The secret of working with violent people is knowing when to end an interview. Then again, in certain situations that is not an option. Occasionally, in spite of what seem to be adequate precautions, I find myself alone in the company of a very dangerous person. For example, several years ago I was locked in a room with Theodore Bundy. I had not planned it that way.
The very best setting for interviewing a potentially violent prisoner is one where guards can see everything and hear nothing. Indeed, when I began my interview with Mr. Bundy, that was the setup. He and I were locked inside a room, adjoining the administrative area of the Florida State Penitentiary at Starke. One side of the room, the side with the door through which we entered, had a large pane of soundproof glass that looked like a picture window; the other three walls were solid concrete. A guard was posted just outside the glass where we could see him and he could see but not hear us. He stood in a common area, surrounded by two or three administrative offices and another glassed-in interview room. The doors to the offices were open, and I could see people inside, working behind their desks. I was perfectly safe. Every so often someone came into the common area to fill a mug from a coffee urn, which was always full and hot.
The room, small to begin with, was further cramped by the presence of a rectangular wooden table that filled almost the entire space. Mr. Bundy and I sat across from each other, our chairs pushed up against opposite walls. He had taken the chair nearest the door and had managed to angle his seat so that he could keep an eye on me and also keep track of the guard’s movements beyond the glass. I was obliged to take the one remaining chair jammed up against the far wall of the cubicle. I would have felt trapped were it not for my clear view of the guard and his clear view of me. There was nothing to worry about. I relaxed and focused my attention entirely on Mr. Bundy and the task at hand. Once an interview is under way, I am oblivious to my surroundings.
We had been talking since nine o’clock and, in spite of the deliberately fat-filled, death row breakfast that I try to consume in order to keep going for hours, my stomach had started to rumble. This tendency of my gastrointestinal tract to make its needs known has been an embarrassment since high school. I looked at my watch. It was a little after twelve noon. Time for a candy break. (Jonathan and I have learned the folly of leaving prisons in order to get lunch. It can take hours to get back inside.) I turned from Mr. Bundy, on whom my attention had been riveted, and tried to catch the eye of the guard to unlock the cubicle so that I could get to a candy machine. The guard was gone. Not only was he gone, but everyone else who worked in the surrounding offices had also disappeared. They had all gone to lunch. It took me a few seconds to realize that I was alone, locked in a soundproof room, with a man who had murdered more than two dozen women. I was not happy.
I turned my attention back to Mr. Bundy. “You were saying?” To this day, I do not recall much of what he was saying; I do remember trying to remain calm and appear attentive. If Mr. Bundy knew the guard had left, he kept the knowledge to himself. I have no idea exactly how long I was alone with Theodore Bundy. It could have been an hour; it could have been a few minutes. I never saw the guard leave. I do know that, during the ten or fifteen minutes between the time I looked up and realized that the area was deserted and the time the guard ambled back to his position on the other side of the glass, I was a very good listener. I limited my responses to nods, friendly grunts, and the occasional monosyllable necessary to help the conversation along. Only one of Mr. Bundy’s statements during that period of time remains with me: “The man sitting before you never killed anyone.” During a previous interview with him, Theodore Bundy had described to me in detail several of the murders he had committed. I made a clinical decision: I chose not to point out the discrepancy between our two interviews. Alone in a room with a serial killer is neither the time nor the place to quibble about inconsistencies.
I used to be relatively fearless. I did not think twice about interviewing violent people all by myself. I figured, if I didn’t threaten them, they would not hurt me. As I reflect on this patently idiotic assumption, I like to think that it is experience and not just middle age that has made me more cautious. I have learned a lot from the rogues gallery Jonathan and I have seen. Books can tell you how to interview, what kinds of questions to ask; supervisors and instructors can provide advice; but there’s nothing quite like delinquents and criminals to teach you about talking with violent people. Timing matters.
I remember one of my first teachers. He was neither a serial murderer nor even an adult. He was a repeatedly assaultive adolescent boy who, because of his violent acts, was incarcerated in the secure unit of a juvenile correctional institution in Connecticut. The two of us were alone in a small room, just off the main corridor of the unit. There were no guards or picture windows. I don’t recall exactly what we were discussing—whatever it was seemed to be making the boy increasingly agitated. Nothing I said made him comfortable, and long silences made things worse. When he could no longer sit still, he began to walk back and forth along the far wall of the room, opposite the door. My chair was nearest the exit. As his pace quickened, he mumbled to himself and began to punch his right hand into his left.
I rose from my chair and scooped up my papers. “I think we’ve talked enough for one day. Let’s stop now and talk again tomorrow. Maybe next week.” I tried to sound casual as I slowly inched my way toward the door. I turned the knob gently, opened the door, and slipped out. The boy followed me. I could feel him behind me. The next thing I knew, I heard a sharp crack behind me, like the sound of a thick branch splitting. I wheeled around in time to see another inmate, who had been walking down the corridor, minding his own business, and who happened to be passing our way, fall to the floor. I was dumbstruck. Had I not ended our meeting when I did, I surely would have been the one on the floor with a broken jaw. When I was able to speak, I asked simply, “Why did you do that?”
“He called me a motherfucker,” came the instantaneous reply.
No one had said a word. Nevertheless, the boy was convinced he had been insulted. In this case (as subsequently with Theodore Bundy), I did not challenge his perception. With any luck, I would have time later on to explore what had happened and why. Jonathan and I have learned never to argue with paranoid misperceptions. It doesn’t work. Paranoia—the unwarranted sense that one is being threatened, endangered, disrespected—is probably the most common symptom fueling recurrent acts of violence. Jonathan and I have found that this is as true of violent juvenile delinquents as it is of violent adult criminals. This does not mean that most violent people are schizophrenic. As Jonathan and I teach our trainees at Georgetown and Bellevue, paranoia is characteristic of almost any neuropsychiatric disorder: schizophrenia, mania, depression, brain damage, seizures, alcoholism, senility, and more. It can emerge whenever something goes awry in the brain. Paranoia must have strong survival value. Doctors who fail to appreciate this basic psychiatric truth get hurt; some wind up dead.
Fortunately, most prisons allow lawyers to sit in on diagnostic interviews with inmates. The presence of another person in the room, while not diminishing paranoia, helps keep rageful feelings and violent behaviors in check. There are other advantages than just safety to having a lawyer at interviews. Jonathan and I insist that the lawyers with whom we work observe what happens in our interviews: what we do, what we say, what we see, and what we hear. Some of the phenomena that come to light are so unusual, so bizarre, that they must be seen to be believed.
Prisons in Georgia, we have discovered, are different. In Georgia, defense lawyers are not allowed to be present during psychiatric evaluations of inmates. At least that has been our experience at the state penitentiary.
Once, when I came to Georgia to examine a young man on death row, although the lawyer was not allowed to join me, the prison offered to station a guard inside the room during the interview. This was obviously unacceptable. No inmate will tell you much about his feelings or symptoms, much less about a murder he may have committed, with a prison guard breathing down his neck. On that occasion I decided to ignore my own basic rule of safety, and I met alone in a locked cell with the condemned boy. The inmate had been a juvenile when he was tried and sentenced to death. His victim, as I recall, was a violent, abusive relative. Otherwise, compared to most of the death row inmates we have seen, the boy’s record was pretty clean. People who do in family members tend, for the most part, not to be indiscriminately violent. In fact, it was hard to understand why this particular young man had been sentenced to death in the first place. I had seen far more dangerous delinquents at the correctional school in Connecticut. It would take me years to appreciate the fact that the trial lawyer has lots more to do with who gets The Chair than does the nature of the crime. Anyway, I felt pretty safe with the young inmate; therefore, with only mild trepidations, I met alone with him.
The interview went smoothly. In fact, as I recall, neither of us felt any uneasiness until I asked a question about discipline at home. Reluctantly, the young man revealed some of his stepfather’s favorite punishments.
“He used to make us do the dead cockroach.”
“The dead cockroach?”
“He made us lie on the floor on our backs with our bare feet in the air. We had to stay that way. It seemed like hours. If your feet started to go down, he would beat you on the soles with a switch.”
Anyone facing execution can be expected to exaggerate, if not downright lie. I was skeptical. I needed proof. Therefore, I asked the young man to remove his shoes and socks. I looked: the soles of his feet were covered with scars.
In the course of the interview, I learned that the boy’s father had also beaten him on the buttocks repeatedly and mercilessly. Sometimes he drew blood. Those kinds of punishments constitute possible mitigating circumstances. But in this boy’s case, the issue of child abuse had never been raised, either during his trial or at the time of sentencing. It might not be too late to introduce this information on appeal, but I needed more objective evidence of it.
When a physical examination is necessary, an attorney can act as chaperone. But in Georgia, attorneys are banished from evaluations. The likelihood that anyone else would try to verify this history of abuse prior to the boy’s execution was remote. On the other hand, I did not generally perform physical examinations on the backsides of murderers while locked up, alone with them, in dimly lit cells. I had to decide: safety and modesty versus documentation and mitigation. Then and there, in the dim light of the cell-cum-examining room of the Georgia State Penitentiary, the boy lowered his prison-issue drawers. I had no camera, but I did my best to draw a diagram of the shiny, faded, white scars that criss-crossed the flesh of his buttocks. Neither of us was embarrassed. On death row, modesty is a luxury no one can afford.
My next case in Georgia involved the psychiatric evaluation of a notorious serial murderer. Accounts I had read of his crimes indicated that I shared certain physical attributes with his victims. In that case, when the warden refused to allow the man’s attorney (or anyone else except a guard) in the cell with me, I demurred. I was forced to examine him in a dark visitor’s area, separated by a dense screen and unable to see or hear very much. I had broken a rule once before in Georgia; I had allowed myself to be locked in a room alone with the condemned boy with scars on his feet and buttocks. I had examined his bare behind and gotten away with it. In the case of this serial killer, I was not about to push my luck.
Over the past twenty years, Jonathan and I have come to realize that, if studying homicidal individuals is a science, communicating with them is an art. To do the former requires the latter. Anyone who would do research on murderers must, therefore, master the art of talking with them. The following are essentials: (1) the temperament to avoid locking horns; (2) the restraint at crucial moments to keep one’s mouth shut; (3) the sensitivity to discern when to break a silence; and (4) the intuition to sense when to end an interview. The last is the most important. Failure to master it could cut short an otherwise promising career in the field of violence research.
I like to watch Jonathan interview a murderer. He conveys a quiet confidence. His body language says, “I won’t hurt you. You won’t hurt me. We have work to do together.” Adopting this posture is hard for many men; in my experience it comes more naturally to women. I suspect that some of the same biological and societal factors that make men, as a group, about nine times as homicidal as women also explain the greater difficulty some male doctors have relating to violent men. Men are more confrontational. They don’t like to have the wool pulled over their eyes. When faced with a violent criminal, they need to establish from the outset just who is boss. Unfortunately, many repeatedly violent inmates have had more than their share of difficulty with bosses. In fact, a fair proportion of their victims have either been bosses or have been perceived as such. One need look no further than recent newspaper accounts of the behaviors of disgruntled postal workers and fast-food chain employees for confirmation of this fact of life. A diagnostic interview with a murderer is just not the right setting in which to rekindle these kinds of unresolved conflicts. Besides, interviews are not contests and there can be no bosses. Good interviews are collaborative; the minute an inmate senses competition, the collaboration ends.
No psychiatrist, male or female, likes to be fooled. On the other hand, violent felons do not have a reputation for candor. Certainly no psychiatrist in his or her right mind believes everything a violent inmate says. Women are just as likely as men to recognize contradictions and confabulations. The difference is, men are more likely to confront them head on. Women wait and listen. We don’t forget; we simply hold off until the time is right to address them. Suppose, for example, that, as I sat alone with Theodore Bundy, I had confronted him with the discrepancies between his stories: “But, Mr. Bundy, last time I talked with you you told me you had killed …” Not a good idea. Based on the years I worked on his case, not a good idea at all.
There are excellent reasons other than just safety for mastering an inquisitive, not an inquisitorial, style. For one, not all inconsistencies reflect lying. In the case of murderers, there are usually numerous psychiatric and neurologic reasons why memory may fluctuate and stories may vary. If Jonathan and I always dismissed memory lapses and contradictions as lies, we would overlook valuable clues to the nature of many violent acts.
I would characterize my own style of interviewing murderers as matter-of-fact. To that extent, it differs little from my style with any other patient. I roll up my sleeves, literally and figuratively, and plunge into the task of trying to understand. I am in no hurry. It takes more than a couple of hours to understand another human being.
At the start of our interviews, both Jonathan and I try to stick to pretty ordinary, nonthreatening questions. Where were you born? Who raised you? What was school like for you? We ask in detail about medical problems, accidents, injuries, illnesses. They matter. There will be lots of time later to explore more charged topics like feelings, attitudes, temper, and, of course, inconsistencies. We usually leave the topic of murder for late in the interview. Violent offenders need lots of time to decide whether or not we can be trusted with this kind of information. We can wait.
After two decades of working together, our interviewing styles are remarkably similar. We have shared our knowledge and expertise so often that we can no longer be certain exactly which aspects of the interview each of us contributed. However, if our clinical approaches are similar, our philosophical positions are not.
My own way of perceiving myself vis-à-vis the rest of the world was clarified for me years ago, on a train from New York City to Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was returning to college, and my father had bought me a seat in a parlor car. There I found myself seated next to Paul Tillich, the theologian and Harvard professor. He was a friendly man (especially to Radcliffe students, I would learn years later from his New York Times obituary). We struck up a conversation. To my surprise, I discovered that his daughter, Miss Tillich, had been one of my English teachers. When I was in high school I had never heard of Paul Tillich. I learned it at Radcliffe, where everyone knew his name.
Paul Tillich and I talked nonstop from New York to Boston. We talked about the Ethical Culture Schools (where his daughter taught), about mysticism, about religion and philosophy. When we couldn’t get a cab, we lugged our suitcases to the subway and took the MTA into Cambridge together. Along the way, we somehow got onto the subject of witches. Professor Tillich introduced the topic.
“When you read about witches being burned at the stake, do you identify with the witch or with the people looking on?” he asked.
“The witch,” I replied instantly. I didn’t tell him that in my mind I also walked into the gas chambers at Auschwitz and up to the gallows at Nuremberg. In seventh grade, when I read A Tale of Two Cities, Madame Defarge knitted and watched the guillotine come down on my neck.
“How about you?” I asked.
“The crowd, of course,” came his response. I never found out why. Paul Tillich asked me to call him and we would go out to lunch together, but a week later, when I did, he had forgotten who I was. I did not forget him, nor did I forget his question.
Jonathan, I think, is more like Paul Tillich. He identifies with “the crowd,” with society at large. He, like most people, is confident of his ability to control his own actions. I think he is even a bit critical, maybe suspicious, of anyone who can’t. Hence we do not always see eye to eye.
Jonathan has few misgivings about the death penalty. I should amend that statement. When we started our work together on death row, he had no qualms whatsoever. Only after he evaluated a man on death row in Starke, Florida, who he was convinced was innocent, did he start having second thoughts. (I thought the man was guilty as hell.)
But by and large, Jonathan has always been concerned most for the public’s safety. Jonathan does not worry that some day, in a fit of rage, or during a nightmare, he himself might kill someone. He trusts his central nervous system. He worries rather that some day his testimony on behalf of a brain-damaged murderer might loose upon society another Jack the Ripper. Suppose that person goes free and kills again? Then, Jonathan feels, the blood will be on his hands. Jonathan cannot live with that possibility.
I, on the other hand, am haunted by the prospect of condemning to death a person whose upbringing and brain function have made it hard, if not impossible, for him to control his acts. Granted, the person may be a menace. I have no problem locking him up forever in a humane place and throwing away the key. Until we know how to treat such individuals, the public must be protected.
Whenever Jonathan and I debate these issues, neither of us will budge. Our relationship reminds me of Peter Medowar’s description of Reverend Smith and the Edinburgh housewives.* Reverend Smith, while perambulating the streets of Edinburgh, overheard a vehement argument between two housewives. When Smith looked up, he saw two women leaning out of their windows, shouting at each other across the narrow street that separated their buildings. Turning to his companion, Smith commented, “They can never agree, for they are arguing from different premises.” That’s us.
I am convinced that our different perspectives are in part biologically determined. Because of the inordinate length of time it takes me to finish a book, my tendency to spill coffee and bang into the corners of coffee tables, and my inability to perform well half the neurologic tests in Jonathan’s repertoire, I find myself identifying with the poor miscreants whose damaged brains and traumatic upbringings have somehow landed them behind bars.
Recently, because of excruciating pain in my neck and arm, I consulted an orthopedic surgeon. He spent a long time studying my X rays. Finally he spoke. “I see an injury here in the first three cervical vertebrae. It looks like the kind of injury you see in divers who hit the bottom of a pool.” He paused. “Were you ever dropped on your head?” he inquired. To the best of my knowledge I was not. But I empathize with those who have been.
Jonathan’s allegiances, in contrast, are with “the crowd,” the healthy, innocent victims on whom the criminals we evaluate prey. It is no wonder that he does not identify with our misbegotten inmates. First of all, Jonathan reads rapidly. His neck is in fine shape. He is bald, and the fine, rounded shape of his skull reveals that he could never have been dropped on it. And Jonathan can perform skillfully all of the neurologic tasks he requires of others. He can touch his finger to his nose with his eyes closed; balance for days on one foot; depress the lever of a tapping machine with his right and left index fingers dozens of times in ten seconds; he skips flawlessly. In fact, one of my only pleasures on a trip to death row is watching Jonathan try to teach a neurologically impaired murderer to skip. Guards in Texas and Florida gawk in wonder as they watch this six-foot-two professor prance gracefully around the examining room. Moreover, he has the sangfroid not to feel ridiculous doing it. We are very different from each other, Jonathan and I. That may be why we are a good team. I keep Jonathan in touch with the vulnerabilities of our violent patients; he keeps me in touch with the consequences of their acts.
* Peter Medowar, Pluto’s Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 103