-old Joseph Jr. died of an unconfirmed virus and a “seizure disorder.” Then, after six more weeks, four-year-old Barbara died of what was believed to be cardiac arrest. Two-week-old Timothy died of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) in 1973, five-month-old Nathan of “pulmonary edema” in 1975, two-and-a-half-year-old Mary of SIDS in 1979, three-month-old Jonathan of undetermined causes in 1980, and three-year-old Michael of “bronchial pneumonia” in 1981.¹⁹

In December of 1985, the Tinnings’ three-month-old, Tami Lynne, was found unconscious in her bed, which was covered with blood. The child's death was attributed to SIDS, but police caught on. Mrs. Tinning ultimately confessed to smothering the baby with a pillow and was suspected of seven other infanticides. She was believed by some to display symptoms of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a psychiatric condition in which someone caring for a child, or elderly or disabled person, intentionally harms his or her charge as a means of gaining sympathy and personal attention. It emerged that Mrs. Tinning would primp herself and soak up the condolences at her children's funerals, playing up the role of a mother repeatedly bearing intense grief, and it was suggested that the focus upon her following the natural death of her first child in 1972—arguably the only meaningful attention she ever received—became something of an addiction for her. In 1987, Mrs. Tinning was convicted of second-degree murder for “depraved indifference to human life” in the murder of Tami Lynne and sentenced to twenty years to life.²⁰ She was released on parole in 2018, at the age of seventy-five, long unable to bear any additional children.²¹

It is worth noting that, if she did, indeed, commit at least two homicides in separate events, Tinning would be the first murderer we have thus far described who meets the previously mentioned FBI criteria for serial murder. As we shall discuss later in this volume, mothers who commit repeat infanticide constitute a subcategory of serial killing that is not necessarily associated with a marked degree of psychopathy or sadism, and such cases can sometimes be ranked at the lower end of the Gradations of Evil scale.

We conclude our description of Category 7 with the truly disturbing case of Armin Meiwes of Rotenburg, Germany. Born in Kassel in December of 1961, he was considered an average child prior to age eight, enjoying the picturesque vistas of his Hessian hometown on the Fulda River and playing with animals. This happier time was shattered when his father, described as stern and detached, abandoned his overbearing, thrice-married mother. In short order, one of his brothers became a priest and another permanently moved away. His mother made him perform grueling chores; forced him to wear traditional lederhosen to school, which made him the butt of constant gibes; insisted upon accompanying him everywhere; and admonished him publicly, sometimes calling him “worthless.” Gradually slipping into a world of pure fantasy, Meiwes created an imaginary brother named Franky whom he envisioned as a very good listener, and became fixated on the story of “Hansel and Gretel”—especially the part in which the cannibalistic witch fattens up Hansel to eat him. Telling Franky that he was becoming increasingly fascinated by the subject of devouring a human being, he tore apart a Barbie doll and cooked the plastic parts on a grill. He also read heavily about infamous serial killer Fritz Haarmann, dubbed “the Vampire of Hanover,” who butchered his young male victims and consumed their blood. At twelve, Meiwes began fantasizing about eating his friends so that they could become permanent parts of himself and never abandon him—a strange, symbolic solution for a lonely boy who had suffered the loss of the majority of his family.²²

In adulthood, Meiwes worked as a computer engineer and served in the military. He was engaged to a woman for nine months, whom he ultimately found just as unbearable as his mother. “It was like going from the shower to the storm,” he would later say. He would also admit that he did not feel it was possible to marry as long as his mother was still living. She developed cancer, and Meiwes was her ever-attentive caretaker, until she succumbed to the disease. He was thirty-eight at the time. Again, he found himself unable to tolerate loss in a mature and realistic manner. Meiwes reportedly constructed a shrine in her honor in the forty-three-room mansion she left behind, ritualistically placing one of her wigs on the head of a doll each night before going to bed. He boarded up the window to her room, allowing no light to enter. Free of his mother's restraints, he became fascinated by pornography with sadomasochistic themes, and embraced an emergent homosexuality, frequenting gay bars and enjoying dalliances with male army buddies. His cannibalistic fantasies resurfaced, and, on one occasion, he fashioned pieces of pork into the shape of a dismembered penis and devoured it. It was in 2001 that Meiwes made up his mind to at last play out his lifelong fantasy of killing and eating an actual person.23

After Meiwes had posted an advertisement on the internet, recruiting a “young, well-built 18–30 year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed,” he heard from several applicants who met him in hotel rooms and role-played cannibalistic acts, but, to his disappointment, no one had taken him literally. His luck changed when he stumbled across an ad placed by a forty-three-year-old engineer and masochist named Bernd Brandes, entitled “Dinner—or Your Dinner,” offering, “the chance to eat me alive.”²⁴ When Meiwes enthusiastically invited him to a farmhouse he owned, Brandes responded, “I hope you find me tasty.”²⁵ The collective term for these erotic wishes to either eat or be eaten by another person is vorarephilia, from the Latin vorare, which means to “devour” or “swallow.”

The two men met, and, after sex, Meiwes felt the desire to consume his new partner, like the female praying mantis, which will sometimes feast upon the head of a male after copulation, gradually working its way through the rest of the carcass. For an analgesic, he fed Brandes a half a bottle of schnapps blended with twenty sleeping pills. Note that this fact lowers the ranking for Meiwes on the Gradations of Evil scale, since a more psychopathic or sadistic individual would have disregarded or even relished the victim's pain. After the sedatives took effect, it was mutually agreed that Meiwes would sever his companion's penis and that he would fry it for the two of them to eat. As captured on a profoundly disturbing home video, Meiwes first unsuccessfully attempted to bite off the appendage before removing it with a knife amid a loud scream from his willing victim. Brandes then tried to eat some of his own penis but found it unappealingly “chewy.” Meiwes fried it in a pan with salt, pepper, garlic, and wine, but it proved too burnt for consumption, so he fed it to his dog. At this point, Meiwes helped the victim into a bath, where he could slowly “bleed out” while Meiwes watched a Disney film. After trying to stand up, Brandes collapsed and slipped into unconsciousness, at which time Meiwes dragged him to an upper level of the house.²⁶

After a period of prayer to both God and the devil, Meiwes killed his new lover by stabbing him in the throat. He then suspended him from a meat hook. Freezing forty-four pounds of meat from the painstakingly dismembered corpse in his refrigerator, he spent ten months savoring Brandes over the course of a variety of candlelit meals. Of the experience of devouring a piece of the victim's back in the form of a rump steak, prepared with potatoes and sprouts, Meiwes would later remark, “The first bite was, of course, very strange. It was a feeling I can't really describe. I'd spent over 40 years longing for it, dreaming about it. And now I was getting the feeling that I was actually achieving this perfect inner connection through his flesh.” It tasted to him much like pork—an opinion often rendered by cannibals. It is intriguing to observe that, in addition to providing Meiwes sexual gratification, the experience gave him the pleasure of merging with another person and having the victim's body become, quite literally, part of his own. The victim's skull was buried in the killer's garden. Meiwes came to the attention of authorities in December of 2002 when he posted new advertisements in an effort to locate a second victim. He informed police that the stockpile of flesh in the refrigerator had been removed from a wild pig. Two years later, expressing remorse for his heinous crime, he was convicted of manslaughter, but a 2006 retrial for murder led to life imprisonment. He has since become a strict vegetarian.27

As noted, Meiwes was not a torturer or a sadist. Moreover, no significant history of psychopathic behaviors or traits was noted at his trial. Instead, his crime appears to have been related to loneliness and an intense sensitivity to abandonment. From these feelings sprung forth a rich but terrifying world of fantasy and the egocentric need to eliminate the boundaries between himself and a love object, even if it meant taking advantage of an apparently vulnerable, self-loathing individual.

CATEGORY 8

Category 8 is the highest ranking on the Gradations of Evil scale in which one can place a killer who is not markedly psychopathic. The hallmark of these types is an underlying, slowly growing rage, rooted in resentment surrounding past maltreatment, bigotry, misogyny, rejection, or some other interpersonal factor. This eventually becomes ignited and prompts them to plan out acts of unmitigated, oftentimes spectacular violence. This is also the first point on the scale in which we might expect an individual to commit murder on a shockingly large scale and to target strangers who have not, specifically, done the killer any harm. This represents a manifestation of the enormity and universality of their deep-seated anger. The case of George “Jo Jo” Hennard, one of the worst mass shooters in American history, provides a quintessential example of this type of offender.

Hennard's abbreviated life began in Sayre, Pennsylvania, in 1956 and ended by suicide in 1991, just one day after his thirty-fifth birthday. His father was a prosperous orthopedics expert whose work in various international hospitals forced their family to relocate constantly, leaving Hennard feeling overlooked and unsettled as a boy. In adolescence, he was quiet and angry, and after high school he joined the US Navy, where he was suspended due to a racially heated argument with a shipmate and later arrested for cannabis possession. In 1983, his parents divorced for unclear reasons. Six years later, he lost a job as a merchant seaman, after marijuana was found in his room on a ship, prompting loss of his seaman's license and a period of treatment for substance abuse.28

Hennard drifted from job to job across the United States, described by coworkers and those who knew him around this time as a “loner,” “combative,” “rude,” “impatient,” and “troubled,”²⁹ with “the Devil in his eyes.”³⁰ All the while, he was growing increasingly lonely and resentful of women. As the drummer for a musical group called Missing Links, he was disliked by his bandmates for his insufferable attitude and bitter hatred of the female sex.³¹ Having settled in Texas, he sent two young adult sisters residing near his home a bizarre five-page diatribe, saying that while he viewed the women in his local area as “mostly white treacherous female vipers,” he saw the “best” of womanhood in them. He also asked to get together with his “two teenage groupies fans” for a long talk, failing to realize that they wanted nothing to do with him.³² A psychiatrist friend of their father analyzed the missive, noting “pent up anger” and a “grandiose sense of power.”³³ Hennard was also known to have had strong resentments of African Americans, Hispanics, and gays.³⁴

By the early 1990s, Hennard had grown paranoid with thoughts that his phone might be bugged,³⁵ and highly obsessive, compulsively cleaning his furniture and car, and making endless notes to himself in journals and on a tape recorder. Over and over, at all hours of the night, he could be heard performing Steely Dan's song “Don't Take Me Alive,” about an armed individual holed up against his enemies. It became something of a personal anthem for him. He also began standing beneath the bedroom window of the two sisters to whom he had penned his lengthy letter, staring and chain-smoking for long periods. When the girls’ family Shih Tzu began barking at something or someone in the night, it was mysteriously found poisoned to death.36

In early October of 1991, Hennard found himself inspired by a documentary about James Huberty, a disgruntled man who killed twenty-one people at a California McDonald's eatery in 1984. He was also impressed by Terry Gilliam's 1991 film The Fisher King, in which a radio host's insensitive remarks prompt a disturbed listener to visit a busy bar with a rifle and open fire.³⁷

Weeks later, on October 16, 1991, Hennard enjoyed a pleasant breakfast and drove seventeen miles to a Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen. He intentionally crashed his pickup truck into the dining area, injuring an elderly man, and, seizing upon the pandemonium this created, shot two random people with Ruger P89 and Glock 17 semiautomatic pistols he had recently legally acquired. Stepping out of the truck, he shouted, “This is what Bell County has done to me!” At point-blank range, he shot people hiding under tables, killing twenty-three and injuring twenty. Survivors reported seeing him smirk while spouting misogynistic statements at the women before firing at them. He was quoted as shouting, “All women of Killeen and Belton are vipers! This is what you've done to me and my family! This is what Bell County did to me…. This is payback day!”³⁸ Indeed, he had passed over men to focus on shooting women, who constituted the majority of those he killed and wounded.³⁹

During a pause in the rampage, one patron heroically hurled himself through the glass window of the establishment, allowing about a third of the survivors to escape. For some unclear reason, Hennard permitted a woman with a four-year-old child to leave the scene.⁴⁰ About eighty others remained trapped inside. The killer then engaged in a heated shootout with police, who struck him four times. He took cover in a restroom, pressing one of his pistols to his head and using his final bullet to end his life, perhaps while calling to mind the lyrics to “Don't Take Me Alive.” The entire tragedy lasted fifteen minutes.⁴¹

This case seems almost archetypical in the current climate of routine mass shootings in the United States, in which emotionally troubled young males enter public places with firearms and take the lives of high numbers of random citizens. We must emphasize, however, that it is not the method of the killing or the types of individuals Hennard targeted that place him in Category 8 of the Gradations of Evil scale. Rather, his ranking reflects his smoldering anger, which, when ignited, led to a furious, yet painstakingly planned-out explosion of rage. Although he despised people from several demographic groups, his extreme anger seemed especially focused upon women, who likely found him intense, off-putting, or even frightening.

Mention should be made of Suzanna Gratia Hupp, who survived Hennard's murderous rampage. She watched in horror as her sixty-seven-year-old mother was shot in the head while cradling her seventy-one-year-old father, whom Hennard had fatally struck in the chest. Five years later, Hupp, who regretted not being able to carry her handgun into the restaurant due to state safety statutes, was elected as a Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives. There, she helped establish a law to permit her state's citizens to carry concealed weapons.⁴²