I am sorry for thee. Thou art come to answer a stony adversary, an inhuman wretch uncapable of pity, void and empty from any dram of mercy.
—William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, act 4, scene 1
While serial killers, torturers, and sadists who meet criteria for Categories 17, 18, or 22 of the Gradations of Evil scale are relatively abundant, we find that those who would be ranked at Categories 19, 20, or 21 are all exceedingly rare. As we examine what designates a psychopathic individual to one of these three unusual places on the continuum, we will note that individuals in Categories 19 and 21 are not known—at least for certain—to have committed murder, whereas Category 20 types commit homicide and torture in the context of severe mental illness involving psychotic states—a concept we will explore in this chapter in some detail.
CATEGORY 19
At this ranking, a psychopathic person is chiefly moved by a desire to terrorize, subjugate, intimidate, and/or commit rape. The objective is generally “practical” in the mind of the individual, such as to severely frighten the victim or other people for purposes of extortion, sex, or some other end. These offenders are not driven by the desire to inflict physical harm for sadistic purposes. An offender who commits one or more kidnaps for the purpose of ransom or who retains an abducted individual as a sex slave, without perpetrating torture or murder, might be included in this category. Critically, while these individuals may be accused of murder or claim to have taken lives, there is no confirmed history of homicide.
Consider the case of Gary Steven Krist, born in 1945. Due to stealing boats and automobiles in early adolescence, he was committed to an industrial school in Utah for a year, briefly escaping before being recaptured in Idaho. At eighteen, he was sentenced to a California vocational school following conviction for two more car thefts and released in 1964. Two years later, he was again convicted of the same crime but escaped from police custody.1
On December 17, 1968, Krist and a female accomplice, Ruth Eisemann-Schier, entered a motel room near Atlanta, Georgia, where twenty-year-old Barbara Jane Mackle was being nursed by her mother through a case of the flu. Mackle was the daughter of a millionaire land developer who was a personal friend of then president-elect Richard M. Nixon. Krist and his accomplice claimed to be police officers and stated that a friend of Mackle's had been injured in a road accident. Eisemann-Schier was wearing a ski mask. Krist brandished a shotgun, and the two bound and chloroformed Mackle's mother, leaving her in the room. The younger woman was abducted and driven twenty miles away to a pine forest, where Krist and his accomplice had prepared a hole in the ground that resembled a grave. The ordeal to which she was subjected is difficult to imagine. She was placed inside a cramped, coffin-like box with air tubes connected to a pump, stocked with a battery-powered lamp, food and water, sleeping pills, a blanket, a sweater, and sanitary supplies. The box was fastened with screws and buried beneath hundreds of pounds of dirt and branches used as camouflage.2 Screaming and banging the walls would prove an exercise in futility. Krist's last words to her were, “Don't be such a baby.”3 Mackle could then hear the shoveling, footfalls, and the sounds of the vehicle that transported her leaving the area. Then she found a long note from Krist, boasting of the design of his hostage containment unit. “Do not be alarmed,” the note read. “You are safe…. You'll be home for Christmas one way or the other.” Although the note claimed the battery powering the light would endure for eleven days, it failed after just three hours, leaving Mackle in total darkness.4
Krist and his accomplice traveled to the Mackle home in Florida and buried a ransom note in the front yard. They demanded half a million dollars in old twenty-dollar bills, which was paid out by the family as the police searched for the kidnappers.5 After eighty-three hours underground, Mackle was disinterred. Although she was dehydrated, stiff, and ten pounds lighter, she said afterward that she was treated humanely and felt “absolutely wonderful.”6 Five days after the crime, Krist was taken into custody. Several months later, Eisemann-Schier was apprehended and would serve three years in prison before being deported to her native Honduras.7
Once jailed, Krist claimed to have committed a series of unsolved murders. In 1961, he supposedly killed a stranger in a violent fit of anger and dumped his body in Utah. He related that, at age fourteen, he was traversing a ravine bridge in Alaska with a sixty-five-year-old hermit with whom he had a sexual relationship and intentionally tripped him, causing the victim to plummet to his death. At nineteen, he reportedly strangled and beat a girl to death, concealing her corpse under a pile of rocks. Krist made allusions to killing a fourth person but never provided details. Since there was no corroborating evidence for any of these purported murders, they were never prosecuted.8 As noted, the absence of a confirmed history of homicide allows for Krist's designation to Category 19.
After ten years in prison, Krist was paroled in 1979, attending medical school in the Caribbean. He practiced medicine in Indiana before his license was revoked in 2003, on the grounds that he lied about disciplinary actions during residency.9 Three years later, it was discovered that he was running a cocaine-processing lab, hidden—naturally—in the ground, beneath the concrete floor of a storage shed in Alabama. The room consisted of a twenty-seven-and-a-half-foot-long tank, reminiscent of the box in which Mackle was entombed. There was also a fifty-foot-long escape tunnel. He was also harboring undocumented immigrants.10 Krist, who once dubbed himself “the Einstein of Crime,” was convicted of these additional offenses.11
To our knowledge, no kidnapping of this diabolical sort, involving burial of a living person, occurred in the pre-1960s era. As we shall see later in this volume, it is characteristic of serious offenders of the last half century to expand upon the “practical” methods and motives of more commonplace crimes, such as abduction of a victim for financial gain, in especially inventive and sadistic ways. Thus, these crimes serve a second function, which is psychological in nature, associated with strivings for narcissistic gratification, domination, and gratuitous cruelty. In short, while kidnapping for the purpose of ransom is quite an old crime, Krist's manner of doing so constitutes a “new” and terrifying form of evil.
CATEGORY 20
Individuals assigned to this category have committed both homicide and acts of torture, and have additionally demonstrated delusional beliefs, perceptual abnormalities, or disorganization of thought or behavior, consistent with psychotic illness. It is critical to note that an individual with psychotic illness can also possess a psychopathic character structure, as we saw with Ed Gein when discussing Category 13. The two are not mutually exclusive. The question of whether psychotic illness reduces an offender's culpability—that is, the degree to which the individual fully grasped the difference between what was right and wrong at the time some crime was committed—must be addressed on a case-by-case basis. Psychotic experiences can occur in someone designated to another level of the scale, but where they prompt acts of both homicide and torture, the designation must be Category 20. The higher ranking is necessary to capture the extreme nature of such crimes, as well as the bewilderment and breathless horror these terrible acts evoke in others—reactions that are central to our conceptualization of “evil.” It is the absence of torture in the case of Ed Gein that excludes him from this level of the scale.
An understanding of the term psychosis is necessary for proper use of this ranking. Although an in-depth discussion of psychotic states and disorders is beyond the scope of the present discussion, we will touch, briefly, upon some critical points. First and foremost, psychosis is a symptom of psychiatric illness but not a disorder, in and of itself. Rather, it constitutes an umbrella term, referring to a state in which one loses contact, in some way, with external reality. This might involve hallucinations, in which one perceives stimuli, in any of the five sensory modalities, that others do not; disturbances of cognitive organization and fundamental logic, called thought disorder; and/or delusions, in which one imbues authentic stimuli with inaccurate meaning and holds that misinterpretation in a fixed way, despite evidence to the contrary. Delusions can involve a wide array of contents—some plausible, like being followed, and some patently absurd and scientifically impossible, such as believing that aliens are firing a ray gun at one's head. We will briefly touch upon some delusional ideas more commonly encountered among persons with psychotic illness. Those with persecutory delusions believe that they are being mistreated, spied upon, or threatened with harm. A grandiose delusion, sometimes called a delusion of grandeur, is characterized by a belief that one has more power, talent, influence, or wealth than one actually has, or conviction about a special relationship with God or a prominent individual. A jealous delusion is a false belief that one's spouse or romantic partner has been unfaithful. Those with erotomanic delusions are convinced that certain people—sometimes celebrities—are in love with them. As we shall discuss in part II, this type of delusion is sometimes associated with stalking activity. An individual with a somatic delusion is convinced of having a physical defect or medical problem, despite the absence of empirical evidence. Delusions of guilt involve unwarranted feelings of remorse, fault, or deserving punishment. In a delusion of reference, one believes that insignificant occurrences, remarks by other people, or things observed in one's environment have a personal meaning or significance, such that they may constitute “signs” or “messages,” alluding, in some way, to the individual. Those with delusions of control believe that their thoughts, feelings, or actions are manipulated by an external person, group, or force. Thought insertion and thought withdrawal are beliefs that thoughts are being placed into or taken out of one's head, respectively. A delusion of mind reading is characterized by the belief that some person or group of people can know one's private thoughts. In thought broadcasting, one believes that others can hear one's thoughts, playing out loud, like a radio. If no central theme predominates, the term Mixed Delusion is applied.
In some individuals, hallucinations and delusional beliefs are intricately interwoven, such that, for instance, hallucinating a buzzing sound coming from one's ear is related to the delusion that one has an electronic tracking device in one's brain. In others, symptoms might be less organized into any sort of quasi-logical narrative. Someone might simultaneously hear what is thought to be the voice of Satan and believe that there is a worm wriggling through his or her innards but struggle to explain how these two experiences might be related to one another. Some psychotic states will also involve disorganization of speech, thought, or behavior.
Several psychiatric categories in current use are associated with discrete periods of psychosis, such as schizophrenia, delusional disorder, brief psychotic disorder, and depression and bipolar disorder with psychotic features.12 Psychotic conditions typically first emerge during adolescence or young adulthood, often following a period of delusions, hallucinations, and/or thought disorder, which are attenuated in terms of intensity, frequency, behavioral impact, and loss of insight. An attenuated psychosis syndrome, which delineates specific criteria for this “clinical high-risk” (CHR) phase, has been included as a condition warranting further study in the previously referenced DSM-5, published in 2013.13 Approximately 30 percent of adolescents and young adults who meet CHR criteria will go on to develop full-blown illness over the course of two years.14 Recent research suggests that violent thoughts and mental images, generally experienced as intrusive and ego-dystonic, may be somewhat common in individuals with attenuated psychotic illness. Moreover, the presence of these thoughts in conjunction with subthreshold symptoms of psychosis may strongly predict the later development of a full-blown psychotic disorder, particularly schizophrenia.15 Further study of violent ideation in the CHR phase of psychotic illness might afford insight into how psychotic ideas associated with violence develop and are experienced by such individuals, and may, with further investigation, serve as a window for early intervention.
It is important to note that psychotic states can occur within the context of traumatic experiences, with the use of certain prescription medications, or due to certain medical conditions. Examples of the latter include Parkinson's disease; Huntington's disease; brain tumors or cysts; dementia, including Alzheimer's disease; stroke; some forms of epilepsy; and HIV and other infections affecting the brain. Psychotic symptoms can also arise while abusing or withdrawing from alcohol or illicit substances, such as amphetamines, hallucinogens, marijuana, cocaine, sedative-hypnotics, and opioids.16
Furthermore, transient, short-lived “micro-psychotic” ideas, perceptions, and behaviors can occur in people with certain personality structures, especially under increased duress. Thus, it is also imperative that we at least briefly review the ten personality disorders described in the DSM, divided into Clusters A, B, and C. In each, there are inflexible patterns of behavior and internal experiences that cause functional difficulties and personal distress. These patterns are long-term, generally beginning in late adolescence or early adulthood. We should emphasize that some of these traits can occur in individuals in a non-pervasive manner that does not give rise to significant difficulties or internal upset, such that criteria for a DSM personality disorder will not be fully met.
Individuals with Cluster A personality disorders exhibit oddness, eccentricities of thought, and social awkwardness and withdrawal like we might see to a greater extent in schizophrenia, never in discrete episodes but across their lifetimes. Three of these conditions have been described. Paranoid personality disorder involves a pervasive distrust and suspiciousness of others.17 Schizoid personality disorder is characterized by a general pattern of social detachment and restricted emotionality, with a preference for mechanical or abstract activities involving minimal human contact.18 Those with schizotypal personality disorder demonstrate schizoid traits, alongside perceptual and cognitive distortions, and/or eccentric behaviors.19 While some of the individuals discussed in our vignettes possess Cluster A traits, this does not imply that they were fully or even partially detached from reality at the times they committed their crimes, or ever in their lifetimes.
There are three Cluster B personality disorders, characterized by emotional, dramatic, and erratic traits, features of which, the reader will note, are reflected at various points along the Gradations of Evil scale. Histrionic personality disorder involves a pattern of excessive emotionality and attention seeking, such that one might be perceived as theatrical, flighty, or flamboyant, with hyperbolic, shallow mood states. Persons who meet criteria for this condition are often easily influenced by the suggestions and opinions of other people.20 Those diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder tend to feel that they possess special talents, powers, or qualities, such that they are entitled to special treatment. They might exploit or manipulate others or demonstrate fundamental disregard for the needs and feelings of those around them. These individuals often feel devastated in situations in which they are made to feel normal, human, or commonplace, cascading into intense anger or shame.21 As we have seen, narcissism, in some cases, can prove a motivation in acts of extreme violence.
Borderline personality disorder is often characterized by viewing people and experiences in polarized, black-and-white terms, which also involves an unstable sense of one's own identity and life goals. Abrupt vacillations between all-or-nothing perceptions result in impulsive, sometimes self-destructive decisions and intense emotionality, which is difficult to modulate. In some instances, these feelings are dissociated and, paradoxically, experienced as numbness or emptiness. These various difficulties with affective stability pervasively affect one's relationships and psychosocial functioning.22 It is noteworthy that dissociative states can sometimes be associated with homicide or other serious acts of aggression, typically followed by shock and confusion on the part of the perpetrator, after he or she has reconnected with reality and the self. However, serious violence authentically committed in the context of total dissociation is truly a rare occurrence.
In antisocial personality disorder, which we discussed alongside our description of psychopathy, there is the aforementioned general, sometimes reckless disregard for the rights and feelings of other people, manifested as hostility and/or aggression, deceit, and manipulation, followed by little to no genuine remorse.23 Notably, as per the DSM, such a person must display these signs outside of the context of bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. This conceptualization obscures the fact that one can have a psychopathic personality structure in addition to a psychotic mood disturbance or schizophrenia, such that one can be psychopathic at baseline and transiently or fully detached from reality at certain points in his or her lifetime, as we have previously noted. When such individuals commit homicide or other acts of violence, we must carefully delineate, to the extent that is possible, whether the crime was driven by psychosis, aberrant personality features, or some combination thereof.
The DSM also delineates three Cluster C personality disorders, which are not typically associated with the brief, fleeting psychotic states sometimes seen in Cluster A and B disturbances. However, in some individuals diagnosed with avoidant personality disorder, characterized by a pervasive pattern of social inhibition, feelings of inadequacy, and extreme concern about negative evaluation by others, social withdrawal and hypervigilance may actually represent schizoid detachment or nascent paranoia, which have not yet been identified.24 Dependent personality disorder involves a strong need to be taken care of by others, such that one is intensely afraid of losing supportive relationships.25 Of note to us here, this disorder is sometimes present in individuals ranked in Category 3 of the Gradations of Evil scale, who blindly follow powerful, psychopathic types who commit heinous acts, sometimes even participating in them. Finally, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder involves a preoccupation with orderliness, rules, and regulations, often to the point of rigidity and loss of efficiency. These individuals tend to be viewed by others as controlling and stubborn.26 Notably, what we do not see here are the magical, psychotic-like ideas that can sometimes be seen in obsessive-compulsive disorder, a condition that should not be confused with this similarly named disturbance of personality.
We should also touch upon the potential relationship between violence and psychotic illness, although an exhaustive review is beyond the scope of this volume. The academic literature indicates that the majority of people with mental illness are not dangerous and that most violence is, in fact, committed by individuals without mental disorders. However, some evidence suggests that psychotic symptoms may be significantly related to risk of violence.27 It has been reported that 5–10 percent of offenders incarcerated for homicide meet criteria for schizophrenia.28 A 2009 meta-analysis of 204 studies of psychosis as a risk factor for violent behavior yielded that persons with psychotic illness had a 49–68 percent increase in potential for violence, relative to individuals not meeting criteria for psychiatric illness.29 Nonadherence to psychotropic medications and poor insight about one's psychotic symptoms have been shown to mediate the relationship between psychosis and violent behaviors.30
A review of twenty-two studies found that major psychiatric disorders, particularly schizophrenia, are associated with higher risks for interpersonal aggression, accounting for 5–15 percent of community-based violence.31 This was true even in the absence of alcohol or substance use. Elsewhere, however, abuse of alcohol or illicit drugs has been implicated as a key mediating factor,32 and may, in fact, account for more of the risk than the psychotic illness itself.33 Psychologist Dr. Eric B. Elbogen and psychiatrist Dr. Sally C. Johnson identified a complex interplay between demographic factors, alcohol and substance abuse, adverse life events, and environmental stressors in violent behavior associated with severe mental illness, making violence prediction challenging.34 The MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study (MVRAS), which evaluated 1,136 recently discharged psychiatric patients over the course of a year, attempted to address methodological issues that had previously limited similar research and to disentangle interwoven factors. The prevalence of violent behaviors among those with major mental disorders who did not abuse substances was found to be indistinguishable from a general population comparison group drawn from the same neighborhoods. Violence risk was doubled by concurrent substance abuse. Notably, patients with schizophrenia showed the lowest occurrence of violence throughout the year (14.8 percent), relative to those with bipolar disorder (22 percent) or major depressive disorder (28.5 percent). However, violence associated with these conditions is likely to be most frequent soon after hospital discharge, and community-based samples of individuals with these disorders are not likely to display similarly high rates of violence. Moreover, delusions were not found to be associated with violence in the MVRAS,35 in contrast to previous evidence linking violence and delusions that threaten to override one's capacity for self-control or make one feel unsafe.36
MVRAS data have recently been reanalyzed, with contrasting results, depending upon whether one's objective is to identify statistical predictors of violence or to establish relationships that allow for considerations of causality. Researchers Drs. Simone Ullrich, Robert Kears, and Jeremy Coid found that a prospective model confirms initial findings.37 However, if the actual timing of psychotic symptoms, relative to violent behaviors, is considered, a relationship emerges between violence and delusions specifically involving thought insertion; possessing unique powers or gifts; and being spied upon, plotted against, followed, or under the control of a person or force. Anger due to these delusional beliefs was found to be a mediating factor, except in the case of grandiose delusions.38 Elsewhere, command auditory hallucinations—auditory hallucinations that instruct an individual to act in specific ways—with violent content;39 delusional beliefs, especially of persecution;40 or both have been linked to higher violence potential.41
With all of these concepts and findings in mind, we turn now to a highly unusual case that falls within this sparsely populated category of the Gradations of Evil scale, in which homicide, torture, psychotic illness, and a psychopathic personality structure are all observed. The gruesome story we will describe is all the more interesting, in that it involves a rare pre-1960s serial killer who displayed many of the characteristics we will link, in part II of this book, with the post-1960s era of “new evil.” Notably, however, serial murder with a psychotic element appears to have always been uncommon, identified as a clear motivating factor in only 6 percent of serial killers between 1900 and 2018, as we have previously noted.42
The case of Albert Fish—the whiskered, seemingly innocuous “Gray Man” who sexually assaulted, mutilated, cooked, and ate children—is truly the stuff of nightmares. He was born in Washington, DC, in 1870, the youngest of four children, to a seventy-five-year-old fertilizer manufacturer, who was said to suffer from “religious mania,” and his thirty-two-year-old wife, who experienced auditory hallucinations.43 There was an extensive history of mental illness in other members of the family: seven relatives were diagnosed with psychoses or psychopathic personalities, two died in institutions, one was an alcoholic, and others were described as “completely crazy.” When Fish was five, his father died of a heart attack, and his mother, who found herself struggling to make ends meet, placed him in an orphanage, where he would spend the next four years.44 His birth name, Hamilton, led the other children to playfully call him “Ham and Eggs,” so he rechristened himself Albert, after a brother, who had also passed away. At the orphanage, he was routinely whipped and beaten, already, at this young age, becoming sexually aroused by the experience of physical pain. He also found a peculiar pleasure in being cruel to others, remarking later in life, “I always had a desire to inflict pain on others and to have others inflict pain on me. I always seemed to enjoy everything that hurt.” He was a frequent bed-wetter and attempted to run away on numerous occasions.45
Around 1879, Fish returned to the care of his mother, who was now gainfully employed. At age twelve, he initiated a sexual relationship with a telegraph boy, who introduced him to urophagia and coprophagia—clinical terms for the consumption of urine and feces, respectively. The budding killer began passing long hours at public bathhouses, watching the other boys disrobe. In his early twenties, he relocated to New York City, where he worked as a prostitute and began sexually assaulting young males.46 He also earned money as a freelance decorator and housepainter, which would later raise questions about the possible impact of lead-based paint upon his nervous system. At age twenty-eight, Fish entered into a marriage arranged by his mother, fathering six children, all the while molesting boys without the knowledge of his family.47 To their surprise, he was arrested for theft in 1903 and incarcerated at Sing Sing.48
Following his release, Fish embarked upon a relationship with a male lover who took him to a wax museum, where the two encountered a model of a bisected penis. The image left a powerful impression upon him, and he thereafter found himself morbidly obsessed with the idea of castration.49 He later tied up nineteen-year-old, intellectually disabled Thomas Kedden in a barn and, after torturing him for two weeks, severed his penis. “I shall never forget his scream, or the look he gave me,” Fish would later say. He left the victim a ten-dollar bill and a goodbye kiss before abandoning him to bleed to death. He had considered mutilating the man's entire body and carting it home but was sufficiently clearheaded to recognize how conspicuous he would be, traveling with rapidly decomposing human remains.50
In 1917, Fish's wife left him for a male boarder, taking nearly all of their possessions with her and leaving him to raise their children on his own. At that time, he began driving them to a cottage in Westchester, New York, where he would climb to the top of a hill at night and bay at the moon, shouting, with his hands raised, “I am Christ! I am Christ!” He developed a taste for raw meat and served it at family meals.51 At that time, he began hearing a voice he believed to be that of St. John the Apostle—interestingly, the namesake of the orphanage where sexual pleasure and pain were first coupled in his mind in childhood—and, following the evangelist's instructions, wrapped himself up in a carpet.52 He experienced intense visions of “Christ and His angels,” and quoted God as revealing things to him, such as, “Happy is he that taketh Thy little ones and dasheth their heads against the stones.”53 He came to believe he should purge and atone for his sins with physical suffering and human sacrifices, and that God had commanded him to torture and castrate boys. Fish began subjecting himself to a series of bizarre masochistic acts, including inserting needles into his groin and abdomen, and beneath his fingernails; stuffing lighter fluid–soaked bits of wool into his anus and lighting them on fire; and beating himself, or having his children or other victims do so, with a paddle studded with nails.54 In 1919, he stabbed an intellectually disabled boy in Washington, DC. It became his preference to assault African American and/or cognitively impaired children, whom he felt would not be missed. Five years later, he began killing with a meat cleaver, a butcher's knife, and a handsaw, which he called his “Implements of Hell.”55
In 1928, the nearly sixty-year-old Fish, masquerading as a farmer named Frank Howard, responded to a classified ad placed by an eighteen-year-old New York City man. While his objective was to draw away the intended victim and torture him to death, Fish unexpectedly encountered the man's ten-year-old sister Grace Budd, and his plans were instantly changed. Presenting to the family as pleasant and kind, and charmingly describing his twenty acres of farmland and amiable crew, he readily acquired her parents’ permission to accompany her to a birthday party, supposedly being held for his niece. She was never seen again—alive or dead.56 Seven years later, after another man had served jail time for the murder of Budd, Fish, who was by then a senior citizen, sent an anonymous letter to the child's parents, which callously explained how he had killed, dismembered, and cannibalized her. It read, in part,57
We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her. On the pretense of taking her to a party. You said yes she could go. I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out. When we got there, I told her to remain outside. She picked wildflowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did not I would get her blood on them. When all was ready I went to the window and called her. Then I hid in a closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked she began to cry and tried to run down the stairs. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mamma. First I stripped her naked. How she did kick—bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms. Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body.
It would later emerge that he had placed the girl's head on a paint can, to drain her blood, before packaging up other parts to transport to his home.58
In 1930, Fish remarried, but he and his new wife separated after just one week. He was arrested for mailing an obscene letter to a woman who answered a false advertisement he posted for a maid position, and hospitalized at Bellevue for observation through 1931.59 In deriving pleasure from using obscene language in his message to a relative stranger, the killer was engaging in one of his several paraphilias, known as scatologia or coprolalia. Three years later, he was arrested for the murder of Grace Budd, threatening the arresting detective with a razor blade.60
Fish later confessed to the murder of four-year-old Billy Gaffney, who disappeared from his Brooklyn home in 1927. The child had last been seen playing with a friend, who, when asked about Gaffney's whereabouts, eerily replied, “The boogeyman took him.” A witness spied Fish on a trolley, dragging the boy, who was not wearing a coat in the dead of winter and crying for his mother. The killer explained that he brought Gaffney to an abandoned house, where he stripped, bound, and gagged him before burning his clothes. The following day, he beat the boy with tools to “tenderize” him, in the way one prepares meat to render it more palatable. He then whipped the victim to the point of bleeding with a homemade cat-o’-nine-tails, cut off his ears and nose, slit his mouth from ear to ear, and gouged out his eyes. The frenzy culminated with Fish piercing the boy's belly with a knife and drinking his blood as he expired. The killer then bagged up portions of the body in potato sacks and tossed them into a pool of stagnant water. Other parts were brought home. The ears and nose, and pieces of the face and belly were made into a stew, and the buttocks were roasted and prepared with gravy. He remarked in his confession, “I never ate any roast turkey that tasted half as good as his sweet fat little behind did.”61
During his 1935 trial, Fish was found to be insane by criminal court psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham, who diagnosed “paranoid psychosis,” in light of Fish's descriptions of intense hallucinations of the voice of God commanding him to kill. Fish was found guilty and sentenced to death, following imprisonment at Sing Sing.62 Onlookers struggled to believe that the decrepit, stooped-over Fish was responsible for so much unspeakable evil. Wertham himself would later marvel how meek, benevolent, and gentle the killer seemed. “If you wanted someone to entrust your children to,” he wrote, “he would be the one you would choose.”63 He also noted that, when describing the slaughter of Billy Gaffney, “He spoke in a matter-of-fact way, like a housewife describing her favorite methods of cooking…. But at times his voice and facial expression indicated a kind of satisfaction and ecstatic thrill. I said to myself: However you define the medical and legal borders of sanity, this certainly is beyond that border.”64
Fish subsequently confessed to the killing of Frances X. McDonnell, an eight-year-old girl on Staten Island, whom he sexually assaulted, then strangled to death with his suspenders in 1924. He was suspected in the 1932 murder of fifteen-year-old Mary O'Connor, whose mutilated body was found in a wooded area not far from a home Fish had been painting.65 He was confidently linked to “at least a hundred” sexual assaults across the country, but Fish boasted four hundred victims “in every state.”66
Prior to Fish's death in the electric chair, he reportedly remarked that the electrocution would be “the supreme thrill of my life.”67 Daily News reporter Norma Abrams wrote of the killer's forthcoming execution, “His watery eyes gleamed at the thought of being burned by a heat more intense than the flames with which he often seared his flesh to gratify his lust.”68
A WORD ABOUT CANNIBALISM AND VAMPIRISM
Albert Fish's acts of cannibalism and vampirism—which refer, respectively, to the eating of flesh and internal organs, and the drinking of blood—may be the aspect of his case that people find most horrifying and unfathomable, particularly because he exclusively feasted upon children. Intriguingly, however, this element of his crimes does not figure heavily into his designation to Category 20 of the Gradations of Evil scale, which is, instead, warranted by his pattern of repeat homicide and protracted torture, in conjunction with both psychopathy and psychotic illness. Indeed, cannibalism poses a unique challenge, on several levels, for the twenty-two-point continuum. First, there is some disagreement about whether or not cannibalism has always been deemed an “evil” act, forbidden on moral grounds across all of time and space. Anthropologists tell us that cannibalism was practiced in past centuries by indigenous peoples in numerous geographic areas, including Sumatra, New Guinea, the Fiji Islands and elsewhere in Melanesia, Australia, New Zealand, areas of West and Central Africa, the Amazon Basin, and parts of the Solomon Islands.69 Moreover, it appears that Neanderthals, who inhabited the Moula-Guercy cave in modern-day France approximately 100,000 years ago, engaged in some degree of cannibalism.70 In ancient Egypt and, indeed, at various points in recent centuries, it was employed as a desperate means of survival during periods of famine.71
As the reader may have noted, it is possible for such acts to fall into a wide range of categories in the Gradations of Evil scale, depending upon one's context, motive, and psychiatric state, as well as the presence or absence of other elements, such as homicide, sexual assault, and torture. We have reviewed infamous crimes in which cannibalism was the result of severe mental illness, as was the case with Fish, and drug abuse, as when thirty-one-year-old Rudy Eugene, under the influence of marijuana and potentially some other illicit substance, was found naked on the MacArthur Causeway in Miami, Florida, devouring the face of a sixty-five-year-old homeless man in 2012.72 In a horrendous case from 2009, police visited the home of thirty-four-year-old Angelo Mendoza, who was intoxicated with PCP, and were told by his injured four-year-old son, “My daddy ate my eyes.”73 We have also examined cases in which cannibalism and vampirism were an aspect of cult or alternative spiritual activity, sometimes intended as a perversion of the Christian concept of Holy Communion, or a means of uniting members into a cohesive “family.” For instance, blood consumption for the latter purpose was practiced by double murderer Roderick Ferrell as part of a vampire cult, in which he assumed the identity of a five-hundred-year-old vampire named Vesago.74
Finally, we have examined crimes in which sport or exhilaration were the chief motivation for cannibalistic acts, occasionally for paraphilic purposes. In 1981, Japan's Issei Sagawa, who had a long history of sexual fantasies involving cannibalizing beautiful women, invited classmate Renée Hartevelt to his apartment to work on a school assignment, shot her in the neck with a rifle, engaged in necrophilic acts, and devoured parts of her body over the course of two days. Arrested while carrying the uneaten remains in two large bags, he went on to gain cult status in his native country following his release from prison, appearing in softcore pornographic films with cannibalistic themes and even working as a sushi critic.75 More disturbing is the 1985 case of John Brennan Crutchley, dubbed the “Vampire Rapist.” After abducting a teenage female hitchhiker, he immobilized her by tying her limbs to a countertop. While taking home videos, he repeatedly raped her, and drank of the 40–45 percent of her blood he had extracted by way of needles inserted into her arm and wrist.76
The particularly infamous gay serial killer, necrophile, and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer murdered seventeen males between 1978 and 1991. Having solicited prostitutes or lured unsuspecting men from bars, he typically drugged, raped, and strangled victims before dismembering them and engaging in sexual acts with their corpses or body parts. Dahmer eventually became preoccupied with the notion that he could transform his victims into “zombies” to serve as submissive sexual partners, entirely under his control. To that end, he drilled holes into drugged victims’ skulls and injected hydrochloric acid or boiling water into their brains. When his crimes came to the attention of authorities in 1991, police raided his Milwaukee, Wisconsin, apartment, which reeked of decaying flesh. To their horror, they found an altar containing candles and human skulls in the closet, two skulls resting on a computer, bodies being dissolved in acid in a large drum, and countless disturbing photographs. They also discovered a severed head and other body parts in the refrigerator, preserved in liquids in jars; a human heart in the freezer; and a decomposing penis and pair of hands. It emerged that Dahmer was eating some of his victims’ body parts, including hearts, biceps, and livers, earning him the ghastly nickname “the Milwaukee Cannibal.”77 He would later claim that his primary objective was to keep his victims from ever leaving him by way of his various atrocious acts—a theme that also emerged in the story of another cannibal, Armin Meiwes, whom we have already discussed elsewhere. “The only motive there ever was,” Dahmer would say during a 1994 interview with NBC's Stone Phillips, “was to completely control a person—a person I found physically attractive—and keep them with me as long as possible, even if it meant just keeping a part of them.”78
Cannibalism and vampirism are hardly “new” evils. We shall see, however, upon our transition to part II of this book that, in the post-1960s era, there have been a number of shocking cases involving forcing others to engage in cannibalism against their wills, sometimes consciously, and sometimes not. We observe unconscious forced cannibalism in a 2010 case in which three homeless men in Russia fatally stabbed and beat a man with a hammer, dismembering and cannibalizing his body. They then sold the remnants to a meat kiosk, where they were incorporated into kebabs and pies in a manner reminiscent of the fictional killer Sweeney Todd and his partner in crime, Mrs. Lovett. It is unclear, however, whether the eatery's owners were aware that they had purchased and prepared human flesh. In the end, authorities could locate no trace of the portion of the victim's body sold to the kiosk, since it had been entirely consumed by unwitting patrons.79 As an example of the conscious form of forced cannibalism, at the time of this writing, it is alleged that five Louisiana residents kept a twenty-two-year-old autistic female relative in a cage, beating her and singeing her with cigarettes, and dousing her with human waste from a septic tank. The horrifying accusation continues that members of the group forced her to open an urn containing the cremated ashes of her late mother, pour them into a cereal bowl, and eat them with a spoon while her captors looked on and laughed.80
CATEGORY 21
Like individuals in Category 19, a psychopathic person ranked at level 21 of the scale is not known to have killed, or is suspected in at least one homicide that has not been confirmed. When there is a claim or accusation of murder, it is generally not described as an integral part of the offender's sadistic objectives but, rather, as having occurred in the service of some practical end, such as eliminating a witness. These rankings are distinguished, however, by the fact that persons assigned to Category 21 physically torture human victims. The torture is intentionally prolonged, particularly cruel, and likely to be both psychological and physical in scope. Note that Category 21 torturers differ from those categorized at levels 18, 20, and 22 of the scale, in that the latter three rankings require a history of homicide. Moreover, while the torture seen in Categories 20 and 22 is deliberately drawn out, as it is in Category 21, the torturous acts associated with Category 18 are not protracted in nature. The constellation of traits and behaviors that characterizes Category 21 can be illustrated with the case of Cameron Hooker, born in California in 1953.
Virtually nothing is known of Hooker's background, except that, after graduating high school in 1972, he took up work in a lumber mill. Three years later, at age twenty-two, he married a fifteen-year-old girl named Janice, an alleged victim of abuse by her family. Her husband called her a “whore” and subjected her to sexually sadistic acts, such as repeatedly hanging her, nude, by her wrists and whipping her, or nearly drowning her. Likely terrified of him, she did not resist. After Hooker informed his wife that he intended to abduct a young woman and force her into sexual slavery, Janice reportedly secured a promise that he would whip the slave, in lieu of herself, so that she might more easily become pregnant. She also asked him to forego vaginal sex with the slave.81
According to Hooker's wife—and it is critical to note for the reasons just reiterated that this allegation has never been proven—in January of 1976, the couple abducted an eighteen-year-old hitchhiker, Marliz Spannhake, in California. She was reportedly stripped and suspended from the ceiling by her wrists, and tortured for one day before her vocal cords were severed with a knife, possibly to quiet her screams. Janice claimed that her husband fatally shot the woman in the stomach with a pellet gun and buried her in a shallow grave near a state park.82
What is known for certain is that, on May 19, 1977, the couple abducted twenty-year-old Colleen Stan as she was hitchhiking from her home in Oregon to visit a friend in the Golden State. Ms. Hooker held a newborn son in the passenger's seat. After driving to an isolated area, Mr. Hooker held a knife to Stan's throat, bound and gagged her, and covered her head with a homemade wooden box—a terrifying contraption, apparently designed to totally disorient her—before transporting her to their home in the Northern California city of Red Bluff.83 Stripped and removed from the device, Stan was blindfolded, hung from the wrists, and whipped before the Hookers had intercourse beneath the dangling victim. Stan was then stuffed into a coffin-like box, which would have deprived her of virtually any sensory experiences.84 Chains surrounded her neck and ran the length of her body. A small blower placed inside the box provided air. Anyone who has ever been in a small, tight space, such as a closed MRI scanner, knows how difficult this is to endure for even a single hour. Stan was kept in the box nearly all day for the next three years and not permitted to make a sound. When in need of the toilet, she had to use her feet to slide a bedpan beneath herself. There was virtually no air to breathe, and the temperature inside the box sometimes exceeded one hundred degrees.85 She would later say of the nightmarish ordeal, “He would keep me in there for, like, 22, 23 hours a day. It was absolutely pitch-black in this box. Totally dark. I had claustrophobia so terribly bad. I would get really anxious and focus on being locked up in the box and listening to that fan next to my head, just going on and on and on, just feeling like I was going to lose my mind.”86
Fed only cold scraps, Stan lost twenty-two pounds over the first four weeks. It was three months before she was bathed by her captors. Permission was required to speak. She was taken out of the box, like a toy, for daily rounds of whipping and electrical shocks.87 She was also stretched on a homemade torture rack, which permanently damaged her back and one shoulder.88 Hooker began raping the victim, using only implements for penetration, lest he breach his vow to his wife.89
By November of 1977, Stan was being forced to do chores around the house, always in the nude. In early 1978, Mr. Hooker informed her, falsely, that he was a member of “the Company,” supposedly a secret organization that enslaves women for pleasure and profit, and which would retaliate against her and her family should she attempt to escape. She was made to sign a “slave contract,” granting full control over her body, soul, and personal possessions to “Michael Powers,” which was Mr. Hooker's pseudonym. Her captors also signed. Stan was then placed in a collar and renamed “K,” robbing her of the last vestige of her former life and sense of self, which later became “Kay Powers.” A new box was constructed and, unimaginably, incorporated into the frame of the Hookers’ waterbed. Rack torture and rape were now simultaneous.90 Stan was referred to as “a piece of furniture.” To test her loyalty, she was instructed to put an unloaded gun in her own mouth and pull the trigger.91
In 1980, Stan was forced to beg for money, and made no attempt to flee, due to terror of the Company. She was eventually permitted to sleep outside of the box, chained to the toilet on the floor of the Hookers’ bathroom. She was allowed to phone her family, claiming that she was employed as a nanny for a “nice couple.” In March of 1981, Mr. Hooker drove Stan to see her parents and grandmother, where he was introduced as her boyfriend, Mike. She spent the night with them and was picked up by her captor the following day. Apparently regretting having given Stan so much freedom, Mr. Hooker returned to keeping her in the box upon their return to his home. Her “year out” had come to an abrupt end.92
In 1983, Stan's encasement was relocated to a pit, freshly constructed by Mr. Hooker, under a shed. In better spirits, he released her to attend church services with his wife and work as a motel maid under an alias. When Mr. Hooker informed his wife that he intended to acquire new slaves and to add them to the pit, alongside Stan, his wife visited their captive at her place of employment and revealed that the Company was a concoction of her husband's. After an unfathomably horrifying seven years, Stan was able to flee but phoned Mr. Hooker in tears, agreeing not to go to the police, so as to give him an opportunity to “reform.” Some believe she may have been experiencing Stockholm syndrome, in which a hostage experiences trust, loyalty, sympathy, affection, or, in some cases, even sexual attraction toward a captor, possibly as a strategy for survival.93
Ms. Hooker later turned in her husband. In light of her own maltreatment and in exchange for testimony, she was not charged with any crime. She currently works under a new name as an advocate for victims of abuse. During Mr. Hooker's trial, he admitted to kidnapping Stan, who described to a stunned courtroom her seven-year ordeal of being repeatedly tortured and raped, and confined for interminably long periods in a box that resembled a coffin. The judge, who described Mr. Hooker as “the most dangerous psychopath” he had ever encountered, and noted the “cruelty and viciousness” of his crimes, imposed the maximum sentence of 104 years in prison.94 At the end of the trial, Mr. Hooker remarked to his attorney, “I want you to thank the judge for me. I have a library, a gym, and the time to enjoy them, and it's better than living with those two women.”95 Because there was no homicide in the case, capital punishment was not an option. However, one might be of the opinion that Mr. Hooker's atrocities constituted a crime worse than murder in the first degree.