From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring—
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And all I lov'd—I lov'd alone—
Then—in my childhood—in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From ev'ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still—
From the torrent, or the fountain—
From the red cliff of the mountain—
From the sun that ’round me roll'd
In its autumn tint of gold—
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass'd me flying by—
From the thunder, and the storm—
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

—Edgar Allan Poe, “Alone”

As we move along the continuum to Category 9, we traverse an important threshold. The remainder of the scale encompasses persons who commit “evil” acts partly or wholly as the result of varying degrees of psychopathy, a key concept we will now explore in some detail. From this point onward, we will no longer encounter individuals who feel driven to homicide or other acts of violence by situational duress. Rather, the remainder of the scale is populated by methodical types who are motivated by self-serving personal objectives, which we will individually discuss: desires to eliminate those who pose obstacles to the attainment of romantic love or power, or who threaten one's freedom; to pilfer other people's assets; to dispel ennui with some twisted form of stimulation; to satisfy perverse sexual desires; to intimidate and subjugate; and to sadistically torture, in ways unimaginable to the average person. In some cases, as we shall see, the psychopathic individual is further influenced by symptoms of psychotic illness, reviewed in depth in the chapter dealing with Category 20, or by the disinhibiting effects of drugs or alcohol.

The concept of psychopathy was first systematically defined by psychiatrist Dr. Hervey M. Cleckley in his groundbreaking 1941 book The Mask of Sanity.¹ The term refers to egocentric, grandiose individuals who feel little to no compassion for other people, manifested by persistent asocial and amoral behaviors, such as deceiving, manipulating, abusing, or even killing. Such persons display minimal, if any, remorse, guilt, or sense of responsibility following such acts, and they do not generally learn from previous mistakes. Psychopaths tend to be impulsive and fearless, with poor behavioral controls and a high need for excitement and stimulation. Interpersonally, they are often superficially charming and typically experience emotions on a shallow level. This pattern of behavior, motivations, and internal experiences tends to originate in childhood and persists across the whole of one's lifetime, constituting a disturbance of the personality structure itself. They are about eight times more likely to be male than female.

It is important to note that psychopathic traits and behaviors occur on a spectrum, such that it is possible for an individual to possess only a handful of the characteristics, associated with occasional social and/or occupational issues, but not resulting in any major impact upon his or her day-to-day functioning. This fact is often ignored by the general public, which often erroneously imagines every psychopathic individual to be the extreme, serial killing type when, in fact, some psychopaths have interpersonal difficulties that never amount to serious crime. Moreover, not everyone who commits murder or some other act of extreme violence should automatically be deemed a psychopath. As our prior points about Categories 1 through 8 on the Gradations of Evil scale have hopefully made clear, individuals can feel driven to such crimes by a number of factors other than psychopathy.

Unfortunately, the bulk of research on the subject has been conducted in prisons and forensic psychiatric settings, where one tends to encounter only those with the most serious degrees of psychopathy. Even within such populations, identifying psychopathic persons is challenging, in that they sometimes minimize or flatly deny certain traits and past behaviors, either in the hopes of securing lighter sentences or certain privileges, or else for the amusement of outwitting those who are endeavoring to study them.

The identification of psychopathic persons has been greatly advanced by the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), developed by psychologist Dr. Robert Hare. The twenty-question measure employs an in-person interview, as well as review of collateral information, such as one's treatment or legal records. It examines personality traits within two factors: Factor 1 explores interpersonal and affective deficiencies, such as superficial charm, shallow affect, manipulativeness, and lack of empathy, while Factor 2 captures antisocial behaviors, including irresponsibility, poor behavior controls, impulsiveness, juvenile delinquency, and criminal versatility. The latter refers to a propensity of an individual to commit several different types of crime. For example, we might observe murder, sexual assault, theft, and forgery in the same offender's history. Each item is scored on a three-point scale, with a rating of 0 if it does not apply, 1 if there is a partial match or mixed information, and 2 if there is a reasonably good match. The maximum score is 40. A score of 30 is considered indicative of psychopathy.²

Another area of confusion concerns the inconsistent use of the terms psychopathy, sociopathy, and antisocial personality disorder, even among professional clinicians and academics. In reality, these terms have somewhat different meanings and should not be used interchangeably. The words sociopathy and psychopathy reflect, in the Latin prefix socio- and the Greek prefix psycho-, distinct hypotheses about the origins of antisocial behavior. Sociopathy deemphasizes abnormal psychological states, suggesting that antisocial persons are not mentally disturbed to the point of not recognizing right from wrong. Furthermore, it conceptualizes antisocial behavior as stemming from social and environmental factors, particularly during one's formative years. Psychopathy, by contrast, conveys the notion that antisocial behavior may be partially attributable to genetic, physiological, and cognitive factors, in addition to social and environmental influences.3 Notably, neither term constitutes a diagnostic category in the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), which delineates the classification system and specific criteria for psychiatric pathologies within the field of mental health. Instead, the DSM nosology contains the diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder,⁴ associated with the following symptoms:

A.A pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others, occurring since age 15 years, as indicated by three (or more) of the following:

1. Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors, as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest.

2. Deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure.

3. Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead.

4. Irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults.

5. Reckless disregard for safety of self or others.

6. Consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations.

7. Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.

B.The individual is at least age 18 years.

C.There is evidence of conduct disorder with onset before age 15 years.

D.The occurrence of antisocial behavior is not exclusively during the course of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

Notably, as per Criterion B, the condition is not diagnosed in individuals under eighteen years of age. Yet, antisocial traits and behaviors are known to generally date to childhood. Thus, conduct disorder, which involves the habitual violation of the rights of others and nonconformity with the law or age-appropriate social norms, serves as a sort of childhood equivalent or precursor to antisocial personality disorder. Of note, the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for conduct disorder include a “with limited prosocial emotions” specifier when two or more of the following characteristics are present over at least twelve months and in multiple relationships or settings: lack of remorse or guilt, callousness / lack of empathy, lack of concern about performance in important activities, and shallow or deficient affect.5 While the diagnostic criteria for conduct disorder weigh an individual's actions, this specifier involves the emotional aspects of such behavior, as well as how these features are experienced by other people.

Notably, the DSM description of antisocial personality disorder fails to capture several well-established aspects of psychopathy examined by Hare and others, such as glib charm and superficiality, egocentricity and grandiosity, shallow emotionality, and the need for excitement. When the DSM diagnosis was altered for the manual's fourth edition, published in 1994, the new criteria had the effect of excluding psychopathic traits that would have to be subjectively determined by clinicians, instead emphasizing socially deviant behaviors that one can objectively observe.⁶ Consequently, as noted by Hare, the vast majority of criminals—an estimated 80 to 85 percent—will meet antisocial personality disorder criteria, but only about 20 percent would qualify for what he would consider bona fide psychopathy.⁷ Furthermore, this 20 percent is thought to account for about half of all of the most serious crimes committed, including 50 percent of all repeat rapists.⁸ These disagreements surrounding terminology, features, and etiology not only make it difficult to study psychopathy but also to formulate appropriate methods of treatment—if the latter is even possible.

Indeed, one could make a solid case that psychopaths—true psychopaths, of the ilk defined by Hare—are essentially an untreatable population, partially because they do not generally feel they require clinical care or seek it out.⁹ When they do participate in treatment—sometimes due to court mandates, following criminal offenses—they tend to make little to no meaningful change, sometimes simply going through the motions of participating in psychotherapy and other interventions, with no real effort to improve themselves or their relationships. A clinician might attempt strategies that target specific antisocial behaviors, such as stealing, manipulation of others, or physical aggression, or which build up empathy and compassion. It may well be, however, that true psychopaths possess abnormal brains, which render them basically incapable of being taught or conditioned to experience such emotions, or to better evaluate the long-term consequences of their actions. For instance, there is some evidence that, among such persons, there may be fewer connections between the amygdala, which mediates fear and anxiety, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, believed to be involved in feelings of guilt and empathy.10 It has elsewhere been demonstrated that individuals with greater numbers of psychopathic traits show increased activity in a brain area known as the ventral striatum, which is involved in evaluating subjective rewards, when the latter are more immediate. That is to say, the brains of psychopaths may be prone to overvalue instantaneous gratification, such that they pay less mind to future consequences of immoral or possibly dangerous behaviors. Thus, psychopathy might be seen as involving impulsive, shortsighted decision-making processes, similar to those associated with abuse of illicit substances or binge-eating disorders.¹¹ As we shall later discuss, however, a distinction is sometimes made between primary psychopathy, in which traits such as lack of empathy and fear are genetically determined, and secondary psychopathy, in which individuals are so humiliated, traumatized, and badly maltreated during their younger years that they emerge with boundless feelings of hatred of other people, displaying traits and behaviors that resemble those of persons with primary psychopathy. By contrast, however, secondary psychopathy may involve more remorse and less fearlessness than the primary type.¹²

Furthermore, teaching individuals who meet criteria for psychopathy which aspects of themselves they should and should not display to others sometimes helps them to better “pass” for “normal” and gain the trust of those upon whom they wish to prey.¹³ Additionally, the treatment of antisocial traits and behaviors after adolescence, when full-blown psychopathy has generally become “locked in,” would likely prove an especially fruitless endeavor. Perhaps it is best to either hope for short-lived behavioral improvements or to wait for the intensity and rate of antisocial behavior to decrease as one ages over time, which is generally the case.

Having established this critical concept, we can now proceed with our characterizations of Categories 9 through 14 of the Gradations of Evil scale. Individuals ranked in these six categories do not necessarily exhibit full-blown psychopathy, but they do display at least marked traits. The distinctions among the six types captured here are chiefly related to their specific motivations for murder or other acts that are commonly called “evil.” We will encounter individuals whose jealousy makes them capable of coolly planned acts of retaliation; who wish to eliminate other people who pose obstacles to freedom, some romantic interest, or power; and who guiltlessly swindle other people's assets. Note that we have not yet arrived at the level of scale associated with fully psychopathic persons who commit rape, torture, and/or murder for less “pragmatic” and more self-indulgent purposes, such as to dispel ennui with some perverse form of stimulation, satisfy depraved sexual desires, intimidate and subjugate others, and/or sadistically inflict pain.

CATEGORY 9

Fully or semi-psychopathic individuals who kill with methodical, malicious intentions arising from jealousy are assigned to Category 9 of the scale. The non-impetuous quality of these homicides distinguishes them at once from the spur-of-the-moment brand encountered in Category 2. Even Category 6, with its emphasis on more extreme violence in the context of hotheadedness, which can certainly be set off by jealousy, is not an adequate ranking for this type. This is because a ranking of 6 does not convey the degree of detachment and planning that we encounter here, nor the perpetrator's typically vindictive and unremorseful nature. The reader is reminded of the “Parachute Murder” case described earlier, in which we observed cold-blooded, calculated homicide, in contrast to the more impetuous “crime of passion” perpetrated by Samuel Collins after he learned of his wife's infidelity. As noted, the former belongs here, in Category 9, due to the extreme cruelty of the homicide and the significant degree of premeditation, with no change of mind or remorse despite time and deliberation.

We find another example of this type of jealousy killing in the case of Paul Snider, who in 1980 brutally raped and murdered his wife, the stunningly beautiful Playboy playmate and film actress Dorothy Stratten. Snider was born to Jewish parents in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1951, growing up in a rough neighborhood in which machismo was prized and nurtured. His parents separated when he was a boy, and he was left to fend for himself, leaving school in the seventh grade. He emerged from these unstable, impoverished early years with a personality characterized by psychopathic, narcissistic, and paranoid features. Insecure about his undeveloped physique in adolescence, he took up bodybuilding and aimed to always be well-groomed and stylishly dressed in public. Money and sex quickly became his twin obsessions. By the mid-1970s, Snider was working as a car show and nightclub promoter, but it was thought he was also earning income as a pimp. A man of expensive tastes, which were well beyond his financial means, he drove a Corvette, strolled about town swathed in mink, and wore a jewel-encrusted Star of David around his neck. He owed a fortune to loan sharks, who once suspended him by his ankles from the thirtieth floor of a hotel, prompting him to flee to the United States.14

With grand aspirations of becoming an actor, director, or producer, Snider headed to Los Angeles, where he struggled to find acceptance in Hollywood's inner circles. He oversaw prostitution activity in LA, insisting that his band of streetwalkers dress in glamorous 1950s fashions. Feeling like something of a failure, he returned to Canada in 1977, making his mind up to avoid trouble and never wind up in jail—a concept that terrified him.¹⁵ It was back in Vancouver that, during a visit to a Dairy Queen with a friend, he first encountered seventeen-year-old counter girl and high school student Dorothy Ruth Hoogstraten. Turning to his companion, he remarked, “That girl could make me a lot of money.” He obtained her phone number from an acquaintance and relentlessly pursued her until they entered into an affair several months later. It has been suggested that Hoogstraten, whose father left her family when she was quite young, leaving them in financially dire straits, was taken by the older, streetwise schemer, who bedecked her in jewels and wined and dined her in his posh apartment. He escorted her to her high school graduation dance and had her sit for professional modeling shoots. Shy and insecure with no ambitions beyond secretary work, Hoogstraten was enthralled by his constant compliments and gradually became swept up in Snider's ambitious plans for their future.¹⁶

Just after Hoogstraten's eighteenth birthday, Snider began pressuring her to sit for another round of photographs, this time in the nude, which he hoped to enter in Playboy magazine's twenty-fifth anniversary Playmate contest. Convincing her that this was a critical first step toward an acting career, he was chagrined to note that women in Canada had to be at least nineteen years of age to appear nude in a magazine without parental consent. He got around this by forging her mother's signature on a release form. Following the shoot, Snider explained that, should they meet Hugh Hefner, she might have to tolerate his sexual advances in order for her career to progress as they were hoping.17

Hoogstraten lost the Playboy contest but was invited to spend time at Hefner's mansion. She was ultimately named Playmate of the Month for August of 1979, rechristened Dorothy Stratten. As soon as word of her magazine appearance reached his ears, Snider proposed marriage and flew to LA to join her, hoping to hitch himself to a rising star who might financially support the two of them. By 1979, the couple was married and Stratten was trying her hand at acting. She began taking small roles on television programs and played the title role in the 1980 science fiction B movie Galaxina. In the meantime, Snider used some of her earnings to operate sleazy wet T-shirt and underwear contests, and to invest in a male strip club, which later became the popular Chippendales franchise. He purchased a new Mercedes with vanity plates reading “Star-80” and mused about their forthcoming life in the estates of Bel Air. Despite having numerous extramarital affairs, Snider was intensely jealous and possessive of his wife. He carefully monitored whether she smoked, drank, or used drugs, and dictated how she should behave around men, teaching her to take advantage of the interests of would-be suitors, while turning down their sexual passes.¹⁸

In 1980, Stratten befriended the movie director Peter Bogdanovich, who cast the ravishing starlet in his then forthcoming film They All Laughed, released the following year. The two hit it off and embarked upon a highly secretive affair in New York City. She was selected as Playboy's Playmate of the Year and was finding herself constantly surrounded by fans, photographers, and the press—a lifestyle that likely filled Snider with unbearable envy, above all else. When he began detecting a chill in her voice during telephone conversations, he became increasingly enraged and controlling, having her private phone calls screened. By June of 1980, Stratten had become estranged from Snider, severing their financial ties. He groomed another seventeen-year-old girl to look just like his wife and tried to pitch her to Playboy, which promptly turned him down. He then got the idea of suing Bogdanovich for “enticement to breach management contract,” in stealing away the woman he primarily viewed as a cash cow, and hired a private eye to trail Stratten and her new lover.19

Regretting the bad blood developing between her and Snider, Stratten suggested that they get together for lunch on August 8, 1980, which he viewed as an indication that they were on the verge of reconciliation. Instead, there was only iciness between them, and they wound up in their apartment, where Stratten at last confessed her affair with Bogdanovich before gathering up some clothes. Snider sank into a black mood, during which he acquired a twelve-gauge shotgun. On August 14, the day before his twenty-ninth birthday, they got together to discuss a formal divorce and how they would handle financial matters. Prior to this second meeting, Snider had considered hiding a recording device, hoping Stratten would make some legally actionable promise to provide for him.²⁰

No one knows for certain what was said between Snider and Stratten that day, or whether he had plotted in advance to murder or simply frighten her. What ultimately transpired was truly horrendous. Snider strapped his estranged wife into a homemade bondage device and savagely raped and sodomized her—both before and after pressing the rifle to her face and pulling the trigger. Stratten was only twenty years old. He then fatally shot himself in the head.²¹

In 2014, Bogdanovich, who was reportedly emotionally devastated by Stratten's murder, shared a poignant story with the website UPROXX. One night while they were browsing a bookshop, Stratten found herself caught up in a book about Joseph Merrick, the severely deformed nineteenth-century figure dubbed the “Elephant Man,” who was also the subject of a 1977 play by Bernard Pomerance and a 1980 film by David Lynch. As she glanced over the horrifying photos of the misshapen, tumor-ridden man, Bogdanovich found himself puzzled by her interest in so morbid a subject. After her death, while directing his 1985 film Mask, a biopic about Rocky Dennis, another victim of extreme physical deformity, he came to a realization: great beauty and great ugliness have something in common, in terms of the limitations they impose upon an individual.²² Perhaps there is some truth to the notion that people will sometimes struggle to relate to those at either end of the spectrum of physical beauty as whole and complex human beings. Certainly, Paul Snider felt that if he could not possess the wife he viewed as a financially beneficial trophy, he would permit nobody else to do so. It is perhaps no coincidence that he chose to annihilate the face that had instantly ensnared him in 1977 and that had afforded her a lifestyle he probably desired more than he yearned for Stratten herself. In a sense, he shot her with a rifle the way he had once shot her with a camera—both as aggressive means of possessing her. It is also tremendously symbolic that Snider engaged in sexual acts with his wife after he had savagely taken her life, having now quite literally reduced her to a body without a soul to animate it.

CATEGORY 10

Individuals in Category 10 do not necessarily harbor specific ill will toward those they kill. Rather, they are motivated to eliminate them simply because they are “in the way.” A victim might have known too much about one's past, posed a burden, or constituted an impediment to some selfishly desired objective. These murderers are extremely egocentric and typically meet some, but not full, criteria for psychopathy. Such killers might stage aspects of crime scenes, fabricate details, or intentionally injure themselves to mislead authorities, and there may be little to no subsequent remorse.

Moreover, Category 10 offenders are capable of rather shocking murders that draw significant media coverage and are invariably called “evil.” In some individuals assigned to this place on the scale, crimes are sensational in nature, related to cravings for wide-scale attention. Others, for various self-centered “practical” reasons, might kill their own children, murder an elderly or physically impaired person, systematically eliminate an entire family, or slay a pregnant woman in order to steal the infant from her womb and raise it as one's own. While these types do not generally demonstrate full histories of psychopathic traits and behaviors, their crimes demonstrate a disturbing capacity for cold-bloodedness when faced with some significant challenge to their personal needs or desires.

Consider the story of Susan Smith, who was found frantically crying on the doorstep of a stranger's Union, South Carolina, home in October of 1994, claiming she had been carjacked by an African American male who kidnapped her fourteen-month-old son Alex and three-year-old son Michael. She described how she and her boys were stopped at a red light when an armed man jumped into the car and demanded that she drive off, before ejecting her from the vehicle, claiming he would not hurt the children. She described hearing them cry out for her as he sped away. For nine days, she and her ex-husband, David Smith, pleaded with the public for the safe return of their sons, and the nation grieved along with them.23 When speaking to the press, she spoke repeatedly of her unwavering faith in God.

It was noticed that as Smith repeated the details of the tragedy on several occasions, they were sometimes markedly inconsistent. She and her ex-husband underwent polygraph tests, and only he passed. Moreover, Smith kept telling friends that she hoped she would receive a visit from a man named Tom Findlay, with whom she had recently been having an affair. He broke it off by means of a “Dear John” letter, allegedly due to not wanting a relationship with a woman who had two young children. It was striking to friends that her mind would be wandering to her ex-boyfriend, during the frantic search for her two missing children. She also seemed overly concerned with how she appeared on television, and it was observed that, following sobbing attacks in public, her eyes were, in fact, completely dry.²⁴

Soon enough, Smith's dark secret emerged. She confessed that, on October 25, 1994, she strapped her two sons into car seats in the back seat of her Mazda, drove to John D. Long Lake, lowered the hand brake, and rolled the car down a boat ramp. She watched as the children drowned, crying and calling for her as the vehicle was slowly swallowed up by the water. The hijacking tale was a contrivance of Smith's to cover up a crime aimed at winning back her ex-boyfriend. Later that day, divers recovered the bodies of her boys, eighteen feet beneath the surface of the lake, in the upside-down car, dangling from their car seats. Findlay's letter was also recovered from the vehicle. Smith was subsequently charged with two counts of first-degree murder, to which she pled not guilty.²⁵ At her 1995 trial, she claimed she had been battling depression, with periods of suicidality, for years. Her defense team described her as having a dependent personality, such that her need for a relationship with Findlay overcame her better judgment. The prosecution presented her as a cold-blooded killer, who murdered her own children simply because they were impediments to a new romance.²⁶

Smith was born in September of 1971 in the same town in which she would commit her double homicide twenty-three years later. She had two older brothers. When she was six, their parents divorced, and, five weeks later, their father committed suicide. Shattered by this loss, Smith kept an audiotape of his voice in her bureau drawer and was thought to be detached and odd in the wake of his death. About two years later, in 1979, their mother married a wealthy local businessman, Beverly C. Russell Jr., a divorced father of three who gained prominence in the state Republican Party and the Christian Coalition. At thirteen, Smith attempted suicide for unclear reasons. She was considered a good student in adolescence and was well-liked by her peers. At sixteen, she alleged that she was sexually assaulted by her stepfather, to which he reportedly confessed, expressing remorse. The family attended therapy, and her stepfather moved out of the house, but Smith claimed that the abuse continued. Years later, she reportedly told a psychiatrist that she felt she had willingly consented to Russell's advances, admitting to jealousy of the attention Russell lavished upon her mother.27

Around age seventeen, Smith, who had been working at a local supermarket, was impregnated by a coworker with whom she was having an affair, and underwent an abortion. When he ended the relationship, she attempted to overdose on aspirin, resulting in hospitalization.²⁸ She was diagnosed with an adjustment disorder, based upon the notion that she was struggling to accept her recent breakup. She then began dating another coworker, the aforementioned David Smith, whom she married in 1990 and with whom she had the two sons she drowned in the lake. The marriage was a stormy one, with accusations of infidelity on both sides and numerous blowups at work, followed by short-lived reconciliations. In 1993 or 1994, Smith took a new job at Conso Products, where she began dating Findlay, the handsome twenty-seven-year-old son of the boss. They called off the affair after several months, when it was discovered by her husband. Around September of 1994, however, when Smith and her husband decided to divorce, Findlay and Smith reconnected. A month later, she received Findlay's letter, of which she would later remark, “I had never felt so lonely and sad in my entire life.”²⁹ In reality, this was the second great abandonment by a male figure in her lifetime, with the first being the loss of her father, due to his emotionally devastating suicide, when she was six years old.

In 1995, Smith was found guilty of murdering her young sons and was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum of thirty years. During her incarceration, she has been accused of engaging in sexual relations with two correctional officers, as well as possession of marijuana and narcotics. It was also alleged that, in 2012, she almost fatally slashed her wrists with a razor blade, which had been smuggled into the prison.30

For Smith, the wish to eliminate people who were “in the way” was related to desiring a certain relationship. In the blood-chilling case of Ronald Gene Simmons, it was associated with preventing his family from leaving him and a dark, humiliating secret from becoming public knowledge.

Simmons was born in July of 1940 in Chicago, Illinois. At the age of three, he lost his father to a stroke, and, a year later, his mother remarried. In 1946, his family relocated to Little Rock, Arkansas, for reasons related to his stepfather's work as a civil engineer, and they would move several times across the state until Simmons was in early adolescence. At seventeen, Simmons dropped out of high school and joined the navy. While stationed at Bremerton Naval Base in Washington State, he met Bersabe Rebecca “Becky” Ulibarri, whom he married in New Mexico in 1960. Over the next eighteen years, they would have seven children. In 1963, Simmons left the navy, joining the air force in 1965. During his military career, he earned a Bronze Star, the Republic of Vietnam Cross, and the Air Force Ribbon for his superb marksmanship. When he retired in 1979, he had earned the rank of master sergeant.³¹

In 1981, Simmons found himself under investigation by the Department of Human Services in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, for allegations of incest with his seventeen-year-old daughter, Sheila, by whom he fathered a child. To evade arrest, he gathered up his family and fled to Ward, Arkansas, in 1981 and then to Dover, elsewhere in the state, in 1983. Simmons worked various odd jobs, leaving one position as an accounts receivable clerk at a motor freight company due to reports of making inappropriate sexual advances toward a female employee. He subsequently worked at a convenience store.³² All the while, Simmons, who was described as a repressive, abusive loner, tried to sequester his family from the world and continue to protect his humiliating secret and evade capture. He refused any heat or air-conditioning, or indoor toilets, and the children were forced to perform intense manual labor. When his wife decided she could no longer accept his behavior, she indicated that she might wish to move to Texas with the children, where they could potentially leak word about his misdeeds and whereabouts. Authorities believed this might have triggered the nightmare that unfolded across a week-long period in 1987.33

Shortly before Christmas of that year, Simmons made up his mind that his safest bet was to eliminate his entire family. He had several of his children dig a ditch, four feet deep, telling them he had decided to install an outhouse. They were, in reality, digging what would later be their own mass grave.³⁴ On the morning of December 22, he began the slaughter by shooting his wife and their twenty-nine-year-old son, Gene, with a .22-caliber pistol. He then fatally strangled a three-year-old granddaughter, Barbara. After a drink, he callously dumped the bodies in a cesspit on their property. When his children, eight-year-old Becky, eleven-year-old Marianne, fourteen-year-old Eddy, and seventeen-year-old Loretta, returned home, Simmons told them he wanted to give them their Christmas presents one by one. Once alone with the victims, he strangled them while holding their heads underwater in a rain barrel.³⁵

On the afternoon of December 26, he murdered seven more family members who came for a holiday visit. He fatally shot his twenty-three-year-old son Billy and his twenty-two-year-old daughter-in-law Renata. He then proceeded to strangle and drown their twenty-month-old son Trae. Later the same day, he shot and killed twenty-four-year-old Sheila—the daughter whom he had been accused of abusing—and her twenty-three-year-old husband, Dennis McNulty. Simmons then strangled the child he had incestuously fathered—seven-year-old Sylvia Gail—and his twenty-one-month-old grandson Michael. He covered all of the bodies with coats, except for that of Sheila, which he draped with the best tablecloth in the house. The corpses of two of the grandchildren were wrapped in plastic sheets and left in the trunks of abandoned cars near the home.³⁶ Simmons then nonchalantly visited a local bar and, returning home, sat calmly among the festering bodies and watched television while imbibing beer.³⁷

Two days later, Simmons drove to a law office in the city of Russellville, where he fatally shot Kathy Kendrick, a twenty-four-year-old woman with whom the forty-seven-year-old killer had reportedly been infatuated. It is interesting to note that Kendrick was the same age as the daughter by whom Simmons had fathered a child. He then went to an oil company office, where, for unclear reasons, he fatally shot a stranger and wounded the owner. He drove on to the convenience store where he had previously worked, and then he opened fire, injuring two more people, before finally visiting the motor freight company that once employed him, shooting and wounding a woman there. It is unknown if she was the former coworker who had reported him for sexual harassment. Simmons then held a woman at gunpoint, telling the hostage that he had “got” everybody who had “hurt” him, before surrendering to police with no resistance, beyond initially giving a false name at the time of his arrest. When the killer refused to speak while in custody and his relatives could not be reached, it was feared that his family might be in danger and police set out to search his home. There, they discovered the gruesome tableau of decomposing bodies, covered with coats and a tablecloth. Some of the corpses had been cleverly doused with kerosene to hide the smell of decomposition. His actual intention may have been to set them or the house on fire to conceal evidence, but this is uncertain. The cars containing the two small grandchildren were recovered. Nearby, authorities discovered the remainder of the bodies in the aforementioned mass grave, covered with barbed wire to prevent digging by animals and discovery.38

Simmons was found guilty on all counts of murder and, under Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, executed by lethal injection in 1990. At the time, the crime was called “the worst family mass murder in American history,”³⁹ although the proper term for the pattern of crime displayed by Simmons, which, in fact, went beyond his kin, would be spree murder, referring to an individual who kills two or more people at different locations with no cooling-off period between homicides. Among such individuals, there is generally no more than seven days between murders.⁴⁰ After Simmons was executed, none of his living distant relatives claimed his body, and he was unceremoniously interred in a pauper's grave.⁴¹ So ended the life of a man who coolly slaughtered sixteen individuals, chiefly family members, and wounded four others. It appears that, in addition to systematically eliminating anyone who might have known about his perverse sexual behaviors, both at home and in prior work settings, and who could reveal his location to police while on the lam, he was also punishing them for ruining his reputation and first bringing him to the attention of authorities. Indeed, in a letter written to his daughter when she reported him for sexual abuse six years earlier, he wrote, “You have destroyed me, and you have destroyed my trust in you,” adding ominously, “I will see you in Hell.”42

CATEGORY 11

Killers in this category have a profile very similar to that of murderers assigned to Category 10, with the same underlying motive of eliminating witnesses and other people “in the way.” The sole distinction is that, here, a fuller history of traits and behaviors consistent with psychopathy is present. As noted, in Category 10, we might expect a perpetrator to move through life without serious legal problems, although the individual may be prone to argumentativeness, egocentricity, unstable romantic relationships, or other interpersonal difficulties. Despite her stormy dating history and family dynamics, few would have considered Susan Smith capable of murdering anyone, no less her two young children. In the same way, while Ronald Gene Simmons was considered an icy, difficult individual, prior to discovery of the sexual abuse of his daughter when he was forty-one and harassment of a woman at work, he established a respected military career and, to our knowledge, had no other significant problems with the law. By contrast, with Category 11 types, we generally see conduct and possibly legal issues across one's lifetime.

A Category 11 type who, as part of an overall picture of psychopathic traits and behaviors, participates in violent gang activities might kill or order someone killed to prevent an individual from serving as a witness in a legal proceeding. Sometimes, such gang members target someone who has already served as a witness to a crime, constituting a sort of after-the-fact witness elimination. This is more about retaliation for a violation of a code of allegiance and obedience than about prevention of arrest or incarceration, although it is also possible that the gang in such cases fears that the witness might have information about other crimes that have not yet come to light. At any rate, such a retaliatory killing certainly serves as a deterrent against the willingness of other witnesses to inform authorities about the gang's activities. The message is clear: witnesses will be eliminated, before testifying wherever possible, but even afterward, if deemed necessary.

For gang members, violence for practical ends, including homicide, is a daily way of life. There are numerous reasons why individuals might join such a group, including financial gain or a sense of power, respect, or a sense of belonging, which sometimes contrasts with a prior life of poverty, helplessness, or social isolation. The common element tends to be a belief that the gang will protect and provide for them. This comes at a remarkably high price. In exchange, these inductees must reject societal rules and concepts of morality, replacing them with an entirely new code of conduct in which extreme violence constitutes the only acceptable behavior. Obedience to these bylaws is strictly enforced, and the cost of betrayal is almost invariably death by other members of the gang, who renew their own loyalty by killing off those who have turned on them.

On July 13, 2003, a fisherman and his son discovered the badly decomposed body of a teenage girl in some underbrush on the west bank of the Shenandoah River in Virginia. She had been brutally stabbed sixteen times, and her head was nearly severed. She was four months pregnant at the time of her death. In order to help identify this Jane Doe, images of various tattoos on her person were circulated to investigators, one of whom recognized them: the deceased had been a member of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, a large street gang chiefly tied to El Salvador and active in over thirty American states. The gang is known for its long history of violence in Hispanic districts of Los Angeles; New York; and Washington, DC. It has distinguished itself from other street gangs in that, while others generally fight and kill one another for self-protection, MS-13 has engaged in the slaughter of police officers and innocent people, simply to reinforce its fearsome reputation.43

The victim was ultimately identified as seventeen-year-old Honduran-born Brenda “Smiley” Paz of Los Angeles, ex-girlfriend of twenty-one-year-old MS-13 leader Denis “Rabbit” Rivera.⁴⁴ She had recently been a key witness in several MS-13-related trials for shooting, stabbing, and armed robbery in Virginia and Texas, including one against her ex-boyfriend and several former friends for a murder eerily similar to what would later be her own—that of nineteen-year-old Joaquim Diaz, who was found slashed, stabbed, and nearly decapitated, with his larynx ablated.⁴⁵ The gang's reach was so far that, despite the fact that Paz had been tucked away in a Missouri hotel by witness protection program marshals, its members were able to contact her and persuade her to leave of her own accord three weeks prior to her murder.46

In 2005, four MS-13 members, including Rivera, were tried for Paz's death. The prosecution argued that the group wanted her to pay for informing on them. Rivera, who was serving a life sentence for the murder of Diaz at the time of the victim's death, was portrayed as the mastermind of the crime, allegedly ordering it, in gang code, from prison. Prosecutors were unable to convince the jury that Rivera had arranged Paz's execution from behind bars, and he was acquitted. Also acquitted was thirty-one-year-old Oscar Alexander Garcia-Orellana, who admitted being present at the murder but claimed he had fled the scene without participating. Prosecutors had argued that he secured Paz's throat while she was butchered.⁴⁷ Two other gang members who were accused of taking part, twenty-two-year-old Antonio Grande and twenty-six-year-old Ismael Juarez Cisneros, were found guilty of murder conspiracy and retaliation against an informant.⁴⁸

Between the two men confirmed in the slaying of Paz, let us consider Cisneros, since more is known about his history. He had been one of Paz's closest friends, but, because she had violated his gang's mercilessly maintained moral code, he participated in brutally taking her life and that of her unborn child. His story exemplifies how an individual with an adverse history can be utilized by a gang to ruthlessly kill for the purpose of enforcing its rules. Cisneros and his mother moved from Mexico City to the United States in the 1990s. His father was allegedly a physically abusive alcoholic, reported to have once put a four-month-old daughter into a coma. Cisneros and his siblings often starved and lived on the streets. Upon entering the States, he spoke only Spanish. As a teenager, Cisneros was recruited into MS-13, which offered protection and a feeling of belonging, in the context of a variety of violent activities. He was given the nickname “Araña,” which translates to “Spider.” Cisneros had a child with a fellow gang member, Maria Gomez, whom he reportedly considered the love of his life. In 1999, he demonstrated loyalty to Grande and the gang by fatally stabbing a fifteen-year-old boy four times in the back at a mall, in retaliation for an argument with Grande. As a result of this crime, he was deported to Mexico and, upon managing to make his way back, learned that Gomez had begun dating someone higher up in the gang's hierarchy. Still, they kept in contact, and it was she who discovered Paz's diary, filled with notations regarding police cooperation, and informed him about it.49 He, in turn, reported his friend's betrayal to the gang. When someone like Paz threatens a gang by cooperating with authorities, it might feel to some of its members as if the only stable family they have ever known suddenly faces dissolution. This may or may not have been the case with Cisneros.

After being arrested on cocaine and firearm charges, Cisneros confessed to participation in the killing of Paz. He described how, on July 12, 2003, gang members met at a Virginia hotel to determine how to deal with the threat posed by Paz's willingness to testify, as well as how to retaliate for her betrayal. A vote determined that she should be eliminated. Grande, whom Paz trusted the most, agreed to take part in her killing, and Cisneros volunteered to help. The following day, after a night of sleeping curled up in Grande's arms, Paz was lured by Cisneros, Grande, and Garcia-Orellana to the Shenandoah River, under the pretense of a friendly afternoon of fishing. During the outing, she was suddenly attacked and met her gruesome end.⁵⁰ Upon his sentencing for the crime, Cisneros evaded the death penalty by agreeing to counsel young people at risk of joining gangs. Later, Gomez, who testified against the gang in the Paz trial, was found dead, and Cisneros was reportedly devastated.⁵¹ He is said to have eventually left gang life behind him.⁵²

CATEGORY 12

Category 12 is the appropriate placement in the scale for psychopathic persons whose evildoing takes the form of an extreme need for power and control over others, often in roles such as the dictatorial head of a cult, a corrupt political or religious leader, or the mastermind of a violent gang like the one we just described. Grandiose and paranoid traits are prominent among such individuals, and anyone perceived as an impediment or threat to absolute power is liable to be promptly eradicated. It should be noted that Category 12 types sometimes have other people do their killing for them. Perhaps due to intense pride or a need to retain control right to the very end, people in this category will also, on occasion, refuse to go down easily when they feel they are cornered, taking lives with no compunction or allowing themselves to be killed rather than allow apprehension by the authorities. Note that we would not expect an individual assigned to this ranking to engage in torture but to prefer that killings be as expeditious as possible. As we will see in the coming pages, sadistic torture would require classification in a far higher category of the scale.

To discuss the subject of our next vignette, it is essential to provide some background, beginning with the colorful history of Mormonism. In 1823, Joseph Smith, a young New York farmer, claimed that an angel named Moroni led him to a hillside, where he dug up golden plates, engraved with mysterious, ancient writings. He subsequently translated these scriptures and reproduced them as the Book of Mormon, providing the basis for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The plates’ mystical message explained that the Jews of ancient times had visited the Americas centuries before Christ's birth and were related to the indigenous peoples discovered there by European settlers. It was further claimed that, following the death and resurrection of Jesus, He visited the New World.53 Central to Smith's evangel was the idea that God was once a mortal man residing on a distant planet who, by way of obedience to the dictates of the spiritual beliefs of his world, was transformed into a deity who then created Earth. God was said to have married—some Mormons believe numerous times over—and to have sired Jesus through a literal physical union with Mary so that Christ was half human and half god. Smith taught that those who follow God's path of self-perfection can also become deities, capable of creating spiritual children to populate other worlds. A critical component of the creed is that the Prophet—that is, the current head of the Mormon Church, since Smith's authority is passed along a line of successors—can override the word of earlier Prophets. Young men, aged nineteen through twenty-two, are expected to help spread the faith. Any literature critical of Mormonism is deemed to be satanic in origin, distributed by apostates from the faith or the product of ignorance.⁵⁴

Since the Old Testament patriarchs were permitted by God to marry several different wives, Smith came to embrace polygamy. Women, however, were forbidden to engage in polyandry, the practice of taking more than one husband. When mainstream Christians condemned Smith's precept about marriage, he publicly denounced it but appears to have secretly taken as many as thirty-three wives before his death. Polygamy was banned in the United States in 1862 and rejected by the Mormon Church in 1890.55 Late nineteenth-century debates over this issue led some Mormon purists, who believed the practice to be spiritually sound, to relocate to northern Mexico to found colonies in deserted areas, largely overlooked by local governments. Their establishment only partially sets the stage for the bizarre and fascinating story of the psychopathic, power-hungry cult leader Ervil LeBaron, the subject of our vignette. We must also briefly touch upon his extraordinary family lineage.

Ervil LeBaron's ancestor David Tulley LeBaron was a close ally of Joseph Smith, convinced that God and Christ had personally endowed Smith with the authority of true priesthood. Around 1840, David married Ester Johnson, the sister of Benjamin F. Smith, one of Smith's adopted sons, whom, it was maintained, received the “mantle” of priestly authority from Smith through a special blessing. The LeBaron family would teach over the years that, when Benjamin F. Smith died, he passed this mantle to his nephew, Benjamin LeBaron. In 1886, he fathered a son, Alma Dayer LeBaron, who would prove a driving force in the establishment of one of the previously described Mormon communities in Central America. Considered still spiritually bound to a wife who had died, he controversially remarried in 1904, which led to his being deemed a dissenter from the faith. His wife left him, and he married again, after which he heard what he thought was the voice of God, telling him he would inherit the priestly mantle if he embraced polygamy. Thus feeling justified with regard to his multiple marriages, he took yet another wife and, when subsequently banished by his brethren, fled to Colonia Juarez in Mexico in 1924. There, he fathered nineteen children by two wives.⁵⁶

Mental illness ran rampantly throughout the LeBaron clan. Alma Dayer LeBaron's daughter Lucinda was extremely violent during bouts of psychosis, requiring her to be confined, with a chain around her ankle. One son, Wesley, repeatedly phoned radio talk shows to ramble on about Christ's plan to return to Earth in a spacecraft, while another, Benjamin Teasdale, suffered a “nervous breakdown” in the 1930s, spending years drifting in and out of psychiatric hospitals. Benjamin, who claimed to hear voices and to be the special servant of God, was once found doing calisthenics in the middle of a busy road in Salt Lake City. He committed suicide by leaping from a bridge in 1978. A cousin, Owen, spoke of voices commanding him to engage in acts of bestiality with a pet dog. Nonetheless, it was unquestionably Alma's son Ervil, born in February of 1925, who proved the most dangerously disturbed.57

The LeBarons were farmers in Mexico, and Ervil would spend his childhood toiling alongside the same family members he would eventually work to destroy. In early adulthood, he and his brothers proselytized to expand the colony. Alma died in 1951, passing his ministry on to his “saintly” son Joel, who established the Church of the First-Born of the Fullness of Times, with its headquarters in Chihuahua. Worshippers were known as Firstborners. At that time, Ervil was his most trusted assistant, although he was self-absorbed and indolent, scoffing at manual labor. Considered handsome and mesmerizing, he would stare straight into people's eyes as he quoted at length from the Scriptures. Ervil distributed work assignments and schedules, affording him a powerful role in which he could control the actions of others. All the while, he routinely skimmed money, pocketed the portions of worshippers’ incomes mandatorily tithed to the church, and attempted a string of get-rich-quick schemes. Once, he offered to sweeten a business deal with a fellow Mormon by offering several young women from his family's congregation.⁵⁸

Ervil developed tastes for flashy clothes and cars, telling the Firstborners that God had commanded him to purchase a shiny new Impala because it would impress and draw in converts. He raised eyebrows by regularly surrounding himself with other men's wives, young girls, older women, and pairs of sisters. He seduced each by claiming God had prompted him to marry her. To earn the trust of female minors, he taught that the Virgin Mary had mothered Christ at age fourteen, so this was an appropriate age at which to take a husband. The colony responded by handing over their daughters to be “brides.” For the thirteen who actually married him, he proved a detached and apathetic partner, regarding them as useless beyond bearing children to expand the church. Some would flee with their offspring to the States; others remained loyal, despite his neglect. As we shall see, two would even commit murder at his behest.⁵⁹

Ervil and Joel began to quarrel over these scandalous behaviors around 1965. They also bickered over Los Molinos, a beachfront farming colony in Baja California, founded by Joel in 1964. Ervil envisioned a lucrative tourist destination while Joel wished to further develop it as an agricultural community. Despite Joel's protestations, Ervil sneaked away to meet with would-be investors, dazzling them with talk of resorts, yacht clubs, and guaranteed fortunes.60

Around this time, Ervil decided that, like the prophets of the Old Testament, he had the right to slaughter anyone in Los Molinos who disobeyed his will. He established a series of decrees based upon the Ten Commandments, which he called the Civil Law, appointing himself their chief enforcer. Worshippers quaked with fear as he described, with not a hint of feeling, the way insubordinates would be stoned, beheaded, or disemboweled. Ervil revived a controversial 1856 teaching of Brigham Young, the second Prophet of the Mormon Church, known as the blood atonement. Young's controversial idea was that certain transgressions are so terrible that the atonement of Christ is inapplicable, such that the perpetrator's own death is needed to make his or her salvation once again possible. Historians note that, from the 1850s through the 1890s, this method allowed Young to eliminate spiritual and financial rivals—and, in reviving it, Ervil could now do the same while pointing to precedent.⁶¹

Ervil turned his attention to Rulon Allred, a homeopath and chiropractor who oversaw a rival sect of polygamous Mormons, centered in the western United States.⁶² They had once been friends and allies. However, in addition to refusing to tithe to the Firstborners, Allred was now openly ridiculing them, prompting Ervil to declare, in a lengthy document, that his actions warranted execution under the Civil Law. From that time onward, Allred was marked for death. Joel, looking on, grew increasingly distressed by Ervil's threats and obsession with financial gain. When, in the summer of 1972, Ervil declared that God wished for them to share the leadership of the Firstborners, Joel refused and stripped him of whatever authority he already had. Shortly thereafter, his brother's name was added alongside Allred's on his rapidly expanding hit list.⁶³

The rift between Ervil and Joel led to a schism in the community, with debates over which one was the true prophet. Ervil established the Church of the Lamb of God in California, where he openly proclaimed that Joel's “treason” should cost him his life. In Baja on August 20, 1972, Joel and his fourteen-year-old son Ivan stopped by the home of one of Ervil's disciples. While the boy slept in their car, a group of Ervil's followers attacked Joel, one of whom pumped two bullets into his head. Joel's assassination left behind seven wives and forty-four children. Ervil was tried and convicted for masterminding the crime, but the conviction was overturned on a technicality, and he was released from jail after serving a single day.64

Ervil was dismayed to learn that, instead of joining his faction, Joel's flock turned to their youngest brother, the quiet and reserved Verlan. Terrified that he was next to die at Ervil's hand, he constantly traveled and routinely switched his cars, ultimately settling in Nicaragua. In the meantime, Ervil adopted lofty titles, such as Prophet of God, Lord Anointed, and One Mighty and Strong, and grew increasingly paranoid. He began carrying a firearm, required that his wives and children study marksmanship, and surrounded himself with a group of worshippers who used aliases, operating under sham birth certificates. All were advised that disloyalty could only mean death. Ervil also published a rambling essay, written in the archaic English of the King James Bible, entitled “Hour of Crisis—Day of Vengeance.” In addition to demanding that tithes be paid directly to him, it forbade contributions to other factions, punishable by blood atonement. Around this time, Ervil took control of all romantic liaisons in his colony. He would demand first pick of all females, arrange all marriages, and use women as totally objectified rewards for male worshippers’ good or loyal behavior. As the group expanded, Ervil relocated it to Utah, where he unsuccessfully tried to extort money from local Mormon factions.⁶⁵

Then, claiming inspiration from God to destroy Los Molinos, where Verlan and his family lived, Ervil called upon Dean Vest, a six-foot-eight, 260-pound Vietnam veteran, to teach a band of loyalists to use weapons and explosives. Vest and five black-clad foot soldiers slipped into Baja by night, firebombing the homes and shooting down its terrified inhabitants as they raced from the flames. The attackers made their way to Verlan's property, where his wife and six of their children watched as their home was ignited and sprayed with bullets. In all, two citizens were killed and thirteen were wounded. Ervil was enraged to learn that his brother had not been home and that he survived the attack, thereafter resorting to using spies to locate him. Moreover, he decided that his usurpation of Los Molinos was inadequate. He wished to take over Mexico and the United States, and ultimately dominate the entire world. To do so, he reasoned, he would have to slaughter his religious rivals, and confiscate their business holdings to finance his mission.66

In 1975, Naomi Zarate Chynoweth, a former Firstborner, began vocally opposing Ervil's leadership and threatening to expose his actions to the authorities. Ervil had one of his wives, Vonda White, who long knew the dissenter, drive her to a dark canyon in Mexico's San Pedro Mountains. There, White allegedly shot the woman five times and loaded the body in the trunk of her car, burying her in the middle of nowhere with the assistance of another of Ervil's wives. The body has never been located.⁶⁷ Later that year, Ervil turned his attention to Robert Simons, a Utah man who sought to convert the Native Americans to Mormonism. He owned a sixty-five-acre piece of property, coveted by Ervil. Simons refused to cave in to extortion demands. Ervil created an alias and visited Simons at his church, posing as a man seeking theological discourse. The two wound up bickering fiercely and wrestling on the ground. Later, Ervil tried to seduce one of the man's wives. Simons threw him off the property. Reasoning that Simons merited death by refusing to acknowledge him as God's prophet, Ervil had him driven out to the desert by confederates, where he was shot to death and buried, doused in lime to hasten his decomposition. Ervil subsequently ordered that all evidence of the crime be set ablaze by his followers.⁶⁸

Around this time, Dean Vest decided to defect from the Firstborners and seek a new way of life. Considering Vest a traitor who might snitch to the FBI, Ervil again called upon White, who was pregnant at the time. On June 16, 1975, Vest stopped by her home, en route to see his wife and daughter, who had just been in a road accident. After making small talk and feeding the kids, White asked him to have a look at a faulty washing machine, after which he stood cleaning up in her sink. She crept behind him and shot him through the liver and lung with a .38 Colt revolver. After he fell to the floor, she fired a bullet just behind his left ear. She then phoned the police, claiming to have heard mysterious shots in the house while tending to the children. She fled to Denver, Colorado, where Ervil was running a sweatshop.⁶⁹

In 1977, Ervil's clan was split up between Utah and Colorado, and one of his daughters, seventeen-year-old Rebecca, was forced by Ervil to abandon a baby in Denver during the process. She threatened to go to the police about his crimes. In April of that year, Ervil told her he had decided to let her retrieve the infant, and arranged to accompany her during the drive to an airport in Texas, escorted by two young male members of his congregation. She was three months pregnant with her second child at the time. As she happily prattled on about plans to relocate to Mexico and raise her growing family, the boys allegedly pulled off the road in an isolated area near Dallas and slowly garroted her to death with rope in the back seat of the car. Ervil later became furious that the killers let her blood stain the trunk of his vehicle as they were carting away her corpse to dump, like so much rubbish, in Oklahoma State Park. He promptly traded it in for one in pristine condition.70

Later that year, Ervil cooked up what he thought to be a foolproof plot, reasoning that, if he successfully assassinated Rulon Allred, his elusive brother Verlan would be compelled to emerge from hiding to attend the victim's funeral. Then, Ervil envisioned, he would have his brother and rival shot dead by faithful followers during the services, in an unforgettable public display of power. On May 10, 1977, at his behest, his wife Rena Chynoweth and an accomplice, Ramona Marston, strolled into Allred's homeopathy clinic, wearing wigs and sunglasses, and mowed him down in an explosion of gunfire. Then, during the funeral, Ervil waited around with bated breath for word that Verlan was dead, but his men had failed to locate him.⁷¹

Eventually, several members of Ervil's cult broke free of his potent spell and went to the authorities. In 1979, Vonda White was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Dean Vest. Chynoweth was acquitted of killing Allred but subsequently confessed to the homicide. Ervil was captured, found hiding out in the mountains near Mexico City, and, in 1980, he was sentenced to life in prison. Totally without remorse and refusing to go down easily, Ervil spent his time behind bars in a Utah prison, penning The Book of the New Covenants, a lengthy screed laying out the line of succession of his priestly powers, should he happen to die, and a hit list of over fifty people he felt warranted blood atonement. On August 16, 1981, Ervil died of a heart attack—and in a bizarre twist of fate, the elusive Verlan was killed just hours later, in a mysterious car crash in Mexico. Despite Ervil's death, his cruel deeds managed to survive. One by one, those on his hit list began to meet terrible ends, just as he had instructed. As one of many terrible examples, on June 27, 1988, three men identified as traitors in Ervil's missive were simultaneously shot to death by cult members, all around the same hour, hundreds of miles apart, in the infamous “Four O'Clock Murders.” Duane Chynoweth, Ed Marston, and Mark Chynoweth, former thugs in Ervil's employ, had all abandoned the church in an effort to pursue happier, normal lives. Duane Chynoweth's ten-year-old daughter was also fatally shot in the mouth and forehead because she was crying for her father and her assassin refused to leave behind a potential witness.72

Blaise Pascal, the great French polymath and theologian, famously quipped in his Pensées, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” Whether Ervil LeBaron actually believed in God or his own theological teachings is open to debate. Whatever the case may be, we observe true “evil” in the power-starved preacher's use of religion to cheat and dominate others, and to justify a long list of wicked deeds, which reportedly included ordering the brutal execution of his own pregnant daughter.

CATEGORY 13

An individual ranked in Category 13 of the scale will have spent a lifetime feeling inadequate and embittered surrounding some personal shortcoming, such as childhood abuse, academic difficulties, unhappiness regarding physical appearance, or low socioeconomic status. The person will present with marked psychopathic traits and seethe with an almost constant anger, sometimes toward some specific demographic group, although this does not, initially, result in serious acts of aggression. While these types are generally detached and isolative in nature, the individual may compensate for feelings of insecurity and inadequacy by way of alliance with some organization that advocates bigotry, misogyny, or anarchistic principles. Ultimately, when built-up hatred and insecurity become paired with some unanticipated, adverse experience or life event, the person is suddenly prompted to plan out some terrible act of violence, which might be sensational in nature and involve murderous rage toward total strangers. We might expect to see some, but not all, spree killers and mass murderers in this category. When such individuals turn to murder, the underlying motive generally appears to be a desire to level life's playing field, which they perceive as having undermined their chances and contributed to their unhappiness. Their attitude is that if they cannot enjoy life, nobody else should. It is not uncommon for individuals in Category 13 to display signs of cognitive impairment or psychiatric illness, although this is not uniformly the case.

We find an example of this type of offender in Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, born in March of 1978 in affluent Wilmette, Illinois, where he was also raised. His mother was an attorney, and his father was a physician, employed at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Both also sold real estate. As a boy, Smith reportedly played with a crossbow in his family's yard, once firing arrows into a neighbor's fence. A local familiar with him once remarked, “My wife lived in fear of him. She thought he had an evil core, and we both worried about our daughter's safety when he was around. He lived on the fringe and didn't fit in.”⁷³ Another observed, “He seemed to harbor intense anger, but it was never of a physical nature. He never lashed out at anybody. He just had an angry look on his face.”⁷⁴ At school, one of his teachers sensed that Smith was longing for a meaningful connection and invited him to his home to watch movies with him and his wife.⁷⁵

Although he had no religious background, Smith considered himself a Muslim for a period, but he ultimately came to feel disappointed and frustrated over his attempts at religiosity. By his final year of high school, he was beginning to harbor hostility toward Jews and had tattooed “Sabbath Breaker” on his chest. He also felt himself being drawn to the white supremacy movement.⁷⁶ Before graduating, Smith did not pose for a yearbook photograph but provided a quotation attributed to Brutus, the assassin of Julius Caesar: “Sic semper tyrannis”—“Thus always to tyrants.” The same Latin phrase, which is the state motto of Virginia, was reportedly shouted by John Wilkes Booth as he leaped from the presidential booth at Ford's Theater in Washington, DC, on April 14, 1865, just after firing a bullet into the brain of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln.⁷⁷

Smith attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he studied agriculture, and consumer and environmental science. In 1996, it was alleged that he was peeping at women through a window at a dormitory, as well as inappropriately touching female students. When apprehended by police, Smith identified himself as Erwin Rommel, borrowing the name of the field marshal of the Third Reich, dubbed the “Desert Fox.” The following year, Smith was accused of possession of marijuana, fighting with other students, and beating his girlfriend. After the latter, he audaciously faxed the young woman a disclaimer to sign, attesting that he had not been abusive to her.78 Smith dropped out in 1998, transferring to Indiana University's Bloomington campus, where he switched his academic focus to criminal justice.⁷⁹ Reportedly uncomfortable in his new culturally diverse environment, he began reading neo-Nazi literature and became a member of the World Church of the Creator, a white supremacist group later known as the Creativity Movement. There, he devotedly—perhaps fanatically—followed the church's leader, Matthew Hale, who may have become something of a father figure to him. Smith soon came to the attention of police for circulating flyers filled with hateful vitriol toward Jews, African Americans, and Asians. He had also taken to driving down residential streets and tossing small plastic bags from the windows into people's yards, containing pamphlets that asserted that whites were being crowded out of their neighborhoods by Jews, blacks, and “mud people,” a derogatory term he used to refer to Asians.⁸⁰ He signed the missives with the pseudonym August Smith, reportedly abandoning the name Benjamin Nathaniel because it might suggest that he was Jewish. He withdrew about $19,000 from his savings account, dropped out of college for good, and devoted himself to Hale's message.⁸¹ Around 1999, Smith moved out of his parents’ home and severed ties with them.⁸²

That same year, Hale, who wished to pursue a career as an attorney, passed his law school exams, but the Illinois State Bar Association called for an ethics hearing related to his openly racist views. On April 11, Smith testified before the bar, regarding what he saw as his leader's sterling character. On July 2, Hale was denied a license to practice law on the grounds of “gross deficiency in moral character.” Apparently enraged by this, two days later, Smith loaded up his car with guns and ammunition and embarked upon a three-day shooting spree that encompassed two states.⁸³

On the evening of July 2, 1999, Smith drove through the West Rogers neighborhood of Chicago, this time firing bullets through the open windows of his car, instead of racist literature. He wounded nine Orthodox Jews before moving on to other victims, who were targeted because of what he perceived to be their racial, ethnic, and religious identities. As African American Northwestern University basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong strolled outside his home in Skokie, Illinois with his young son and daughter, Smith pulled up alongside them and shot the man to death. The following day, Smith traveled to Urbana and Springfield, before reaching Decatur, where he fired at a black clergyman, leaving him wounded. On Independence Day, Smith drove to Bloomington, Indiana, where he fatally shot Won-Joon Yoon, a twenty-six-year-old Korean economics student at Indiana University, who had been en route to a church service. Smith fired at, but missed, nine other individuals. When police caught up with the killer, he engaged them in a high-speed chase on an Illinois highway before the car careened into a metal post. Smith had shot himself twice in the head. Still alive, he pressed his firearm against his heart and pulled the trigger, which finally ended his life.84

We will never fully understand Smith's precise state of mind before and during his three-day trail of murder. It appears that, in the white supremacy movement and Hale's organization, a young man with a history of deep-seated rage, existential confusion, and feelings of inadequacy believed that he had, at last, found a sense of personal identity and someplace that felt like a home to him. Moreover, the church's principles might have become a way of inverting the social order, such that Smith would no longer feel invisible and impotent but, rather, superior to those around him. Its teachings may have unwittingly allowed him to feel justified with regard to intense hatred and rage, which initially had nothing to do with his religious or racial beliefs, lending those feelings shape and purpose. He could project blame for his personal failings onto other people, an unseen “them.” It is possible that he viewed through this same distorted lens Hale's inability to acquire a law license, reasoning that if it were not for the African Americans, Jews, and Asians, who incurred the group's hatred by simply existing, his leader would have been able to enter into practice. It is intriguing, however, that in his “random” targeting of members of certain racial groups while driving across Illinois and Indiana, Smith does seem to have honed in on people who were walking along, surrounded with family and friends, or at school, or heading into or out of places of worship. One wonders if, beneath his anger and “supremacist” views, he did not feel profoundly inferior and intensely envious of the types of people who love and are loved, who know what it is to belong in a family or a traditional social setting. How symbolic, then, that a man who might have wished to convince himself that he had no longing for any of it—for giving and receiving love within a traditional family or circle of friends—would end his life by destroying his very heart.

The reader might be surprised to learn of our opinion that Ed Gein, mentioned in our introduction, also belongs in Category 13. The crimes we are about to describe, including murder, grave robbing, and the transformation of the skins and body parts of corpses into clothes and various household objects, were certainly gruesome and unfathomably depraved. The case gives us an opportunity, however, to drive home the point that placement in the scale is primarily dependent upon an individual's specific motivation and the degree of amorality associated with that driving factor. Gein cannot be ranked at the scale's lower end, because, as we shall see, there is no evidence that his actions were impulsive in nature, related to situational stressors. There is also no indication that he was killing primarily to eliminate people “in the way” or for personal power. Moreover, his designation cannot be higher. As per the scale, higher rankings involve killing for more overt sexual gratification, to subjugate or terrorize, or following sadistic torture. Instead, it appears that Gein's crimes, like Benjamin Nathaniel Smith's, were driven by anger and resentment surrounding a sense of inadequacy and a disturbed notion that, if he could achieve some end or right some wrong, he could resolve underlying feelings of self-loathing. In both cases, the crimes were part of searching for personal identity and were set in play by a “last straw” event that focused underlying anger and antisocial personality features. This is the essence of Category 13. We should also note that, in addition to possibly psychopathic character traits, it is distinctly plausible that both men were at least sometimes psychotic—that is to say, partially operating under false beliefs, hallucinations, or disorganization of thought processes, a concept we will discuss at some length when we arrive at Category 20. For now, we will say that, if Gein were exclusively acting within the context of psychosis, affecting his ability to distinguish right from wrong, this might reduce his moral culpability and, thus, the “evil” of his actions. As we shall see, however, he displayed a complex blend of both psychotic and psychopathic features.

Edward Theodore Gein was born in August of 1906 in La Crosse, Wisconsin. His parents were farmers who relocated the family to Plainfield when Gein was a boy. His father, an abusive alcoholic who struggled to maintain regular employment, also worked as a tanner, insurance salesman, and carpenter, leaving his mother to look after Gein and a brother and to make the various decisions of the household. Gein's mother despised his father. She was a highly religious Lutheran, speaking sternly against premarital sex and telling the boys that all women, except herself, were whores and instruments of Satan. During daily Bible readings, she concentrated on Old Testament passages concerning death, murder, and divine punishment. Gein's mother chased off any visitors she felt might negatively influence her sons. Gein was shy and peculiar in school, sometimes observed laughing to himself. He was not permitted to befriend his classmates, at the threat of harsh punishment by his mother. Despite these social and family difficulties, he was a generally good student who especially enjoyed reading.85

When Gein was thirty-four, his father died of heart failure related to his hard drinking, and he and his brother began taking up odd jobs to make ends meet, typically as handymen. In 1944, the two were burning away marsh vegetation on the property, which, Gein would explain, got out of control. His brother was later found dead, supposedly from smoke inhalation, but the circumstances were suspicious. The brother's head showed signs of blunt force trauma, and no burn marks could be found. Some question exists of whether Gein murdered his sibling and started the fire to mask a jealousy-driven fledgling murder that would have made him the sole object of his mother's attention, following the death of his father.⁸⁶ One wonders how many times his mother had read him the story of Cain and Abel from the fourth chapter of the book of Genesis, in which Cain murders his younger brother, who he felt had proved the more beloved in a triangulated relationship with God.

Not long following the tragedy, Gein's mother suffered a stroke, rendering her paralyzed and in need of her remaining son's constant care. She had a second stroke in 1945 and died shortly thereafter. Gein, who had quite literally lost his only friend in the world, took up a hammer and some nails and sealed up his mother's bedroom, the living room, and upstairs and downstairs parlors like sepulchers, leaving everything just as she had left it. These rooms remained immaculately tidy while the remainder of the house fell into utter disarray.⁸⁷ Gein passed the time reading about death, cannibalism, South Seas headhunters, and Nazi concentration camp experiments.88

From the time of his boyhood, Gein had always been uncertain of his gender identity, with hopes of following in the footsteps of pioneering transsexual Christine Jorgenson and undergoing sex reassignment. However, in addition to the high cost of the procedure, he was terrified by the thought of the castration of his penis. This led Gein to contemplate how he might “turn female” without having to tackle these challenging obstacles.⁸⁹ His solution was truly the stuff of nightmares.

Between the ages of forty-one and forty-eight, Gein broke into three local cemeteries by night, disinterring and prying open an estimated forty coffins. Sometimes, he left with entire corpses, which he would, on rare occasions, return to their places of rest. In other instances, he removed various body parts that met his fancy. He claimed to be assisted, for a period, by a developmentally disabled man named Gus, who served as a sort of Igor to his Dr. Frankenstein. When this ally passed away, Gein continued these nocturnal raids on his own. Once back at home, he would set to work embellishing the various rooms, using skullcaps as bowls during meals; upholstering furniture with skins, which were also used to fashion lampshades and wastebaskets; mounting skulls on bedposts and creating objects from bones; decorating a necklace with tongues; crafting mobiles out of lips, noses, and labia; making gloves and leggings from flesh; and concocting a belt bedecked with severed nipples. He claimed to do all this, in part, to provide company for the spirit of his mother. In order to transform himself, at will, into a female, Gein would don the scalp and face peeled from a woman's corpse, and an elaborate vest, to which he had attached breasts and a vagina removed from corpses, the latter resting just above his loins. He found contentment for a while, dancing in this outfit beneath the moon in the privacy of his backyard. He would later admit that he enjoyed pretending to be his mother when dressed in his female suit, a fact that made him the basis for Norman Bates in Robert Bloch's 1959 thriller novel Psycho, subsequently adapted by Joseph Stefano for Alfred Hitchcock's classic film version, released the following year. Note that we have no indication that the butchering or wearing of skins provided Gein perverse sexual gratification, at least on a conscious level. He also denied ever engaging in necrophilia, once remarking that corpses “smelled too bad.”⁹⁰

By 1954, abusing already deceased bodies was no longer enough for Gein. In early December of that year, fifty-one-year-old Mary Hogan disappeared from a tavern she managed in the town of Pine Grove. Police found an overturned chair, a pool of blood, and a spent .32-calibre pistol cartridge that, three years later, would be matched to a gun recovered from Gein's home. Then, on November 16, 1957, fifty-eight-year-old Bernice Worden similarly vanished, leaving behind only a trail of blood. Here, it led outside to where the body had evidently been loaded into a vehicle and driven off by the perpetrator. The woman's son recalled that Gein had once expressed romantic interest in his mother. He also recalled Gein speaking to her just the day before, about wishing to purchase some antifreeze. When a sales receipt for the product was found inside the store, investigators paid a visit to Gein's farm. What they encountered there would shake and change them for the remainder of their days.91

In a shed near Gein's home, Worden hung upside down from the rafters, decapitated, with her genitals carved away and the innards gutted, much the way one hangs and eviscerates a deer carted home from a hunt. Her heart was found in a plastic bag in front of a stove in the house, and her head, found in a burlap sack, had reportedly been transformed into a macabre decoration, with twine attached to nails driven into her ears. Her organs were stored in a box in a corner. Mary Hogan's flayed face was found in a paper bag, and masks fashioned from other women's faces were found elsewhere in the home. In a cardboard drum, ten heads were discovered. Nine vulvae were found in a shoebox, and a pair of lips was observed dangling from the drawstring of a window shade. Police also recovered four noses, female fingernails, and a corset made from the skinned torso of an unknown woman. Gein confessed to the murders of Hogan and Worden, along with his long history of violating graves. He was able to recall, in vivid detail, which coffins were left empty and which were not. It was never clarified whether he had murdered his brother in the so-called accidental marsh fire.⁹² There were additional questions raised about whether Gein was responsible for the disappearance of a man named Travis and his male companion on a hunting trip, or of two missing girls, fifteen-year-old Evelyn Hartley and eight-year-old Georgia Jean Weckler. Although the vulvae of two young women were found in his home, these could not be positively identified. Gein was never conclusively linked to any of these other cases.⁹³

In January of 1958, Gein was deemed incompetent to stand trial and sent to Central State Hospital in Waupun, Wisconsin.94 Proceedings against him were held a decade later. He was found guilty, but insane, and sent back to Waupun. He died of liver and respiratory failure related to cancer at Mendota Mental Health Institute in 1984, aged seventy-seven years.

Gein's aims seem to have been related to dealing with feelings of insecurity, guilt, and self-loathing surrounding his gender identity, generated by his domineering mother's religious zealotry. As to whether Gein's mind was completely aberrant, it should be noted that he was careful to only raid cemeteries and to wear his female costume in the dead of night; to keep his crimes a secret from virtually everyone, except for a developmentally disabled man who posed little threat of blowing his cover; and to never let anyone see the décor or objects he had fashioned out of corpses. If he did, in fact, murder his brother, he also took steps—admittedly, unconvincing ones—to conceal the crime. Additionally, in creating his bizarre objets d'art, Gein demonstrated ingenuity and technical skill, which were not suggestive of disorganization but, rather, frightening detachment from the reality that his materials were the remnants of human beings. One might speculate about whether he had ever observed his father during his days as a tanner, matter-of-factly working with the skins of animals and turning them into eye-catching articles of clothing and other items. Much is made of the killer's desire to impersonate or even transform into his deceased mother, but, in working with skins, it is plausible that he was also incorporating some small aspect of his father's identity. At any rate, various psychiatric evaluations of Gein interpreted him as displaying both psychopathic personality features and schizophrenia,⁹⁵ consistent with the way we have understood him here.

Furthermore, Gein exhibited a complex blend of affection, rage, and envy toward women, clearly shaped by his relationship with his mother, who, despite her abuses and manipulations, quite literally meant the world to him. After her death, his mind gave way to his bizarre fantasy of transformation. This may have represented a primitive introjection or incorporation of a key figure in his life, the loss of whom his brittle psyche simply failed to tolerate. In this we see an attempt to deny his mother's death altogether, further manifested by sealing up rooms that reminded him of her. The ultimate in Gein's refusal to accept the reality of death came with displaying corpses, or parts thereof, in various parts of his home, whereby the deceased were suddenly alive again, the lengths of their “new” lives now completely under his control. We trust that this picture of the so-called “Butcher of Plainfield” makes plain, at the possible costs of sleep and appetite, why his various crimes warrant placement in Category 13 of the Gradations of Evil scale.

CONSIDERATIONS WHEN RANKING MUTILATION AND DISMEMBERMENT WITH THE GRADATIONS OF EVIL SCALE

One of the more unusual aspects of the Gein case is the element of dismembering and mutilating disinterred corpses to create household items and articles of clothing, which included the incorporation of various people's skins into his infamous “woman suit.” It should be noted that the words dismemberment and mutilation have hitherto been poorly distinguished, such that they are often used interchangeably in both popular and academic parlance, including in some dictionary definitions. Thus, when writing this book, we worked with forensic researcher Dr. Ann W. Burgess, cocreator of the widely used Crime Classification Manual, to attempt to establish proper distinctions between these terms. It was our consensus that dismemberment might be best conceptualized as involving the entire removal, by any means, of a large section of the body of a living or dead person, specifically, the head (also termed decapitation), arms, hands, torso, pelvic area, legs, or feet. Mutilation might be defined as the removal or irreparable disfigurement, by any means, of some smaller portion of one of those larger sections of a living or dead person. The latter would include castration (removal of the penis), evisceration (removal of the internal organs), and flaying (removal of the skin). It would also include cases in which corrosive acid is thrown in somebody's face—a crime generally committed by males who aim to harm the physical appearances of females who have rejected their romantic advances. Thus, removing a whole hand would constitute dismemberment, while removing or damaging a finger would be mutilation. Decapitation of a full head would be dismemberment, while removing or damaging a part of the face would be mutilation. Removing a whole torso would be dismemberment, while removing or damaging a breast or the organs contained within the torso would be mutilation.

While the reader might envision that dismemberment and mutilation would automatically be associated with some high ranking on the Gradations of Evil scale, the matter is actually a complicated one, since the motives we have found for these decidedly disturbing actions are, in fact, rather varied. For instance, with regard to mutilation involving removal of the skin, it is critical to distinguish between cases in which victims were flayed while dead or still living. Indeed, flaying a victim while alive, an almost unimaginable cruelty, has a long history as an extreme method of torture, especially throughout medieval Europe, and among the ancient Assyrians and Chinese. For instance, three Chinese emperors of the third through sixth centuries—Gao Heng, Sun Hao, and Fu Sheng—were infamous for having criminals’ faces removed as a severe punitive action.96 It is also maintained that St. Bartholomew, one of the twelve disciples of Christ, was flayed alive before being crucified, and he can be seen in Michelangelo's The Last Judgment, draping his own sad-eyed skin over the cloud on which he is perched.⁹⁷ Death by this means is typically due to blood loss or loss of other fluids, low body temperature, shock, or infection, and can occur hours to days after the removal of the skin.⁹⁸ A rare pre-nineteenth-century case involving flaying of living victims for private, psychosexual purposes is Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed, a Hungarian noblewoman of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, believed to have tortured and killed hundreds of female victims. The early female serial killer enjoyed flaying young virgins in cages suspended over razor-sharp spikes and forcing them to eat bits of their own skin, in addition to a variety of other horrendous abuses. Death was followed by the butchering and burning of corpses, and bathing in the women's blood, in an effort to enhance the beauty of her own flesh.⁹⁹

Arguably the most horrendous example of a modern murder involving the flaying of a living victim is that of white supremacist cult leader Michael W. Ryan, who abused and killed Luke Stice, the five-year-old son of one of his followers, reputedly as punishment for the child expressing doubt about the existence of God. After writing “666” on the boy's forehead, he forced the child's father to beat, whip, and sexually assault him and another agnostic cult member, twenty-six-year-old James Thimm. Ryan then shoved the child into a cabinet, causing a fatal blow to the head, and compelled the father and Thimm to dig the boy's grave. Ryan proceeded to torture Thimm for days. The victim was chained up in a hog shed and shot in the face before being forced, while bleeding, to have intercourse with a goat. A shovel handle, marked up like a ruler, was repeatedly forced into his rectum by a group of Ryan's confederates. Reaching a depth of two feet, it ruptured the victim's rectal wall. This was followed by severe whippings. The fingers of one hand were shot off with a pistol, and his left arm was broken. It was only then that Thimm was partially flayed alive with a razor blade and a pair of pliers. As he did not die from the torment, his legs were shattered with wooden boards and Ryan jumped up and down on his chest until Thimm, at last, succumbed. The killer was sentenced to death for these atrocities but, after thirty years in prison, died of natural causes.100 What is illustrated by this ghastly case is that when flaying is done to a living person, it constitutes unfathomable torture and will almost invariably warrant a ranking of Category 22, the highest level of the Gradations of Evil scale. As we gradually make our way toward areas of the scale in which we begin to encounter the unspeakable horror of torture-based crimes, we must also remember the impact something like flaying would have upon a victim's loved ones, who will have to hear about and envision the slow and brutal death, or, perhaps, even encounter the mutilated body. This all serves to add to the overall “evil” of the act.

In other cases, as with Gein, the flaying is of a corpse, such that there is no pain infliction involved. In the various incidents of this type that we have examined, the perpetrators were suffering from serious psychiatric illness, or else persons who killed and flayed in the context of severe maltreatment and trauma, whose rage toward the abuser burned on long past the person's demise. In a particularly bizarre example of the latter, in 2012, twenty-four-year-old Jeremiah Berry was allegedly raped by his father, who claimed God had commanded that Berry undergo a sex change to become his wife. Berry, in turn, shot his father to death, dismembered him with an axe, and carefully removed the skin with a knife, which was subsequently fed to wild coyote. The body parts were encased in concrete.¹⁰¹ Despite the gruesomeness of removing a dead victim's skin in this matter, acts of this nature are generally scored lower on the Gradations of Evil scale, perhaps at level 6, where we see impetuous, hotheaded violence from people who lack psychopathic traits, or Category 13, where a rageful, insecure, and possibly disturbed individual with some psychopathic qualities commits violence with a degree of malice aforethought.

Similarly, the dismemberment of victims also seen in the Gein case is yet another terrible action that seems as if it would automatically merit a high ranking on the Gradations of Evil scale, but which, in fact, may not, depending upon a perpetrator's specific motivation, and whether or not victims were alive or dead at the time. As we shall see as we progress along the scale and particularly as we turn to part II of this book, dismemberment of corpses may be for a wide array of purposes, most commonly the “practical” objective of more readily disposing of a corpse to conceal evidence of a homicide. In other cases we have reviewed, some of which we will review in the pages to come, dismemberment of one's deceased victims represented mental disorganization; “overkill” of objects of extreme hatred; a precursor to cannibalism; or part of a psychological thrill, sometimes followed by the retention of heads or other body parts as trophies or for perverse sexual purposes. When we see removal of the limbs of a living victim—a thankfully rare event in peacetime—this is nearly always part of an intentionally prolonged and brutal murder that warrants a high ranking on the scale, involving protracted torture. Decapitation of a living victim is a somewhat more complex matter. In some instances, the beheading is expeditious, involving no sadistic prolongation of suffering. In others, this may be painfully slow, performed with a blunt or small instrument. If the latter is carried out with the intention of inflicting psychological and physical pain, a higher Gradations of Evil scale ranking would be required to capture the element of torture.

CATEGORY 14

Category 14 is the most common ranking for killers on the Gradations of Evil scale, although murder is not required for this designation. It contains a variety of ruthlessly self-centered psychopaths, unlimited in their willingness to cheat and steal to meet their respective personal ends. They are thieves, schemers, and confidence tricksters, sometimes remarkably adept at mimicking sincerity and trustworthiness in order to defraud others. Their plots are often mind-boggling in their ingenuity, and they experience no compunction about taking days, weeks, months, or even years to build the relationships necessary to bring them to successful completion. Indeed, these skills often allow them to slip seamlessly through life, evading suspicion and apprehension by police, at least for a considerable period. When Category 14 types commit murder, it is purely to achieve some practical, self-serving end. This is the type of offender who unfeelingly shoots a security guard because it is necessary to gain access to a safe or who heads to the altar with a well-heeled victim, who is then quickly eliminated, resulting in a financial windfall. We often encounter this brand of psychopath in cinema and literature, since their diabolical charms and self-absorption make them ideal archetypical villains. Of course, their real-life counterparts are often far more nuanced and complicated.

Of note, it is not uncommon for people ranked in Category 14 to employ the assistance of weaker-willed allies, who recognize their true natures but feel a curious loyalty or even affection for them. Such allies are sometimes manipulated with fear of harm to themselves or loved ones, and are capable of killing if the dynamic is adequately powerful. If lacking psychopathic traits, such accomplices would likely fall into Category 3 of the Gradations of Evil scale.

A fascinating case we would place here is that of Sante Kimes, born Sandra Louise Singhrs in Oklahoma City in 1934. She was the third of four children to an East Indian father and an Irish mother of partial Dutch descent. The family relocated to Southern California in the late 1930s, after which her father abandoned the family and her mother felt compelled to resort to prostitution to help with mounting expenses. The children were placed in orphanages and foster homes. In watching her mother go down this path, Kimes may have come to believe that it is acceptable to resort to immoral or illegal activities to satisfy one's personal needs, amounting to little more than trying to survive unfavorable circumstances.¹⁰²

For a period of time, Kimes wandered the streets of Los Angeles. She was reportedly sexually abused by a number of adults around this period and was once arrested for stealing food. When she was in the seventh grade, Kimes was adopted by a couple who changed her name to Sandra Chambers and who purchased a new home in Carson City, Nevada. There, Kimes earned moderately good grades. Blossoming into a brunette beauty by late adolescence, she was a cheerleader and sang in her high school's glee club, when not flirting with a number of boys.103 When her birth mother popped up, looking to take her back to California, Kimes flatly refused. It was also during this period that she first took to shoplifting and using her adoptive father's credit card without his knowledge.¹⁰⁴

Three months after graduating, Kimes married her high school sweetheart, Lee Powers, but divorced him for unclear reasons after several months. At twenty-two, she married another high school boyfriend, Edward Walker, with whom she had a son, Kent Walker.¹⁰⁵ She changed her name to Santee Chambers in 1960. Around this time, it came to her attention that she bore a striking resemblance to actress Elizabeth Taylor, after which she sometimes shamelessly signed autographs as the star.¹⁰⁶ She also began using the attention she garnered from men to her advantage, occasionally taking money in exchange for sex, just as her mother had done decades before.¹⁰⁷ Kimes gradually built up her skills as a con artist and thief and, over two decades, burned down a number of homes she had acquired in order to cash in on insurance claims.¹⁰⁸ In 1965, she managed to charm an automobile dealer into letting her test drive a car alone, and simply never brought it back to the showroom. She then tried to beguile the police officer who arrested her a long while later, audaciously claiming she was still test driving it. She was ultimately charged with seventeen counts of grand theft after racking up $20,000 in debt, using multiple credit card accounts attained by way of a long list of aliases.¹⁰⁹ Arrested for theft again the following year, she pled guilty and received three years’ probation but went right on scheming and swindling. She and her second husband divorced in 1968.¹¹⁰

In the early 1970s, Kimes met motel tycoon Kenneth Kimes. A decade later, he became her third husband when their son, Kenneth “Kenny” Kimes Jr., was six years of age. It was then that she adopted the last of her many names, Sante Kimes. From his earliest days, Kenny was taught by his mother to lie and steal on her behalf, and, during his college days, there were suspicions, never confirmed, that they were having incestuous relations.¹¹¹ In the meantime, the wealthy family owned homes in Las Vegas, California, Hawaii, and the Bahamas. Kimes and her husband began trotting around the globe to address American civil rights groups about patriotism, raking in money by peddling US flags to schools. In order to acquire an official government sanction, they met with First Lady Pat Nixon and inveigled themselves into a 1974 party at Blair House, where they chatted with Vice President Gerald R. Ford about their work. Their success prompted them to continue to crash events at embassies and elsewhere, until the pair's chicanery came to light.112

Kimes and her husband were arrested on slavery charges in 1985. She had been making the rounds at various homeless shelters to identify undocumented immigrants, whom she forced to work as servants in her family's home under the threat of deportation. She was incarcerated until 1994 while her husband raised their son and underwent treatment for alcohol abuse.¹¹³ Then, when Kimes lost her husband to a sudden heart attack in 1995, she was more distressed about not being included in his will than she was about his demise. She made up her mind to simply conceal any evidence of his passing, forging the deceased's name to checks and legal documents to blow through the millions of dollars he had left behind.¹¹⁴ Kimes would thereafter continue her criminal career in tandem with her son, pulling cons and amassing cars and other assets by passing rubber checks, earning them the nickname “Mommy and Clyde” from one journalist. They callously did away with several people who got in the way of plans or posed risks to her freedom, including David Kazdin, a business associate who figured out that she had a notary forge his name on a $280,000 mortgage and threatened to expose her. In 1998, she had her son shoot him in the back of the head and leave his body in a dumpster at Los Angeles Airport.¹¹⁵

Then, later that year, Kimes cooked up a plot whereby she would eliminate and assume the identity of a beloved, flamboyant eighty-two-year-old Manhattan socialite, Irene Silverman, thereafter appropriating the victim's $7.7 million mansion. Kimes had her son rent a room in the woman's home and secretly moved in with him. When Silverman was out, the two rifled through her personal papers to cook up the best way to take over her property. Silverman eventually became suspicious of her boarder and his ever-present mother. On July 8, 1998, while Silverman's staff was away for the Fourth of July holiday, Kimes indifferently watched television while her son dragged Silverman into her bedroom. She then zapped the victim in the head with a stun gun and said, “Do it.” Her son strangled Silverman, wrapped her body in several trash bags, loaded her into a duffel bag, and dumped her remains in a trash bin at an isolated New Jersey construction site.116

Little did Kimes and her son know the FBI was on to them for a number of crimes, including the killing of Kazdin. During a setup with a man they believed to be a friend and ally, the pair were apprehended. In their stolen car, agents recovered handguns, ammunition, blank social security cards, Silverman's passport, the keys to her mansion, and a pad in which Kimes had been practicing how to forge the victim's signature.¹¹⁷ Kimes was subsequently convicted on fifty-eight counts and sentenced to 120 years in prison. Her son was convicted on sixty charges and sentenced to 125 years. The two were then extradited to California to be charged with Kazdin's murder. Kenneth Kimes entered a plea agreement in 2004 and, to avoid the death penalty, testified against his mother.¹¹⁸ Beyond describing how and why Kazdin and Silverman were killed, he confessed that they had also fatally drowned Indian investment broker Syed Bilal Ahmed in a bathtub after he had denied Kimes a loan in the Bahamas. His body was reportedly dumped in the ocean. Kimes and her son were never charged for this additional homicide. This time, they were sentenced to life in prison, where the elder Kimes died of natural causes in 2014.¹¹⁹

At the time of her sentencing, Kimes raved at length about the unfairness of her legal situation, expressing no remorse whatsoever.¹²⁰ Dr. Arthur Weider, a forensic psychologist who observed her throughout the trial, noted that she exhibited a psychopathic personality with “no guilt, conscience, remorse, or empathy.” He further described her as socially charming and arrogant. “She feels everyone is stupid and will do her bidding,” Weider remarked. He compared her hold over her son to that of master manipulator Svengali in George du Maurier's 1895 novel Trilby, explaining that Kimes dominated and controlled her son, having him play out whatever terrible scripts and scenarios she concocted.¹²¹

Our second Category 14 example is that of Richard Wade Farley, who infamously stalked and shot the object of his longtime obsession, Laura Black. He slaughtered seven of her coworkers, who happened to be standing in the path of his prey. Reflecting upon the case of Mark David Chapman, already discussed in the section on Category 7, it should be evident that stalkers who ultimately commit homicide can fall into a number of rankings on the Gradations of Evil scale, for the reason that this sort of behavior can have an array of underlying motivations, with varying degrees of ruthlessness. As we have noted, individuals ranked here demonstrate egocentric, psychopathic personalities and, by way of cunning and calculation, relentlessly pursue whatever they desire. If this takes the form of stalking, they seek nothing short of the complete possession of some individual upon whom they have become intensely fixated. Stalkers of this type will almost invariably perceive their relentless, obsessive feelings as “love,” totally disregarding any pain or difficulty these selfish, one-sided affections entail for their victims. It should also be clear that mass murderers like Farley can fall into a number of categories on the scale, similarly dependent upon their underlying motivations. As we shall see, Farley's murderous attack constituted a deliberate, meticulously planned assault, not an impetuous crime of passion, which would result in a lower ranking on the continuum.

Richard Wade Farley was born in Texas in July of 1948, the oldest of six children. His father, who was allegedly abusive, was a mechanic for the air force, and his work forced the family to move several times around the country until the Farleys finally settled in California.¹²² He would later say that he viewed his mother as the only person who ever loved him,¹²³ which may or may not have figured into his idealization of another female figure later in life. Farley was isolated and self-centered in childhood, as is common among future stalkers, and was domineering with his siblings.¹²⁴ After graduating from high school in 1966, he attended Santa Rosa Community College for less than a year before joining the navy.¹²⁵ There, it was his mission to gather intelligence by spying on other people, perhaps reflecting or fostering an underlying need to assert dominance over others.¹²⁶ He remained there for a decade, after which he found work as a software technician at ESL Incorporated, a Sunnyvale, California, defense contractor. It was there, at age thirty-six, that he first encountered twenty-two-year-old Laura Black, who was employed as an electrical engineer by the firm. They were introduced when Farley visited a colleague in Black's work area, and the three went out for lunch. While she enjoyed a casual outing with colleagues, Farley “fell instantly in love.”¹²⁷

Farley took to routinely popping up at Black's desk and incessantly inviting her out on dates. She politely declined, explaining that she was only interested in him as “a work friend,” but he plowed on, just the same. He demanded her contact information and began leaving her letters and a variety of gifts. These included homemade baked snacks and, as his behavior grew more peculiar, a heart-shaped mirror and a power shovel. When Black felt compelled to tell him that she would never date him, even if he “were the last man on earth,” he harassed her further, reasoning to himself that if she was not going to turn him down in a polite manner, he had every right to continue his campaign of harassment.128

Farley proved extremely crafty and resourceful. He joined Black's gym and surreptitiously snapped photographs of her while she was exercising. He conned a coworker into giving him Black's home address by claiming he was a good friend who wanted to drop by to surprise her for her birthday. He rang her home phone on a regular basis, at all hours of the night, and began driving past her house whenever she failed to pick up, making certain he always knew her whereabouts. He broke into Black's work desk and made meticulous tracings of her house keys, which he then used to prepare copies for himself. When she played recreational softball, he attended the games and invited himself to the team's private pizza parties. When Black took a personal leave to visit her parents, Farley rifled through her desk a second time, locating the address where she would be staying. He sent her a letter, eight single-spaced pages long, which was only one of the hundreds he would mail her over the next four years. She repeatedly changed locations and addresses to elude him, but, each time, he managed to find her. Somehow, these obsessive behaviors created a distorted notion in Farley's mind that they were somehow growing closer and, at the very least, forced his victim to constantly acknowledge his existence in a world in which he was otherwise invisible to women.¹²⁹

When several coworkers attempted to reason with Farley, he reacted in a defiant or menacing manner. In the fall of 1985, Black asked their company's Human Resources Department for assistance, which resulted in Farley being mandated to attend psychological counseling. As is nearly always the case when psychotherapy is attempted with stalkers of a paranoid type, the intervention proved utterly ineffective. Not long thereafter, he showed up in front of Black's home, boasting, in an unsettling manner, about his collection of guns and his great skill at firing them. Having assured HR that he would stop trailing her home, tapping into her work computer, and sending her letters and gifts, he returned to stalking her after a respite of just two short months. The company stepped in twice more through early 1986, issuing Farley written warnings to cease and desist at the risk of his position. When these went ignored, the firm finally terminated his employment.130 Farley wrote to Black about the dismissal, saying he now had “no alternative” but to live with her, as long as he was out of work.¹³¹ Somehow, Black, the victim of his menacing behavior, was being blamed for wreaking havoc on his life by refusing to reciprocate his feelings.

Even after Farley found work with another defense contractor and became engaged to a different woman, his obsession with Black went on, without interruption. She went back and forth in her mind about whether she should pursue a restraining order, fearing, as is often the victim's concern in these situations, that it might stoke her stalker's temper and place her in even greater danger. Things came to a head in early 1988 when he left an envelope on the windshield of her car, containing a note and a reproduction he had made of her latest house key. In February of that year, she was granted a temporary restraining order and Farley was barred from contacting or coming within three hundred feet of her. A court date for a hearing regarding a permanent restraining order was set for a little over two weeks later.¹³²

We can only imagine how Farley felt at this point, swimming in debt and now being prohibited from having anything to do with the object of his constant desire. It is likely he felt as if he had lost control over his life—a situation that, for individuals in this category, can constitute the final straw. One week after the temporary restraining order was issued, he used his security clearance from his ESL job to acquire, at a cost of thousands of dollars, a 12-gauge Benelli Riot semiautomatic shotgun and over three thousand rounds of ammunition. He sent Black's attorney falsified “evidence” that he and Black had been romantically involved, in an effort to get the order tossed out, which was promptly dismissed. Then, Farley made his mind up to confront Black at ESL on the eve of the court hearing, giving her the “option” of rescinding the restraining order or watching him shoot himself to death.¹³³

On February 16, 1988, Farley approached his former place of employment clad in military fatigues, black gloves, and a scarf, which he had wrapped around his head. He wore a bandolier over his shoulder and was armed with his 12-gauge and a number of other firearms, a knife tucked under his belt, a smoke bomb, and a container of gasoline.134 Making his way across the parking lot, he unflinchingly raised a shotgun and dispatched forty-six-year-old former colleague Larry Kane. He took aim at other employees and shot his way through the security glass in the building's façade. Firing into one of the offices, he killed twenty-three-year-old Wayne Williams. Five more employees were struck down on a stairwell, three of whom subsequently died from their injuries. Farley then approached Black's office, blasting through the door. Despite his claim that his intention was to force her to witness his suicide, he shot her twice, leaving her with a shattered left shoulder and collapsed lung and knocking her unconscious. The killer then moved from room to room, taking aim at the employees taking cover underneath desks or barricading themselves in their offices. To make certain victims were dead, he shot them in their backs at near point-blank range with his shotgun. There is some question of whether Black's coworkers were massacred for the purpose of emotionally wounding the object of his obsession in a cruel attempt to leave her blaming herself for their tragic deaths. In the meantime, Black, now conscious and heavily bleeding, managed to slip out of the building to safety. Colleagues plugged her wounds with paper towels, selflessly collaborating to save her life.¹³⁵

A SWAT team arrived, and Farley spoke with a hostage negotiator on and off throughout a siege that lasted a grueling five hours. He passed the time by shooting up computers until “it wasn't fun anymore.”¹³⁶ He expressed no remorse, explaining that none of this would have been necessary if Black had simply agreed to go out with him. The chaos only came to an end when Farley decided he was too hungry to go on without lunch. He agreed to surrender in exchange for a sandwich and a soft drink. Farley had fired ninety-eight shots during his rampage,¹³⁷ leaving seven former colleagues dead and four others injured, including his “beloved” Laura Black. The next day, her restraining order against him was rendered permanent.¹³⁸ Black spent the next nineteen days in a hospital and would be disabled by her terrible injuries for the rest of her days. Farley, feeling just fine, remarked after the tragedy that if he wound up in the gas chamber, he would “smile for the cameras.”¹³⁹

In 1991, Farley stood trial, over three years following the mass shooting, which had been driven by a massive, wounded ego. He confessed to the killings but pled not guilty, claiming that his objective was merely to commit suicide in Black's presence—a statement that was difficult to reconcile with the actual, incontrovertible facts of the case. The defense painted the picture of a previously nonviolent individual with no prior criminal record, whose judgment temporarily lapsed and who would never kill again. Stated another way, he was depicted as having committed a crime of passion, associated with a much lower ranking on the Gradations of Evil scale. The prosecution, in turn, described the painstaking efforts Farley made to make Black's life a living hell, as well as the extensive planning and premeditation that surrounded his deadly attack. Farley was convicted of seven counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. He remains on death row as this volume goes to press.140 In the wake of the massacre, which was followed by the tragic shooting of My Sister Sam actress Rebecca Schaeffer by an obsessed fan, Robert John Bardo, in 1989,¹⁴¹ California passed the United States’ first anti-stalking laws in 1990, and other states gradually followed suit.¹⁴²