Canto XI, ll. 79–84

Non ti rimembra di quelle parole	Do you not remember the words
con le quai la tua Etica pertratta	with which your Ethics treats so fully:
le tre disposizion che ‘l ciel non vole	the three dispositions that Heaven refuses
incontinenza, malizia e la matta	—incontinence, malice and mad bestiality?
bestialidade? E come incontinenza	and how incontinence offends God
men Dio offende e man biasimo accatta?	less, and acquires less blame?

We just examined cases of impulsive violence prompted primarily by motives such as jealousy, fury arising between sexual partners, or rage at specific individuals. Jealousy does not always involve a sexual triangle: men can sometimes be so jealous, within a family triangle, of the attention a new mother devotes to her child, as to kill either child or wife or both. In some of the examples, it was mental illness that had helped release the brakes on self-restraint.

Here we will turn our attention to crimes of impulse, particularly violent crimes carried out by people with a more distinct antisocial twist to their personalities. The persons we will confront here will be more likely than those we met earlier to stretch out their actions to include some planning after the fact, often to hide the evidence of what they have done. Hence their violence was born of an ungovernable impulse but was followed by what we might call malice afterthought. It's as though they were surprised and alarmed at their own violence and realized they could get into deep trouble if found out, so they do their best to hide their crime and escape justice.1 Their actions, that is, are not “purely” impulsive, such as we might see in the typical barroom brawl. Picture two strangers in a bar. One man might insult another; the second man breaks a chair over the first man's head—obviously with no malice aforethought: they didn't even know each other. And there are dozens of witnesses, so there's no way to drag the victim to a shallow grave and pretend innocence. In the absence of malice aforethought, what raises the specter of evil in the cases to be discussed here will be evil's other key ingredient: the horror evoked at the nature of the act—which will nearly always be one of violence. There is something wildly excessive, “over the top,” about the violence described in this chapter. Often enough, our sense of shock will be a reaction to the gruesomeness of the violence, as, for example, in the dismemberment of a child. Occasionally, we will be shocked at the sheer number of victims (as in a mass murder case), even if each died a painless death via a bullet to the head. In still other cases, what we respond to is the innocence, the beauty, or the social importance of the victim, as in the murder of a nun, well-known actresses like Rebecca Schaeffer and Sharon Tate, or a prominent and revered figure like Martin Luther King Jr. The attempted murder of Pope John Paul II by hired gun Mehmet Ağca in 1981 had the same effect.

Although the term impulsive captures the essence of these crimes, some authors prefer the term reactive;2 they also speak of proactive, where we might prefer words like premeditated, cold-blooded, “with malice aforethought,” or instrumental. All the latter seem preferable to proactive, which is usually reserved for positive actions, such as reading the state driver's manual before taking the written licensure test. Another distinguishing feature of the persons described in this chapter is that they are not career criminals, even though they have some antisocial traits. The crimes are “one-offs” (unique acts, that is, occurring once in the person's lifetime) that struck all those who knew them as totally out of character. Neighbors and acquaintances will be quoted in the media as saying, “I can't believe he did that,” or “That isn't the person I've known all these years,” as though the evil that lurks in the minds of men—a phrase we are fond of saying about those who repeatedly violate social norms—has no relevance to the kindly man next door who took an axe to his wife, or to the sweet, churchgoing adolescent cheerleader who one days shoots to death her whole family. I believe we say these things partly because it is truly bewildering that seemingly ordinary folk can in a moment of intolerable stress commit mayhem, mutilation, or murder—where Nature and all the rules we live by can be turned upside down in a millisecond.

The other reason we find these acts inexplicable is, I suspect, because we need to reassure ourselves that not even under the greatest imaginable stress could we descend to violence of that sort. And so with this reaction, we put an earth's diameter of distance, psychologically speaking, between ourselves and “those” people. In the sections that follow I will offer examples of these impulsive or “reactive” acts, acts that inspired many to pronounce them “evil”—where the underlying motives vary over a wide range: marital conflict, hate crimes, parental cruelty, school shooting, romantic rejection, and the like. In contrast to attacks on strangers, as in rape or serial sexual homicide, the bulk of the crimes in this chapter concern violence against known persons, especially intimates.

To find the stories that illustrate this theme of reactive violence in (primarily) antisocial persons, I have had to rely mostly on articles in newspapers and magazines. The short-tempered men and women depicted here are not evil enough long enough to have stimulated some true-crime author to delve deeply into their lives and make a book out of their nefarious exploits. Besides, the very impulsive nature of the violence in these cases usually coincided with carelessness, one might even say sloppiness, in any attempt at concealment. Either that, or the perpetrator simply made no attempt at concealment. Most were easily caught, so that there was little in the way of the laborious and ingenious detective work that lends itself to an absorbing book-length account, even if the crime itself was not so spectacular. Instead, these stories easily made the front pages of the tabloids, held the public's attention for three or four days, and then vanished from the press altogether, to be replaced by a still fresher horror story from the day before. As we would expect, the driving forces behind reactive violence are emotions carrying a short fuse: passion and hatred. Translated into the language of the Seven Deadly Sins, this means Lust and Anger. Pride and Envy can sometimes ignite anger intense enough to set off a violent impulse. In crimes of passion, Greed will only rarely be a motive.

There was an incident in March of 2008 where radical environmentalists calling themselves ELF (for Earth Liberation Front) torched three homes, burning them to the ground. Each home was valued at about two million dollars. Supposedly the homes were not sufficiently “green” (that is, environmentally friendly). Whether or not the radicals were aware of it, all of the newly constructed homes were built with all manner of heat-conserving and other environmentally respectful devices. As a psychiatrist, I cannot help thinking that the “green” problem here was being green with envy. If we could tap the innermost layers of these self-righteous torchbearers, I have a hunch that their ecoterrorism was covering up a secret desire to live in such beautiful (and environmentally friendly!) houses themselves. Luckily, the homes were not even occupied and no one was hurt, so the crime stopped short of being called “evil”; merely, “outrageous.”3

In the next section I will give examples covering a broad range of impulsive/reactive crimes of violence. Because, as noted earlier, the material is derived more from the media than from full-length biographies, less is known about the early lives of the participants in these actions. Most appear not to have had previous encounters with the law. For these reasons it is not easy to assign them confidently to one or another category in the Gradations of Evil scale. The categories that seem relevant to the majority of these examples are 6 (impetuous hotheaded murderers, yet without marked psychopathic traits) through 10 (killers of people “in the way”; marked egocentricity). The adjectives evil, depraved, heinous, and monstrous were used by many of the journalists and reporters whose accounts I relied on for my information. Since a numerical grading is less reliable for these examples, it seemed more useful to present them alphabetically according to motive or type of crime.

ENVY

There are not so many examples of spur-of-the-moment murders prompted by envy, but one that stands out in my experience is that of a secretary in London who killed her employer. The secretary had emigrated from Canada to accept the position of administrative assistant. Cecile, a woman of no mean attractiveness herself, was thirty-three at the time and was considered “bewitching” by the reports, and able to “wrap men around her little finger.” She was prettier than her employer, a woman in the banking industry who was seven years younger. But her advantages did not extend beyond her looks, for she had come from humble circumstances and was working for a wage she regarded as meager, whereas her employer had gone to the best schools, came from a prestigious family, and now had a very lucrative position. We know mostly Cecile's side of the story, but she is said to have been filled with “hatred and envy” toward the younger woman, her boss. The final confrontation, in the spring of 2003, was apparently sparked by a disagreement about her salary. Cecile felt she deserved a substantial raise; her boss firmly refused. Cecile then grabbed a heavy brass paperweight and bludgeoned her boss to death, fracturing her skull in several places. The younger woman had some broken fingers at autopsy, which were believed to be defensive wounds from trying to fend off the blows. Even the pathologist was moved to comment that the wounds were “monstrous.” The large number of fracture sites, representing a kind of “overkill,” suggests an attack precipitated by rage. The rage factor raised the question of possible “diminished responsibility” or “temporary insanity.” By the time of her trial, however, Cecile was described as “ice cold” and in full possession of her senses. The absence of any previous brushes with the law, let alone outbursts of violence, was a mitigating circumstance.

Cecile's defense attorney succeeded in winning a reduction of the sentence to manslaughter partly because of her “clean record” in the past and also on the basis of “irresistible impulse.” This type of defense is similar to that in certain US states in which the sentence falls short of an outright insanity plea and relies instead on an argument for “diminished responsibility” with the presumption that the impulse was impossible to control. In a famous 1994 case, Lorena Bobbitt was found not guilty after her defense attorney argued it was an irresistible impulse that led her, in June of 1993, to cut off her husband's penis. Lorena was able to marshal evidence that her husband had been unfaithful, as well as being physically, sexually, and emotionally abusive toward her, which meant that her violence had followed great provocation.4 There was no indication Cecile had been so provoked, which made her a less sympathetic figure at trial. Granted that the attack was particularly brutal, the notoriety of the case and the readiness of the press to use the term evil (depraved, monstrous, savage) may have reflected in part the social prominence of the victim. Cecile belongs in Category 8 on the scale, showing “smoldering rage but without psychopathic personality.”

FAMILICIDE

The murder of an entire family is more often a crime of impulse than of long premeditation; the motive will likely be a smoldering anger at one key member of the family that ignites into violence over some “last straw.” Sometimes, the motive is to protect the perpetrator from some deep humiliation, such as the exposure of an embarrassing secret. The case of Eugene Simmons is an example. Simmons was a marine sergeant who killed twelve family members when the news surfaced of his having sired a child by his own daughter.5 This puts Simmons in the category of 10 on the Gradations of Evil scale.

Rarer still is the motive of greed in a familial crime of passion, as in the case of Jeremy Bamber, the adopted son of a wealthy British family, who hoped to be the sole remaining legatee.⁶ A more typical case is that of Brian Britton—an adolescent of sixteen, who in 1989 killed his parents and younger brother in upstate New York. The inciting incident seemed to have been a quarrel over his schoolwork. Brian had never been in trouble with the law, though he did have a reputation at school for his obsession with guns and death. He had written an essay about his summer vacation, mentioning that he shot a bird out of a tree and ran his bicycle over a cat. His girlfriend insisted he was a “nonviolent kid and didn't really like guns,”⁷ but others remembered him differently. At one point, his parents had taken him to a psychologist. His father used to come home for lunch to make sure nothing was wrong with “Rambo”—the name Brian took for himself after watching Sylvester Stallone in the movie of that name, where Stallone played the part of a gun-toting tough guy.

An extraordinary, if not unique, case in the annals of familicide is that of Jean-Claude Romand. The only child of a couple from the Lyon area in France, Jean-Claude took great pains to conceal any bad news from his emotionally fragile mother. If he did poorly on an exam, he lied and said he did well. Somehow he got into medical school, but kept failing the third-year exam for ten years in a row, all the while making up fantastic excuses to the school authorities (that he had cancer, for example) and never actually finishing. He then lied to his parents, saying he had gotten his MD and now had a post across the border in Geneva with the World Health Organization. This was Act One in the bizarre tragedy of Romand's life.

Act Two: Now married, he told his wife he had a “top secret” job, such that she could not phone him at work. The money he brought home didn't come from work but rather from the money his parents gave him to invest for them—which he simply used for himself. He would drive off each morning as if to go to work, but he would park his car near the woods, read until the late afternoon, and then return at a time that would not arouse suspicion. By swindling money from his parents, in-laws, and friends to “invest,” he kept the charade going for twenty years, with no one the wiser. All this came tumbling down when he began an affair with a woman in Paris. That set the stage for the third and final act.

Jean-Claude persuaded his mistress to let him take care of the proceeds from the sale of her property—money he instead used to buy a Mercedes and expensive baubles for her. When he eventually went broke, she worried something was amiss. She asked for her 900,000 francs, but he had gone through it all. He tried to strangle her, but she survived. Jean-Claude's wife began to realize he had lied to her about another matter. When his father-in-law demanded the money he had lent him, Jean-Claude pushed him down the stairs, killing him. He then got hold of his father's rifle and shot to death first his two children, then his wife, and finally his parents. After the impulse murders, the “malice afterthought” kicked in. He used accelerants to burn down his house to make it look as if his family had simply died in a fire. Curtain closed.

His imposture discovered, he made a half-hearted attempt at suicide by swallowing a few sleeping pills that were way beyond their shelf life. Sentenced to life without parole, Romand's earliest release date is 2015. Romand emerges as the consummate con artist, able to live the high life for two decades before his recklessness brought the curtain down. Never vicious until the end, he lived like the elegant jewel thieves in the movies of the 1930s: suave, charming, and, as far as his friends could tell, a good host, good husband, and good father.8

I put Romand's case under the heading of “familicide,” but it was not easy to categorize, since it touched on so many other themes. The most appropriate category on the scale would be 10. From the Seven Deadly Sins alone, almost all were relevant: Pride (in maintaining a false front for twenty years), Envy (of those who really were capable of work), Greed (in swindling huge sums from everyone he knew), Sloth (never earning an honest franc in his life), Lust (the disastrous affair), and Anger (at the mistress and father-in-law demanding their money back). From what I read, he was innocent of Gluttony.

FELONY MURDER

Though murder is already a felony, a murder committed during the act of another crime (usually robbery) is often called “felony murder.” Murders of this sort may earn the maximum sentence, including the death penalty. In November of 2006 actress Adrienne Shelley was found hanging in her Greenwich Village office in New York. Her death looked at first like a suicide, though there seemed to be no reason at all for this successful actress and mother to take her own life. The true story came to light within a few days. A nineteen-year-old illegal immigrant, Diego Pilco, had been renovating the apartment below Shelley's. He was making a lot of noise, which led to Shelley to come downstairs and complain. Pilco became panicky that she would complain to the police and he would be deported back to Ecuador.9 Hot-tempered and in a fury he strangled Shelley and then staged the crime to make her death appear to be a suicide, hanging her body from a shower curtain rod. He confessed after police found Pilco's footprint in the victim's bathtub. The murder was clearly not premeditated: he never knew the woman existed until she came down to complain about the noise. But that act led to a spur-of-the-moment murder, followed by staging, as an afterthought. The murder became “high profile” because of the victim's fame, which in turn gave the murder an extra measure of shock, a greater appearance of evil. The appropriate category on the scale is 6.

HATE CRIME

The exclamation “evil!” will most readily be pronounced when the violence done to a celebrity or other highly respected figure¹⁰ is done by a similarly well-known figure.¹¹ It is also used when there are many victims (as in the case of mass murder or serial homicide), or when the violence is extremely brutal, especially if the victim is a woman or a child. Hate crimes are similarly repugnant, perhaps because of the wide gulf that separates the malevolence of the perpetrator from the innocence of the victim, not to mention the total violation of our most cherished values of fairness and equality. Impulse is seldom a part of hate crimes, since premeditation and considerable planning are usually preludes to the final act. But occasionally a bigot with plenty of hatred built up over a long time hasn't really contemplated actual violence, until, that is, he (it is always a “he”) is faced with an unanticipated event, at which point he swings into action.

Such appears to be the case with white supremacist Benjamin Smith,12 whose rampage against Jews, blacks, Asians, gays, and other targets led to the murder of two and the wounding of a dozen others during the first days of July 1999—just two months after the Columbine, Colorado, school massacre.¹³ Smith, who changed his name from Benjamin to August so as not to sound too “Jewish,” was a follower of Matthew Hale, founder of the white supremacist hate group the World Church of the Creator. Hale allegedly preached nonviolence, though his incendiary “sermons” could easily serve as springboards to violence. But Smith, who came from a privileged (and nonabusive) background, had problems that preexisted his exposure to Matthew Hale. He got into trouble right away in college—for voyeurism and pot smoking; morbidly jealous of his girlfriend, he struck her and ended up with a restraining order against him. Smith finally quit college in January 1999, just as the administration was about to dismiss him. Somehow he got hold of a gun (because of the restraining order, he was unable to acquire one legally), but at first had no definite intention of shooting any “mud people”—the phrase of choice for the despicable “others,” according to Hale and his followers. The stimulus for Smith's impulsive murders was the denial on July 2, 1999, of the Illinois State Bar Association to grant his hero, Hale, a law license on the grounds of moral deficiency.¹⁴ Smith's rampage began that very day, with his shooting several Orthodox Jews (who survived), a black basketball coach (who died), and an Asian man (who survived). The next day he shot at several black people and a Chinese man. Then on July 4 he killed a Korean graduate student, finally putting his pistol under his chin and killing himself.

Mass murderers are a mysterious lot—all the more so in Smith's case, since, as far as we can tell, he came from a good family. Their usual fate is suicide just before capture or to be shot during a showdown with the police. Almost all have a paranoid personality, but how much of that is due to heredity and how much to adverse circumstances in early life can rarely be assessed properly. Smith's category on the scale is 13.

KIDNAP

The majority of kidnappings are not impulsive at all: the motive is greed, and the act is planned long in advance. Less common is kidnapping for sexual purposes, for example, abducting a child who may be raped and then murdered or in some cases kept alive as an unwilling sex mate for periods stretching up to a decade or more.15 This latter variety always involves careful planning. Occasionally one hears of a lonely, childless woman snatching an infant from its pram outside a shopping mall or some other public place. This may at first seem impulsive, but she has likely thought for some time about abducting another woman's child and moves quickly into action when she finds a baby left briefly unattended. All these varieties of kidnapping are among the most detested of crimes, for which reason “kidnap” (the shorter name given to the crime in legal circles) shares with premeditated murder and treason top billing as a death penalty case wherever capital punishment is still enforced. These crimes smack of evil, even when they do not end in death.

A more “understandable” motive for kidnap (as I shall refer to it) is seen now and again in bitter custody cases, where one parent violates the custody agreement and takes a child away from the custodial parent. It is rare for the child to be killed in these situations. The abducting parent may claim that the child is being “rescued” from an unfavorable environment, though less than honorable motives are often at play—such as the wish to avoid child-support payments. Sheer spite often plays an important role as well. The needle on the evil meter doesn't swing so far in these cases, since the court can usually be relied upon to restore the child to the proper home and parent.

There are rare instances where kidnap in a custody battle reaches mythic proportions. Even in Greek mythology, when Hades kidnapped Demeter's beautiful daughter, Persephone, she was at least not his daughter: his aim was to marry her. But when in 1976 Eric Douglas Nielsen kidnapped his twenty-one-month-old daughter, Genevieve—on Mother's Day—he promptly disappeared with her the day before the court was to make the mother's custodianship official.16 The mother, Laura Gooder, was not to learn of her daughter's whereabouts until Mother's Day twenty-nine years later. We don't know what soured the relationship between these high school sweethearts who had married in 1970. We do know that Laura endured incalculable suffering when her daughter and ex-husband vanished. The kidnap appeared at first to be opportunistic and impulsive: Nielsen took Genevieve on what was supposed to be an overnight visit. But he then fled halfway across the country, changed his name—and his daughter's—and avoided using his Social Security number. He was thought to have had the help of his family in California; it is hard to imagine how he could have evaded detection all those years without assistance from someone.

Thanks to dogged detective work, Genevieve was finally located in Arizona, where her father was in prison on unrelated charges. Nielsen, to compound the evil of the decades-long disappearance, had told Genevieve that her mother had “died in a car accident,” so she had no idea her mother was still alive. The case is a monument to selfishness: Nielsen was willing to deny a mother her infant child and to deny the child her mother. As to the crime of kidnap, the story is unique—the kind books are written about. But, to safeguard Genevieve's psychological well-being, no book should ever be written about her story, as she was already quite traumatized to discover she was not who she thought she was; indeed, that nothing about her life was as she thought it was, that her father was a liar and a criminal, and that her identity must now undergo a complete overhaul. It is difficult to find the appropriate place for this father in the Gradations scale, since it was developed primarily to deal with murder cases. But Category 14 is the most appropriate place for him: “ruthlessly self-centered psychopathic schemers,” since he planned, for utterly selfish reasons, to take his child permanently away from her mother, at a time when she was still a baby and in great need of a mother's tender care.

MARITAL CONFLICT

Psychiatrists who study life events know that divorce and marital conflict rank near the top of all stressful situations, just below that of losing a child. Loss of a spouse or irresolvable marital conflict also create intense stress. The latter can be a breeding ground for violence, as every police officer knows when called upon to answer a 911 call about “domestic dispute.” Furthermore, when violence breaks out, it is usually on impulse: a disagreement or a jealous accusation that leads to an argument, an argument that goes from words to lightning-fast action that is unplanned and unforeseen at the beginning. I include under this heading partners in an intimate relationship who are living together, whether married or not. The Australians have a nice term for nonmarried partners: “de facto”—meaning that the two are a couple in fact, though not in law (in other words, not “de jure”). Impulse murders in this group are seldom written up in books, because they do not elicit as much interest as do the more cunningly planned partner murders. This is especially so in cases where the murder is more “diabolical,” more “evil” because, say, a hit man is hired or there is staging or some other form of pretended innocence by a partner who is “too clever by half” (and is ultimately caught anyway).

The New York City case of Herbert and Barbara Weinstein was clearly of the impulsive rather than the planned variety. In January of 1991 Barbara was found dead on the sidewalk by their posh East Side apartment—an apparent suicide. Herbert was sixty-five at the time, his wife, fifty-six.17 This was a second marriage for both, and by all appearances, a happy one. No one who knew them saw any signs of discord, much less fighting. They were comfortably off, even with Herbert's love of gambling, which he was able to keep under control. There seemed to be no reason why Barbara would commit suicide. The autopsy confirmed what the police had suspected: she had been strangled first and was then thrown out the window of their twelfth-story apartment in her husband's effort to make the murder—to which he quickly confessed—look like suicide. Defenestration¹⁸ to disguise murder is rare enough, but there was yet another intriguing aspect to the case. Perhaps because of his age and the “out-of-character” quality of the murder, Mr. Weinstein, at the advice of his defense attorneys, underwent brain examination by PET-scan (positron emission tomography). The scan showed a large brain cyst that encroached on the front and middle (fronto-temporal) sections of his brain on the left side. I will have more to say about the implications of such an abnormality in the section on neuroscience, but suffice it to say at this point that the damage in that area was believed capable of impairing his function, not to the level of legal insanity (not knowing right from wrong), but to the level of being less able to think properly and less able to retain self-control when irritated. A brain abnormality in that area likely shortened his fuse, which may even have remained otherwise unlit. This was a pretty controversial matter when the case was argued in 1991; the judge allowed the defense team to tell the jury about the cyst, but he could not tell them that it was associated with the violence. The prosecution, worried that the jury—even with that little knowledge—would not convict for murder, opted for a plea bargain down to manslaughter.19 As for what triggered the murder in the first place, this remains a mystery. Because Mr. Weinstein was not psychopathic, his action would correspond most closely to Category 7 on the Gradations scale, granted that his brain abnormality would be a mitigating factor.

The case of Norman Harrell in Washington, DC, also arose out of marital conflict or, rather, conflict between a woman and her former “de facto” partner. The woman, Diane Hawkins, forty-two at the time of her death, was considered sweet and loving by all who knew her. She had six children: three by her first de facto, and one each by three other men, including Harrell's son, Rasheen. A truck driver with a steady job, Norman Harrell had a checkered past: two arrests for armed robbery in his youth and a rape charge that was later dropped. He was pathologically jealous, and as a man of six feet five (196 cm), he was an imposing and generally intimidating figure. Several of the women he had been with and who had borne his children had left him because of his physical abusiveness. He seemed allergic to the notion of child support, and when one of the women demanded a small sum for their daughter, she ultimately had to take him to court to have his wages garnished. A few years later, Diane found herself in the same situation. In May of 1993, the day before she was scheduled to take Harrell to court where he would be forced to make child support payments, he stopped by her house. A skilled hunter and a man familiar with knives (which he carried with him at all times), Harrell in a fit of rage stabbed Diane to death and then trussed her like a deer—eviscerating her and carving the heart out of her chest cavity. One of Diane's daughters, twelve-year-old Katrina, was upstairs and aware of all the commotion in the living room. Harrell went up to the girl's room and killed her in the same fashion, later tossing her heart somewhere in the woods (it was never located). Though Harrell was immediately identified as the suspect, he denied any involvement. The prosecutor in the case, Kevil Flynn, became obsessed with the murders, in no small measure because of the horrifying way Harrell vented his rage and hatred.20 DNA and blood-spatter analysis provided the proof that led to his conviction and a sixty-year sentence. Harrell professes innocence to this day. In his summary of the case, Flynn commented that “Norman Harrell didn't do these murders because he was evil; he was evil because he did them.” Here Flynn wished to emphasize that Harrell was not “born” evil—no one is—but rather that Harrell became identified as someone whose actions were evil once the community became aware of their horrifying nature.²¹ The category for this crime is 16.

PARENTAL CRUELTY

Many of the parental cruelty cases arise in homes where there is a stepparent. We know from studies of child murder that the risk of a child dying at the hands of a stepparent is many times higher than the risk of murder by a biological parent.²² Worse still is the situation where a woman has a child by a previous union and now lives with a boyfriend (in a relationship not likely to lead to marriage). The boyfriend's chief interest is in pursuing a sexual relationship with the woman. The child is all too often just a nuisance he has to put up with in order to secure the woman's sexual favors. In this situation, too many of us behave not so differently from other social species. In lion prides, for example, if a new male takes over a pride, he may kill the cubs that had been sired by his predecessor and create a new family of cubs by mating with the various lionesses.²³ All the resulting cubs will then be his.²⁴ This is Nature's way. Parents are less likely to harm offspring that carry their DNA than that of strangers. The fairy tales about the wicked stepmother were not written to malign women who took on that role; the stories reflect the unfortunate likelihood that a child will receive worse treatment from a mother (or father) who is not the birth parent.25 By the same token the risk for incest involving a female child is considerably greater (by a factor of 6 or 7)²⁶ when the adult is the child's stepfather with no blood tie to the girl.

It must be stressed that most couples who go through the steps of adopting a child have a sincere commitment to the welfare of that child and a strong predisposition to love the child as though it were their own biologically. But now and again there are exceptions where grievous harm is done to the foster or adopted child: harm that may be physical, sexual, psychological, or a combination of those. Here, under the heading of parental cruelty, we concentrate on cruelty meted out for some trivial failing or indiscretion on the child's part that would never result in such retaliation from a calmer parent. The methodically cruel parents who enslave or torture their children over prolonged periods without provocation will be discussed in a later chapter, dedicated to evil writ large.

The Zeigler Case

One of the more harrowing examples of impulsive parental cruelty is the case in Texas of a beautiful blonde toddler of two whose body washed ashore in Galveston Bay in late October of 2007. The little girl's body itself did not wash ashore as such; rather, it was the storage container in which her body had been placed that ended up on an uninhabited island within the bay. A fisherman chanced to find the bag—and the body within it; he then notified the authorities. The as yet unidentified body, bearing skull fractures in three places, was at first called “Baby Grace.” A sketch was made of the girl, which was shown later to the paternal grandmother, Sheryl Sawyers, who lived in Ohio. She recognized the sketch as that of Riley Ann Sawyers, the girl her son, Robert Sawyers, had fathered two years before with Kimberly Trenor—then a girl of seventeen. After filing allegations of domestic violence against Robert, Kimberly, having gained custody, later moved with Riley Ann to Texas. Early in 2007, while still in Ohio, Kimberly had struck up an acquaintance with a twenty-four-year-old Texan, Royce Zeigler, whom she had met in cyberspace in an online game called World of Warcraft. He sent her expensive gifts while she was still living with Robert. It was on the strength of this budding relationship that Kim relocated to Texas, where in the late spring she married Royce, a technician in the oil industry. Come the summer of 2007 no one had seen Riley Ann; Kim told people, including her relatives, that a “social worker” had taken the girl, for reasons never specified, back to Ohio.

The real story was quite different. Unaccustomed to the norms of fatherly behavior toward a girl of two, Zeigler brought to this new assignment a mindset more appropriate to that of a marine sergeant burdened with the task of whipping into shape a rebellious troop of raw recruits. He demanded that Riley Ann answer him with “Yes, Sir” and “No, Sir”; she was always to preface any request with “Please.” But as a girl of two, rather than a man of two-and-twenty, Riley Ann's responses sometimes fell short of her stepfather's orders, on which occasions Zeigler insisted that Kimberly spank the girl with a belt. It appears that Riley Ann's behavior, even after these belt-reinforced lessons, improved only marginally. Zeigler then took matters into his own hands—literally—and set about teaching her a lesson she'd never forget. Or, as it turns out, never survive. We will not likely ever learn what childish peccadillo of Riley Ann's pushed Zeigler over the edge. But on July 24, 2007, he gave the girl what one journalist described as a “savage beating with a leather belt that left welts and bruises,”27 adding that, “as can be expected from a little girl being beaten by an evil step-father, she cried and cried.” That got Zeigler even more furious with the girl. Things escalated. He then filled a tub with water and—perhaps with the mother's participation—held Riley Ann's head under the water until she nearly lost consciousness, then let her up briefly for air and dunked her again. When he finished “waterboarding” the girl, Zeigler lifted her up by the hair and threw her across the room. Riley Ann's head hit hard against the tile floor, fracturing her skull and killing her. Fury-driven reaction—the impulsive torture and murder of a two-year-old girl—now gave way to planned action. Realizing that the old biblical shibboleth “Spare the rod and spoil the child”²⁸ has its limits, and that they had rather exceeded those limits, the two now went to the local Wal-Mart to purchase a plastic tote bag. Placing the girl's body in the tote bag, they then stored it in a shed in their backyard—for two months. It was during this time, in the fall of 2007, that Riley Ann's disappearance attracted attention. At the end of that two-month period, the couple dumped the bag—and its contents—into Galveston Bay, where it was found on October 29. The rest, as they say, is history.

At the time of the discovery of Riley Ann, Zeigler, with a belated chivalry, attempted suicide, stating that “my wife is innocent of the sins that I committed.”29 As is customary in these cases, his attorney put the blame on Kimberly; her attorney, on Royce. The matter is purely academic, since both mother and stepfather were complicitous in the girl's death. Both face stiff sentences in a Texas court. Once these sentences begin, they will have a long time in which to contemplate how the moment of blind rage that took the life of Riley Ann caused them to throw away the entire span of their remaining years: about fifty in Royce's case; sixty, in Kimberly's.³⁰ To the extent that Riley Ann was a “nuisance” to Zeigler—someone “in the way” of his life—Zeigler's crime would ordinarily fall under Category 10, though we don't know whether he had ever shown such cruelty in the past. But the element of torture actually makes Category 18 more appropriate.

RAGE IN THE MENTALLY ILL

In people with severe mental illness—schizophrenia or mania, for example—outbursts of violence are more apt to be of the impulsive rather than of the planned type. Because they sometimes suffer from bizarre delusions, schizophrenic persons in particular will on occasion commit acts of a shocking and repellent nature—acts that have a surreal quality, something beyond one's imagination and beyond what one has ever heard of before. This is where the idea of “evil” comes into the picture—until, that is, the public is made aware that the person in question is psychotic (the word crazy will more often be used) and for that reason not responsible for what was done. We have already discussed a few cases of this sort. Here is another example of an impulsive murder, with bizarre characteristics, committed by a mentally ill man.

In 1996 Kenneth Lee Pierrot Jr. of Beaumont, Texas, bludgeoned to death his sister, who was confined to a wheelchair because of cerebral palsy. He was then sent to a forensic hospital after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. In addition he had been smoking marijuana that had been laced with embalming fluid. He was released four months later, having been treated with appropriate medications to the point where he was no longer in the grips of psychotic thinking. Unfortunately, he was not steadfast about taking his medication, and during a period when he was not on his medication, he killed the six-year-old son of his girlfriend. In April of 2004 he smothered the boy and stuffed his body in an oven. In his haste, he left the oven off, so there were no signs of burning. When caught shortly thereafter, Pierrot yelled at the police that he was “sanctified by the blood of Jesus Christ” and was noted to have a “glaze in his eyes and a smile on his face.”31 Pertinent to the standpoint of motive was the fact that Pierrot was the biological father of a son by his girlfriend and was angry at the attention she gave to her older son by another man. The comparison will not be lost on the reader between the “daddy” lion's elimination of cubs sired by a previous male lion and Pierrot's murder of his girlfriend's son by a previous partner. Cases of this sort strain the legal system to the maximum: the prosecution argued (correctly) that Pierrot knew what he was doing and knew it was wrong. He killed the boy when everyone was asleep and then in the “afterthought” of the impulsive murder, fled the scene. Therefore he was not legally insane. Yet he was a chronically schizophrenic man who had been “crazy” (1) to suppose that all his girlfriend's attention should be devoted to their son only, and none to her other son, and (2) to think that the older boy deserved to die. The real issue was not whether he belonged in prison (where he was sentenced to sixty years) or in a forensic hospital, but that his level of dangerousness (previous murder, chronic psychosis, noncompliance with treatment) was so high that he needed to be kept in one or the other type of facility for a very long time; which type really wouldn't make much difference.

RAMPAGE

The characteristics of a rampage are violence, frenzy, recklessness, and destructiveness. When such a scenario involves victims, the word is reserved for cases in which several people are hurt or killed, rather than just one. Overturning and setting fire to a dozen cars during a riot (as happened in Paris when two boys fleeing the police were electrocuted after falling on a subway rail in 2005) would be considered a rampage, but the public would not be likely to call that evil, since no people were killed in the ensuing violence.

A rampage where people were targeted occurred in New York in 2006, when a homeless man, Kenny Alexis, paranoid and high on drugs, went on a crime spree, stabbing four people: two men and two women tourists who refused his sexual advances (and whom he called “whores”). The police mentioned “there is a possibility of him being deranged.”32 There was a record of a psychiatric hospitalization at Bridgewater in Boston a few months earlier, after he had committed several assaults. The psychiatrists there had declared him “competent to stand trial,” which merely means he was rational enough to be able to cooperate with his attorney. He was mentally ill, but how much his illness had to do with drug abuse and how much with his general mental state independent of any drugs is unclear. The nature and number of the stabbings Alexis had committed in New York were just the kind that inspires headlines with the word evil: in his case: “His Face Was Evil.”³³ His were impulsive acts of violence with neither premeditation nor attempt to cover up his traces afterward. Because of his severe limitations in function and his mental illness (whether primary or aggravated by drug abuse), his place on the Gradations scale falls in Category 13: Inadequate, rageful psychopaths, some committing murder.

REJECTED LOVER

One of the shortest time spans between an anger-inducing event and a retaliatory murder was that of the Happy Land Nightclub massacre that occurred on March 25, 1990—the day of the Honduran equivalent of Mardi Gras. Julio Gonzalez, a thirty-seven-year-old Cuban immigrant and warehouse worker, formerly an army deserter and ex-convict, had been rejected earlier that evening, this time once and for all, by his girlfriend of six years, Lydia Feliciano. Lydia was a hatcheck girl at the Happy Land, a club in the Bronx filled on that evening mostly with Honduran immigrants. To make matters worse, Julio had just been fired from his job and was now broke. Gonzalez, fueled on alcohol and machismo, then went out and bought—for one dollar—a gallon of gasoline, poured it on the only staircase (all other exits being illegally blocked to prevent freeloaders from gaining access), and lit a match. In the ensuing inferno eighty-seven people died—pretty much everyone who'd been in the dance club—except his main target, Lydia Feliciano. She knew of a seldom-used door and managed to escape, along with a few other patrons.

The firefighters who came upon the scene minutes later—but already too late—felt as though they had stumbled upon a Nazi gas chamber. Standing across the street from the holocaust was Gonzalez himself, watching until the firefighters arrived. Apprehended half a day later, Gonzalez, still smelling of gasoline from his soaked clothes, told the police, “[I]t looks like the devil got into me.” The evil of his act, depicted in the tabloid headlines as “Date with the Devil” and “The Monster,”34 was due mainly to the huge number of victims. Mercifully, most died fairly quickly of smoke inhalation. It was the worst fire in New York since the famous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that occurred seventy-nine years before, on the same day. Though Gonzalez walked back to his apartment after the fire, he made no effort to hide from the authorities and was remorseful when confronted—even more so as he imagined at first that he had killed Lydia. At his trial the next year Gonzalez was sentenced to 174 years in prison—a year for each victim and a year for depraved indifference toward each victim.³⁵ Gonzalez's crime is consistent with Category 15 on the Gradations scale: spree or multiple murder. This was mass murder, since the eighty-seven victims all died within minutes of one another during the same incident.

REJECTION OF FATHERHOOD

In many of the cases where a pregnant woman is murdered by the father of her child, the public's first guess is that the man's anger was directed primarily at the woman. This is seldom the correct guess. The underlying motive will usually turn out to be the man's dread over accepting the responsibility of fatherhood. This type of reaction is quite unacceptable to the man's ego, so he will offer some less embarrassing excuse (“I just know it wasn't my kid”; “I saw the bitch looking at another guy”) or, if the man is also psychotic, he will claim that the devil made him do it or that a “voice” commanded him, and so on. Those “rationales” are also less embarrassing. How rare it is to hear a man openly acknowledge and say with words of contempt that he wanted that child dead. This is what makes the case of Brian Stewart so extraordinary. In February of 1992 he committed an act that defies belief and invoked the judgment of “evil” from every source. What he did on that occasion was the kind of act that moves ordinary people to say “I couldn't think of something like that in my wildest dreams” and “Even if I could imagine such a thing, I wouldn't do it to my worst enemy.” Stewart's act of evil was to inject blood positive for HIV—not into his worst enemy—but into his five-year-old son.

To the extent that some planning was necessary, his was not a purely impulsive act, but by virtue of his being a hospital technician who gave injections (fancy title: phlebotomist) and who worked on a unit with many HIV patients, the opportunity and means were readily at hand. The mother of the boy had met Stewart in 1990 and gave birth to their son in 1991. She ended the relationship the next year and later sued for child support. He attempted to evade this obligation, claiming the boy “wasn't his.” But paternity was proven in 1997, by which time the boy had become gravely ill with constant and serious illnesses, whose origin was mysterious. Stewart told the mother, “You won't need to look me up for child support, anyway, because your (notice: not “our”) son's not going to live that long.”36 He further threatened her that he could have her “taken care of” and that no one would ever be able to trace it back to him. The court ordered him to pay $267 a month. Meanwhile, the boy was discovered first to be HIV-positive and eventually to suffer from full-blown AIDS. Stewart was imprisoned for “first-degree assault” that could be upgraded to murder if and when the child dies. At trial, prosecutor Ross Buehler spoke of Stewart as a “monster,” adding that “[i]n the mind of an evil genius, HIV was the perfect disease to inject a death sentence into the child's veins.”³⁷ In a related article on evil, psychologist Katherine Ramsland mentioned that the prosecution chose the assault charge “because it carries a penalty of up to life in prison, [whereas] attempted murder is limited in Missouri to 15 years.³⁸ The boy, now in his early teens, is too weak for a full school day or ordinary play and has nightmares that one day his father will get out of prison and kill his entire family. As a ruthlessly self-centered psychopathic schemer, Stewart belongs Category 14 on the scale.

RELIGIOUS ZEAL

We would like to think that religiously devout people, the truly God-fearing sort, would be at the furthest remove from evil. Then we rapidly make our descent from the ideal to the real and remember Pascal's cautionary note: “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”39 There is a cultural wrinkle here: certain practices that are sanctioned in one culture may easily strike those in other cultures as barbaric. I would like to think that the incident I am about to describe would be regarded, if not as evil, at least as repugnant—irrespective of culture. Alas, this is not the case.

On the night of November 6, 1989, listening devices that had been planted earlier by the FBI on the phone of Zein Isa, a St. Louis man who emigrated to the United States from Palestine, inadvertently picked up a family conversation. The three voices were those of Zein, his wife, and their sixteen-year-old daughter, Tina. Her name in itself is of interest. Her original name was Palestina, signifying their Muslim homeland. She Americanized it to Tina, which most would take as short for Christina, signifying perhaps a different religious background. That was already part of the problem: Tina was adopting different ways from those of her father. Worse yet, she was dating a non-Muslim; in fact, an African American boy, which, because of the father's prejudices, offended him in two ways instead of just one. In his interpretation of his culture, this called for an “honor killing,” lest the girl disgrace the family by dating a man objectionable to the father. Never mind that he had married for the second time to a Christian woman from Brazil. Tina's defiance signed her death warrant, as we learn from the taped conversation:

Zein:	Here, listen, my dear daughter, do you know that this is the last day? Tonight you are going to die.
Maria	(the mother, after hearing Tina's shrieks, and holding the girl down): Keep still!
Tina:	Mother, please help me!
Maria:	Huh? What do you mean?
Tina:	Help! Help!
Maria:	Are you going to listen?
Tina:	Yes! Yes! Yes! I am! (coughing) No, please!
Zein:	Die! Die quickly! Die quickly!
Tina:	(moaning)
Zein:	Quiet, little one! Die my daughter! Die!40

Zein stabbed his daughter six times with a boning knife, piercing heart, lung, and liver, killing her. This is what the FBI heard on their surveillance tapes, made because of Zein's participation in the terrorist Abu Nidal group. The autopsy on Tina was performed by Dr. Phillip Burch, who commented, “This was very evil justice.”41 Sgt. Guzy of the homicide squad had said earlier, “Zein was an evil son of a bitch.” Assistant prosecutor Bob Craddick said, “It's worse than any movie, any film, anything I thought that I would ever hear in my life.”⁴² The Missouri court sentenced both Zein and Maria to death. Zein died of complications of diabetes in prison; Maria's sentence was altered to life without parole. Honor killings in radical Islam do occur. They are hopefully rare, but their numbers are not easily determined, since “killing your child because he or she is disrespectful is not open for discussion in any country.”⁴³ Had the honor killing taken place in Zein's native country, nothing would have been said. But he was acculturated enough to realize that it would not go down well in America. So he and Maria pretended that their rebellious teenager had “attacked” them and that they had killed her in self-defense. It was this lie, easily shown in the court for what it was, that particularly enraged the jury, ensuring that they would hand down the maximum sentence.⁴⁴

REVENGE

The theme of revenge runs through many of the accounts of impulsive violence we have touched on in this chapter. The case of Nathaniel Gale is one among hundreds we could have chosen to illustrate this topic. Gale's thirst for revenge grew out of his belief—an unrealistic, probably outright delusional belief—that a famous guitarist, along with the heavy metal band Pantera of which he was a member, had been trying to steal Gale's identity and the lyrics he had supposedly composed. For a long time Gale had been Pantera's number-one fan. At some point he snapped, and in December of 2004 Gale leaped onto the Columbus, Ohio, stage where Pantera had been performing, and shot to death guitarist Darrell “Dimebag” Abbott and three others, before Gale himself was killed by the police. Jeramie Brey, a former friend of Gale's, told the authorities that Gale seemed to have copied his lyrics from Pantera and then somehow imagined that he was the original author. At first he threatened to sue the band, but then he impulsively chose that evening to kill “Dimebag” and whoever was nearby. Not much is known about Gale, but his motive appears to have been revenge for what he considered “intellectual property theft.” People described him as a tall and imposing “keep-to-yourself” type of person45 who had become increasingly argumentative and paranoid. Andy Warhol once quipped that people will do anything for that “fifteen minutes of fame.” That was true of another paranoid loner, Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon—a man much more famous than “Dimebag,” and whose murder did earn fifteen minutes of fame for Chapman, and then some. But fame was not Gale's ambition. Still, the evil exhibited in the Pantera case related more to the murder of a celebrity—plus the number of “collateral” victims—than to with the way in which the victims were killed.⁴⁶

SCHOOL SHOOTING

Though mercifully rare, school shootings by adolescent students gain enormous attention both because of the number of fatalities and because of the nature of the crime: children shooting to death other children, usually their own classmates. Sometimes teachers are targeted as well. These two aspects account for the public's reaction of horror and the response of “evil.” This was very much the case in the massacre in April of 1999 at Columbine High School near Denver in Colorado, perpetrated by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Before committing suicide, the two teenagers killed twelve students and one teacher, wounding twenty-one others. Although Eric Harris, the dominant figure in the Columbine massacre, was considered a psychopath, most school shooters are not. Instead, they are depressed young persons (like Klebold) or, more commonly, disgruntled students who are “loners,” “misfits,” or simply kids who don't fit in with the majority of students more adept at making friends. Some school shooters felt bullied and rejected by their classmates, either because they were indeed loners and misfits or because of other reasons: being part of a minority, being rude, or gay, or short, or obese, or ugly, or dumb, or awkward, or dishonest, or whatever else gets one marginalized by adolescents clamoring for acceptance by the respected “in-group.” School shooters are in many ways like younger versions of adult mass murderers: paranoid, grudge-holding, alienated individuals who, before their one impulsive and final burst into violence, usually haven't had prior run-ins with the law.

This was certainly the case with Robert Steinhäuser, the nineteen-year-old school shooter in Germany who put Erfurt on the map a second time in history. Erfurt, located just east of Germany's geographical center, has a more treasured native son: Johann Sebastian Bach, whose father, violinist Johann Ambrosius Bach, and grandfather, court musician Christoph Bach, were both born in Erfurt. Like the other school shooters, Steinhäuser was a loner and a misfit, but he had several other strikes against him as well. He was considered lazy and slovenly, physically and socially awkward, described by those who knew him as “notably un-noteworthy.”47 He was caught cheating and forging excuse notes, and then got expelled before his final exams. He pretended to go to school so his parents would be none the wiser. This was shortly before that day in April, when, having legally acquired a Glock-17 pistol, he entered the school and singlehandedly shot to death seventeen people: thirteen teachers (his main target), one administrator, two students, and a policeman—before killing himself. As with their older counterparts, we know little about these young mass murderers because they usually die by their own hand or by police action. There is no court trial and little probing into their family life, mental health records, or situation at birth. The public's reaction of “evil” softens quickly in many instances because the killers are indeed children, sometimes mistreated or neglected children whom we do not hold to the same standard as we do the mass murderers who have reached adulthood. (As we shall explore in a later chapter, the brain in adolescence is still immature in many important ways; self-control is less efficient—and these are mitigating circumstances.)

STALKING

The obsessive, often secretive, pursuit of another person—an act we place under the heading of “stalking”—usually refers to people who are tied by some love relationship, whether real or imaginary, to the object of their longing. The term is borrowed from the habit of certain animals that sneak up quietly on their intended targets—as when a cat crawls slowly and silently toward its prey. The common motives behind stalking are thwarted or unobtainable love. There are other motives, such as anger at a boss after having been fired or the quest for sexual domination of a stranger, as in the case of a predatory “serial killer.” (We will have occasion to look into those varieties in later chapters.)48

Once stalking is set in motion, there is considerable intention and planning. But the stage for this activity may be set and the impulse unleashed in an instant, following rejection in a love affair or the sudden collapse of a marriage. This is especially true when the stalker is of a possessive and morbidly jealous nature, convinced that the love object is “the only person in the world who matters” to him. In this case there is a life-or-death quality to the relationship: the stalker must have that person back—or else! It is easy to see how this morbid preoccupation can lead to the persecution of the former loved one or spouse; it may be a short step from persecution—to murder. Psychopathy is the order of the day in serial killers, but in the garden-variety thwarted lover, psychopathy is not part of the picture. Instead there are feelings of insecurity, self-centeredness, entitlement—the qualities, in a word, of the sore loser.

Pernell Jefferson fits the description of the rejected-lover-turned-stalker. Though he was physically strong and outstanding at sports, he abused anabolic steroids in his late teens to make himself even stronger. Already of a demanding, bossy, and controlling disposition, he was morbidly jealous; he actually fainted when his first major girlfriend left him. He had gotten her pregnant and they had a son, Pernell Jr., in 1982.⁴⁹ As with many athletes who abuse steroids, Jefferson became aggressive and assaultive. He acted violently toward his next two girlfriends, both of whom left him because of his anger and possessiveness. The second woman he later stalked, terrorized, abducted, and raped.

In 1984 he was about to try out for a position on a professional football team but was warned against steroid use. Stopping the drug abruptly, he fell into a depression and threw away his chance to be on the team. He took up with another woman, toward whom he was even more controlling and abusive than he had been with the others. She, too, left him and began seeing another man. Telling her, “If I can't have you, nobody's going to,” Jefferson stalked her and found out wherever she was.

In 1989 he abducted her and shot her to death, and then buried her body with the help of one of his friends. Later the friend had a pang of conscience and told the police. Her body was located but could be identified only by forensic examination of tooth fragments. Although he was sadistically controlling of his girlfriends, Pernell was not psychopathic. He did not, for instance, have the extreme narcissistic traits of remorselessness, callousness, deceitfulness, and so on, that are the hallmark of psychopathy. Pernell's condition falls more within the realm of obsessive love.50 Given a life sentence when eventually convicted, he became a model prisoner once the steroids were out of his system. Later on, he taught the other prisoners a course on how better to manage anger and aggression. The impulsive aggression and the evil acts of his late twenties were now behind him. Eligible for parole in 2011, it remains to be seen whether he will be able to put these tendencies behind him permanently—especially his jealousy and his overreaction to being rejected. Pernell's crime fits best in the Gradations scale at Category 7: highly narcissistic persons who murdered loved ones.

THEFT OF FETUS

There is something about the murder of a near-term pregnant woman, followed by the theft of her fetus, that raises the specter of evil more assuredly than most other crimes. The reasons are obvious. This is one of the few crimes committed exclusively by women, who are ordinarily much less prone to violence than men are. It is therefore all the more shocking when they do resort to violence. Then there is the murder of a pregnant woman, whose life and hopes are held sacred by people the world over. And finally, the kidnap—and since death is often the result—the murder of a baby, whose life and hopes are held equally sacred.

I have been able to locate nine such cases, all involving American women—five approaching menopause, and four of those coming from hamlets of very small population. The earliest case was in 1987: Darci Pierce, the youngest (age twenty) and the only one with distinct psychopathic features.⁵¹ Darci had conned her boyfriend into marrying her by claiming she was pregnant. She then killed nine-months-pregnant Cindy Ray in a remote area near Albuquerque, slicing open her belly with a car key to extract the baby (who survived).

Another woman, Michelle Bica,⁵² was pregnant at thirty-nine and in anticipation of the birth had decorated the baby's room, outfitting it with baby bottles and all the other paraphernalia for the newborn. But she miscarried. Announcing to her husband that she was pregnant again, she later presented him with a healthy baby boy in late September of 2000. Rather overweight anyway, she was easily able to fool her husband. There were two problems. She hadn't been pregnant this time, and she had killed a pregnant woman who lived a few blocks away—from whom she then removed the fetus. A week later it became clear to the police that Michelle had shot and killed the missing Theresa Andrews and that the baby had belonged to the Andrews couple. Michelle had buried Theresa in her garage. As she was about to be confronted, Michelle used the same gun to commit suicide. Oddly, her husband was a corrections officer. When evaluated by his superiors, he was called “simple-minded,” “lacking in good judgment,” and “gullible.” Nor was this Michelle's sole foray into theft: Thomas Bica had met his wife in 1994 when she had been serving time for receiving stolen property.

Arguably the most well-known of the theft-of-fetus cases is that of Lisa Montgomery from the village of Melvern, Kansas (population 423).53 Although she already had four children by her first marriage, she seems to have wanted to “solidify” her second marriage by having another child. This, although she had had her tubes tied at the end of her first marriage. With a husband as gullible as Mr. Bica, she went ahead and connived to meet pregnant Bobbi Jo Stinnett from the even smaller village of Skidmore, Missouri (population 342), under the guise of buying a puppy. The baby she stole after killing twenty-three-year-old Bobbi Jo survived. One would think that these women murderers, besides being unspeakably evil in the eyes of the public, were all psychotic. But none of them was. If anything, they seemed terminally naive, socially and psychologically “out of the loop,” and of course massively self-centered—yet not crazy. There are plenty of small villages around the world, and no lack of women desperate to have a child. Why this fetus-snatching phenomenon is confined to America, I cannot answer, nor am I certain there are not other cases in other countries that have simply not as yet come to light. It is not easy to find appropriate spots for these women on the Gradations scale. Darci Pierce was psychopathic and therefore belongs most likely to Category 11: killers of people who are “in the way” (in her case, this was the real mother, whose baby Darci was intent on stealing). Michelle Bica had remorse (she committed suicide) and could be placed perhaps at number 5. Lisa Montgomery is not a full-blown psychopath, yet she killed the Stinnett woman in cold blood in order to steal her fetus. She acted like a ruthless schemer (14), though with only a few traits reminiscent of the psychopath.

THRILL-KILL

There are some impulse murders that seem not to fit into any common category. As far as anyone can tell, the murders are done purely “for the hell of it.” Some refer to such incidents as thrill-kills; the perpetrators are usually adolescents or young adults. Presumably, there is a powerful “rush” associated with such murders—as great, perhaps greater, than one might get from cocaine or from high-risk, daredevil acts such as riding a motorcycle over a (not too wide!) chasm or riding a hot rod car in a “chicken race.”54 In Detroit, in November 2007, seventeen-year-old Jean-Pierre Orlewicz lured twenty-six-year-old Dan Sorenson, a bouncer, into the garage of the younger man's grandfather and stabbed him in the back, killing him. It seems that Jean-Pierre had made a deal with his friend, eighteen-year-old Alexander Letkemann, that Alexander would help clean up after the murder. As Alexander said in his statement later on to the police, “Me and JP hung out at his grandpa's house…. All I had to do was clean up. I would have no part in the actual act. He would call it even for the hundred dollars I owed him. I don't know why he had it out so bad for that guy.”⁵⁵ The teens sawed off Sorenson's head and then burned his hands and feet with a blowtorch to hamper any attempts at identification. To make absolutely sure, they transported the torso to a remote spot, set it on fire, and then took the head and dumped it in a river fifteen miles away from the torso.

But with the stupidity and rashness that are the hallmarks of adolescent murder, Jean-Pierre asked yet another friend to help them haul the body. That friend notified the authorities, and the two were quickly caught. Even Dan's girlfriend knew he was going to the Orlewicz house to collect a debt. Unlike the murder of a stranger, which has the best chance of remaining unsolved, everyone who knew Dan could point to Jean-Pierre. The media and the Internet blogs were quick to pick up the case and enter it into their list of the “most evil people of the month” or create headlines like “Greater Evil: A Thrill-Kill in Michigan.”56 What shocked the public particularly was the absence of any discernible motive. Some people, grasping at straws, thought perhaps the teens looked down on Dan because he was a “registered sex offender”—assuming they even knew. But Dan's so-called offense was to have had sex with a fourteen-year-old girl when he was only seventeen. In the “Romeo-and-Juliet” laws of most states, that is not an offense at all. Jean-Pierre and Alexander may well have had the characteristics described recently under the heading of the adolescent psychopath.⁵⁷ They behaved like the persons of Category 11 (psychopathic killers of people “in the way”), though why they wanted their victim “out of the way” is unclear. The mutilation of the corpse was a postmortem act that is, for that reason, not sadistic (in the sense of causing great suffering to someone still alive), even though it is shocking and grotesque. As it is, the murder alone consigned both teens to mandatory life sentences, to which were added yet another ten years for mutilating a corpse.

Impulsive murder takes but a minute but can cost a lifetime.