Canto XXXI, ll. 55–57

Ché dove l'argomento de la mente	For where sharpness of mind is joined to evil will
s'aggiugne al mal volere e a la possa	and power, there is no defense
nessun riparo vi può far la gente.	people can make against them.

Many of the case histories from the last chapter hinged on sudden outbursts of destructive behavior, usually ending in murder. If the judgment of “evil” was ascribed to these outbursts, the reason for it had more to do with the act, in most examples, than with the perpetrator. If there was any planning ahead of time, the interval between thought and deed was brief; where there was intention, the intention was to do the act, not so much how to do it in such a way as to get away with it. Even that intention-to-do sometimes counted as “malice aforethought,” but not to the degree of what I would call the more genuine and overt cases of malice aforethought, as we will confront in this chapter. Here we will encounter the real schemers, who, you might say, worked hard to earn the label of evil. They did so by conjuring up complicated plans and intrigues, long in advance of the act itself, and by resorting at times to the use of hit men, lovers, or other accomplices with the ultimate goal usually of getting rid of a spouse or lover or, in rarer instances, of killing a stranger for money. Almost all the people we will meet here had sterling reputations in the community until their acts became known. Because of this, the huge disparity between public image and private deed created much of the shock value that gave meaning to the label of evil. Almost all of them came from privileged social classes: some of great wealth, the majority from the upper-middle class. Only a few had ever had brushes with the law before the dramatic murder that turned them into notorious celebrities. These people did not languish for a few days in the inner pages of the tabloids; they all merited, if that is the right word, a full-length biography. There is another characteristic that sets them apart from the violent individuals we have encountered so far. Whereas the others had at most a few psychopathic traits from the traits mentioned earlier, here we are in the domain of psychopathy proper. To be more accurate, the persons in this chapter show chiefly the egocentric personality traits of psychopathy and fewer of the behavioral features present in the impulse killers. This is an important point, and to understand it more fully requires a bit of an explanation.

The most widely used measure of psychopathy today is an instrument questionnaire developed by Robert Hare called the Psychopathy Checklist (introduced in chapter 1). His scale is divided into two main factors: one for personality (and emotion), the other for behavior. The checklist was the outgrowth of thousands of interviews and records from persons in prisons and forensic hospitals. Many of these incarcerated people were habitual criminals with long rap sheets, often reflecting a wide variety of offenses. The majority came from socially disadvantaged backgrounds and were about as likely to show the behavioral qualities as the personality qualities. Many, that is, were con artists and had been juvenile delinquents; they were compulsive liars and they had poor behavioral controls. If they scored 30 or higher out of 40 on the scale (the maximum score and the number necessary for the label of full-blown psychopath), chances are the points were evenly divided between the two parts of the list.

But the persons in this chapter were not delinquent in their teens nor did they ever violate their parole—because they had never had any brush with the law in the first place. A few had done some outrageous things in their teens, but coming from affluent homes and indulgent parents, their acts were covered up. They might have been arrested once or twice, but they were never convicted, and they seldom stole even for drugs, because they had no need to. What these people had instead was the full menu of personality and emotional traits. As mentioned above, these traits were categorized by Hare into two factors:

Factor-I Traits

1. glibness and/or superficial charm
2. grandiose sense of self-worth
3. pathological lying
4. conning or manipulativeness
5. lack of remorse or guilt
6. shallow affect (shallowness of emotional display)
7. callousness, lack of empathy (also includes lack of compassion)
8. failure to accept responsibility for one's actions

The second factor concerns behavior and consists of nine qualities:

Factor-II Traits

1. parasitic lifestyle
2. poor behavioral controls
3. lack of realistic long-term goals
4. impulsivity
5. irresponsibility
6. juvenile delinquency
7. early behavioral problems
8. need for stimulations, boredom
9. revocation of conditional release (in the case of incarcerated persons)

There are three additional items that do not fit neatly into the two main factors:

1. sexual promiscuity
2. criminal versatility (by which is meant a history of committing a large variety of different types of crimes, such as assault, fraud, theft, escape, kidnap, vandalism, rape, etc.)
3. a history of many short-term marital (or “de facto”) relationships.

But even if a person showed all eight of the Factor-I traits to the maximum, his score would be only 16—far from the 30 required for the psychopath label. Yet it so happens that these personality qualities (glibness, grandiosity, deceitfulness, manipulativeness, callousness, lack of remorse or empathy) are the ones least likely to change throughout one's life. Not only that, but if someone is callous, totally lacking in remorse or compassion, and is a habitual liar and a con artist, he (and it will much more often be a he than a she) is far less likely to outgrow his dangerousness over the years, in comparison with those who are impulsive and hot-tempered. Many outgrow those behavioral traits as they enter middle age. And if such traits were their only problem, they tend to stop acting in these “antisocial” ways.1 For example, if alcohol fueled their bad behavior, they might join Alcoholics Anonymous and learn to stop drinking. In contrast, the personality qualities listed by Hare remain throughout one's life. This means that there are psychopaths in the community who never (or almost never) end up in jail, who score well under the radar for the Hare scale, and—if one relied just on that scale—would seem not to be psychopaths. Hare himself refers to some of these people as “white-collar” psychopaths; these people are known to us as crooked businessmen, corrupt politicians, and the like.² And some murder. The Factor-I traits, then, can best be pictured as the essence of psychopathy: the part, if present when you first get to know someone, that doesn't go away with time.

We are not dealing with embezzlers and graft takers here but with violent psychopaths, persons, that is, who usually made a good impression on their neighbors (because of the superficial charm), could fool people and talk their way out of tight spots (their glibness and calmness when lying), and lived, until caught, seemingly successful and morally upright lives. Theirs was a morality, however, that was only skin-deep, a camouflage. And when it suited them, violence was an acceptable option, even if the violence engulfed people in their closest, intimate life. Sometimes life circumstances—wealth, an indulgent family—can throw a protective cloak around the psychopath, who, unless pushed too far, manages to stay out of trouble. Even under the best of circumstances, the psychopath is incapable of meaningful and enduring relationships with others—especially love relationships. A predator at heart, he can say, “I love you,” if it suits his purpose, but he can walk away in a heartbeat if something better, or someone more appealing, comes along. Here is an example.

A man in his midtwenties had not worked since dropping out of college after two years. He lived off an ample trust fund and had recently inherited an additional sum, a little under half a million dollars, from a grandfather. Within a year he had gone through the inheritance money by traveling back and forth every few weeks to Europe for parties with the “jet set.” Quite reckless in his teen years, he had gotten in several drunk-driving accidents but managed to avoid serious consequences with the law, thanks to the influence of his family. At his high school graduation he was given a new car, which he promptly totaled three days later. Anxious to avoid punishment for his carelessness, he went to the dealer and purchased through his trust fund a new car of the same make and color. He guessed that his father, who was predictably in a cloudy state from drinking, would never notice the difference. He had carried on a few brief affairs with various women, sometimes several at once, whom he would charm with boasts of his prodigious, albeit make-believe, exploits. One of them urged him to get a job. He lacked any marketable skills but had no shortage of unrealistic pipe dreams: becoming a “top movie producer,” or a “world-class tennis pro,” and the like. A distant relative gave him a position in his real estate company. After only several weeks, he already boasted that he had sold a big commercial building in downtown New York for “a hundred million dollars.” But this was pure fantasy. His job was really a both-feet-on-the-desk sinecure during which he mostly read the sports section of the paper and rarely ventured outside the office. This man had never been violent, so it seemed likely that he would not become so in the future. But if the course of his life were to take a drastic change for the worse, he might be more capable of a violent act than someone with solid scruples.

There is no telling whether people who have been nonviolent but who have displayed psychopathic tendencies would rise to the level of doing something evil. That depends on the coming together of many unforeseeable circumstances. The persons in this chapter did rise to that level. For most of them, we have enough pieces in the mosaic of their life to create a convincing portrait. This highlights the salient aspect of evil that represents “excess.” Because we can begin to understand the why question—why did they end up doing what they did?—they will appear less as incomprehensible freaks of nature and more like twisted—very twisted—versions of you and me at our worst moments. This idea was captured well in the title of a book by an eminent forensic psychiatrist: Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream.3

Information about the persons described in the previous chapter was sometimes sparse, and it was not always easy to place them with any accuracy in the Gradation of Evil scale. Because this chapter is based on full-length biographies, assigning their acts to a particular category is easier. For that reason I have arranged the accounts according to what seemed the most appropriate category.

CATEGORY 9: JEALOUS LOVERS WITH MARKED PSYCHOPATHIC FEATURES

Richard Minns

When they met on the ski slopes of Aspen, Colorado, in 1977, Richard Minns was forty-seven, a successful and multimillionaire health-spa tycoon, and she, then known by her maiden name, Barbara Piotrowski, was a stunningly beautiful model of twenty-three. She was also a straight-A pre-med student at UCLA. Minns, obsessed with youth and masculine prowess, worked out fanatically at his own spas and made himself into as much of an Adonis as a man of forty-seven can be. He was smitten with her and begged her to come with him to Houston. Reluctant at first, she eventually accepted. They began a torrid affair, and she then moved in with him. Whatever he told her about his life, he omitted one detail: he was married and had four children. By and by he revealed that he “had been married” but was now separated. Not only was he still married to his wife of twenty-five years; she was his business partner. His wife, Mimi, eventually learned about the affair and sued for divorce. The impediment to marriage now removed, Barbara expected that Richard would propose to her. He was in no hurry to do so, though he put her up in a fashionable townhouse. They began to argue. Minns became increasingly possessive and jealous, though he still refused to marry her. He struck her on several occasions. Barbara had had enough and broke off the relationship. She remained in Houston and returned to her studies.

A short while later, in October of 1980, Barbara was at a doughnut shop when a man drove up beside her and shot her four times in the back. She was taken quickly to a hospital, where the doctors saved her life, though she was now paralyzed from the chest down. There were layers of hit men involved: Minns had hired A who then hired B to pay C and D to do the actual shooting. All (except Minns) were caught and sentenced. As for Minns, he was never formally charged and anyway escaped to Europe, where he went from one country to another (including Israel, where for a time he served in the army) and assumed at least five aliases and a collection of seven passports in different names. At one point he had been living in the Bahamas as “Richard O'Toole” and posing as a tax lawyer.4 Always the real suspect, he was finally apprehended in 1994 as he tried to fly from Mexico to Vancouver via Dallas–Fort Worth, where he was arrested at the age of sixty-four under the name Harlan Allen Richardson. At that point he served a four-month sentence for fraud (the only crime for which the police had sufficient evidence at that time), and was then deported to Ireland where he had established residence.⁵ Back in 1987, district judge William Elliott had ordered the court in a civil trial to accept that Minns was responsible for the shootings, and then charged him to pay $28.6 million to Barbara in damages.⁶ By that time, she had changed her name to Janni Smith and had moved to California to avoid any more attempts on her life. She won another civil suit in 1991, in which the jury awarded her $32 million. She has yet to see penny one of these awards.

What you read in the last paragraph was based on the headlines of this case. To grasp what Richard Minns is all about, you need to read some of the fine print. Minns was brought up in a middle-class family in Texas in unremarkable circumstances. He had a sister, Janice, seven years younger. By age eight, he was already sadistic and violent—beyond his parents’ control. He made his baby sister swallow a penny, which required a visit to the emergency room. When she was learning to crawl, he placed her near an open window, from which she fell out, as he stood by laughing. When Janice was two, he forced her finger against a movie-projector lightbulb “because he wanted to find out what skin smelled like when it burned.”⁷ At other times he tossed lit matches at her.⁸ He boasted that when he was fourteen, he was booked for aggravated assault. The truth of this is uncertain, but it is in line with his emerging character that he saw fit to make such a boast. He emerged in his adult life as a supercharming but supervindictive man, bursting with energy, needing little sleep, hard-driving, and entrepreneurial, but dishonest, volatile, manipulative, and combative. On one occasion he broke the noses of his wife, Mimi, and his younger daughter, and, when things soured between him and Barbara, of Barbara herself. After he punched her, he said, “I didn't do it! Something came over me!”9 Charismatic and thrill seeking, Minns was described by some as the flame next to whom others like to dance.¹⁰

Early in their relationship, when Barbara had become pregnant, he forced her to have an abortion against her will. She miscarried shortly afterward but still went on with their affair. Minns was also a bully in his business dealings and extremely litigious, suing anyone who dared to oppose or object to his numerous shady and unethical dealings. He was not above threatening his business associates with blackmail about their mistresses, if that's what it took to get his way.¹¹ He cajoled and threatened his wife when she moved to divorce him. She backed down for a while, but when she made another attempt, he tried to get a friend to swear in court that he had had an affair with Mimi. The man refused. Minns spoke of hiring someone to kill her, or else to blow up the plane on which Mimi and the children were flying to San Antonio. These things never happened, but his threats paint a lurid picture of how he thought and what he was capable of.

Minns had many of the qualities that come under the heading of “hypomanic,” by which is meant a personality makeup just short of full-blown mania. It consists of traits reminiscent of mania, though in a less exaggerated form. He was, for example, socially extraverted, grandiose, hard driving, well beyond average in his sexual needs, risk taking, intense, arrogant, and boastful. Many of his other traits, however, were not hypomanic but were what one sees in the typical psychopath. He was a habitual liar, exploitative, unscrupulous, and dishonest to the extent of swindling his children out of their trust funds. He was totally opposed to divorce because he could not tolerate the idea of Mimi's ending up, under Texas law, with half their estate. When all his efforts to suborn witnesses and defame Mimi failed, the judge awarded her 60 percent of their assets; Minns, only 40 percent. This was his “Waterloo,” after which he spiraled downhill, still refusing to marry Barbara even after he had divorced his first wife.

As he became increasingly cruel and controlling toward Barbara in the aftermath of his divorce, her love turned to contempt. She left him for good—and ended up at the wrong end of the hit men's guns. Minns, as was mentioned, hid behind three layers of intermediaries, like the Mafia don who decides to “whack” a rival, so he could claim what is quaintly called in the secret service “plausible deniability.” We must credit him with a measure of success here, since the little justice Barbara has been able to garner has been only in civil, not in criminal, court. Minns, having been deported to Ireland, is perhaps still there living free, at age eighty as of this writing.

Later I will have more to say about what is known of situations that negatively affect the brain and that may contribute to violence. What is interesting about Minns is that, to the best of our knowledge, none of these conditions seem to have been operating in his case. There is no record of his having suffered head injury with unconsciousness in childhood. We don't know if his mother smoked or drank alcohol excessively when she was pregnant with him—either of which might have increased the risk for later antisocial (though not necessarily violent) behavior.12 His parents never divorced. He was if anything much brighter than average. There is no evidence that Minns developed what has been called acquired sociopathy (or “pseudopsychopathy”) from adverse conditions during pregnancy or in one's early years.¹³ This leaves us with the more likely explanation that heredity played the major role. In other words, Minns was most likely born with a strong tendency to a driven, intense, and extremely self-centered personality, insensitive to the feelings of others, along with a need for “thrills”—to the point of risk taking and even sadism (as was present in his behavior toward his little sister when he was just eight or nine). Add his hypersexuality, possessiveness, and “midlife crisis” into the mix, and you have a recipe, not inevitably for murder, for murder is rare under these circumstances, but for a much greater risk for murder than exists in the average person. Minns was not a man who could admit or accept defeat (divorce, a judgment against him in divorce court, rejection by a lover, and so on). Once these events turned on his vengeance engine, there was no stopping until he could put the sources of these defeats out of the way, permanently. He had serious thoughts of killing Mimi. With Barbara there was no stopping him. But he was “cool” enough to work through hirelings and has escaped justice (apart from the brief stint for fraud in 1994) for almost thirty years. Now eighty, Minns will most likely die outside the United States, but also outside prison.

Ira Einhorn

The story of Ira Einhorn reads like a carbon copy of the Richard Minns story, almost as though he were Richard's eleven-years-younger brother. He, too, had a hypomanic temperament, needed little sleep, was hypersexual, egomaniacal, grandiose, charismatic, amoral, and given to explosive outbursts of aggression. Einhorn became a locally famous figure as an anti-Vietnam orator and hippie guru in Philadelphia during the 1970s. Before that, however, his dark side was already making its appearance. When he was twenty-two (in 1962), for example, he was carrying on a passionate romance with a dancer, Rita Siegel. She found him irresistible yet weird and frightening in the way he would expound grandiloquently on famous mavericks like Friedrich Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, and the Marquis de Sade.14 He liked to torture cats by taking them into the shower and listening to them scream.¹⁵

What he wrote that year was equally frightening: “Sadism—sounds nice—run it over your tongue—contemplate with joy the pains of others as you expire with an excruciating satisfaction…. Beauty and innocence must be violated because they can't be possessed.”¹⁶ That July he strangled Rita until she passed out, and then wrote: “To kill what you love when you can't have it seems so natural that strangling Rita last night seemed so right.”¹⁷ Four years later in a plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose moment, he committed aggravated assault on another girlfriend, Judy Lewis, whom he attacked with a broken Coke bottle and then choked until she passed out. As with the first assault on Rita, Einhorn wriggled out with no more than a warning; neither girl pressed charges. Although Einhorn had turned violent only when a woman threatened to leave him, these incidents were just a foretaste of what was to come.¹⁸

In 1974 he met a beautiful woman seven years younger than he: Holly Maddux. Like her counterpart in the Minns case, Holly was as bright as she was stunning: class salutatorian as well as cheerleader at her Texas college. As with his other relationships, Einhorn was possessive, stifling, and, on several occasions, combative to the point where Holly's bruises were observed by friends. Finally, after three years she left him and went to New York, beginning a relationship with a new man. When Einhorn found out, he demanded she return to Philadelphia. Unfortunately she did and was never seen again. Einhorn murdered her and stuffed her body in a steamer trunk, which he then put in his closet. Neighbors complained about foul odors coming from his apartment—but not until two years later in 1979. Police investigated, found Holly's mummified body, and arrested Einhorn. Bail was set at $40,000 and was paid by a gullible supporter, Barbara Bronfman, who had married into the Seagram distillery family. Einhorn fled to Europe and settled for a time in Ireland under the name “Ben Moore.” Once Irish authorities discovered who he was and were closing in for the capture, he fled to England and later to Sweden, where he changed his name once again and charmed a wealthy Swedish woman, Annika Flodin, into becoming his girlfriend. Still unaware of his identity, Annika left with Einhorn for France and later married him—a man then in his sixties whom she knew as “Eugene Mallon.” By 1988, Barbara Bronfman had read Steven Levy's true-crime biography of Einhorn, learning of his cruelty to the other women and the facts about the steamer trunk. Disenchanted finally, she tipped off the police as to his whereabouts in Sweden—whereupon he and his Swedish inamorata abruptly left for France.

Finally, through laborious detective work and struggles with the French authorities, Einhorn was extradited back to the United States—after twenty years of freedom and high living. Time had changed many things about him: his beard was gone, his hair was gray, he had lost fifty pounds, but his fingerprints, alas, were the same.19 He was sentenced in October of 2002 to life without parole for the murder of Holly Maddux. As with the Minns case, the Maddux family had won a pyrrhic victory in the courts a few years earlier, when Einhorn was convicted in absentia in civil court, yielding an award of some $907 million, not a penny of which the family will ever see. Einhorn continues to deny his guilt.

Among the many parallels between Minns and Einhorn—advantaged social class, high intelligence, pathological jealousy, Hare's Factor-I personality traits with very little of the Factor-II behavioral traits—is the act of killing during an act of impulsive violence. But then they cover up the crime with astonishing coolness and cleverness, even managing to win allies to their cause to bankroll them during their years of hiding from the law. Unlike Royce Zeigler (see chapter 3)—who acknowledged the “sins I have committed,” marking him more antisocial than psychopathic—Minns and Einhorn lie and deny to their dying day. These psychopathic traits, especially the cold-bloodedness, the callousness, and the scheming, make the impression of “evil” more readily applicable than it was with the persons sketched in the earlier chapter.

CATEGORY 10: KILLERS (NOT TOTALLY PSYCHOPATHIC) OF PEOPLE “IN THE WAY”

Unlike the stories in the previous section, the following stories concern individuals who shocked the public with murderous acts that were not impulsive. We are dealing instead with violent acts that were carried out in a cold and methodical way from the beginning—followed by equally methodical ways of trying to escape justice. The same amorality and psychopathic personality traits (the “Factor-I” traits) were just as evident, but here they occur without the flashes of rage and intemperate behavior. Furthermore, the motive behind the scheming was quite different. Minns and Einhorn killed because the women they had once loved to distraction rejected them. Neither saw any other solution to his loss and wounded pride than to murder the woman who had hurt him. That each of these men had driven the woman away because of his abusiveness was clear to everyone else; they remained steadfastly blind to the obvious and thus felt “justified” in exacting revenge. In this next section, the killer's motive was to get rid of someone in order to be free to be with someone else, or to escape a deteriorating life situation. Certain people, as they saw it, were just “in the way.”

John List

People somewhat familiar with the saga of John List connect his name with evil because of the emotionless way he went about killing his entire family, much as one might swat pesky flies in the kitchen. But there is more. List, with the palpably absurd excuses he later fashioned to explain away his actions, carried hypocrisy to heights even the most corrupt politician could not rival.

List was born in Michigan in 1925, the only child of a pious Lutheran family. His father was described as rigid, joyless, angry—the neighborhood crank and an ultraconservative religious zealot.20 His mother, Alma, was alternately domineering and overprotective.²¹ John himself was known in his early days as a priggish “mama's boy” and “neat freak,” fastidious and obsessed with books about the military. Worried lest he get sick, Alma did not allow him to go out and play with the other children; “play” consisted instead of she and John reading the Bible together in the evening—a custom he maintained once she came to live with him and his family, until the very end.²²

Though he saw no action during his stint in World War II, he did acquire a knowledge of guns, as well as some actual guns, which figure prominently in his life later on—especially an Austrian pistol he brought back from overseas. Outwardly moralistic, unspontaneous, and detail oriented, List was a caricature of the compulsive personality. He eventually obtained a degree in accounting, but because of his poor social skills and meager executive abilities, he lost many jobs—meantime becoming increasingly in debt. The debt became overwhelming once he moved to a huge eighteen-room mansion in Westfield, New Jersey, with his family, now consisting of his aging mother; his wife, Helen; and their three children. The house was way beyond his means, and the situation was compounded by his wife's progressive mental illness—the result of late-stage syphilis contracted from her first husband.²³ There was the added dissatisfaction with his teenage children, especially the eldest, sixteen-year-old Patricia—a fun-loving girl whom he called a “slut” when he had to go to the police one night after she and another girl had been innocently walking together in the late hours.

It was in this context that he carried out his meticulous plan on November 9, 1971. After kissing his mother a final time, he shot her in the back of the head, and then did the same to Helen. When two of his children, Patricia and Frederick, came home that afternoon from school, he shot them in the same way—all with the old Austrian pistol. The youngest, John Jr., had been playing soccer at school, so John drove over to watch his son in the game, brought him back home—and shot him to death too. For some reason John Jr. did not die immediately, so his father fired off nine more shots to complete his mission. After tucking the bodies of his wife and children in sleeping bags, he prayed over them—and then departed. He had ample time to get to wherever he was going, since the family was not missed at first and their bodies not discovered for a month.

The hypocrisy machinery now moving into full gear, List wrote a letter to his pastor explaining the reasons for the murders. The 1970s were a sinful time, in his opinion, and his daughter was succumbing to temptation, given her interest in an acting career, which List saw as linked to Satan. By killing them all before they had renounced their faith, he had ensured their place in heaven. List changed his name to that of a student he once knew at college, Robert Clark. He began a new life, remarried, and lived free, first in Denver, then in Virginia—until his capture, which did not take place until eighteen years later. The arrest came about through the help of a forensic artist, Frank Bender, who created in clay a bust of what he imagined List would look like at age sixty-four. This image was shown on the television program America's Most Wanted. A week and a half later, someone recognized the face and called the police. List was arrested. On May 1, 1990, List was sentenced to life in prison on five counts of first-degree murder. Far from expressing any remorse for the murders, List was convinced he would rejoin his family in heaven—as he explained during a TV interview in 2002 with Connie Chung of ABC's show Downtown. She asked him why he didn't just kill himself when he saw his debts exceeding what he could ever hope to repay. As he patiently explained, suicide was a sin that would bar him from heaven and thus deny him access to his family. But if he murdered them and then sought forgiveness, they would have forgiven him—or else not even know that he had been the instrument of their deaths, so either way, they could all spend eternity as a family just as before. He also recounted to Chung how he cleaned up the blood from the room where he had shot his wife, and then, at the same table where she had been sitting, made himself lunch—because, as he told her, “I was hungry.”

List's self-serving rationalizations had already moved into full swing long before the Chung interview: in 1995, during a radio interview, List was asking for a second trial because of what is sometimes facetiously called the “orphan's plea”; namely, that he was “suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder” as a result of “killing my family.”

As I emphasize throughout this book, the label “evil” is an emotional reaction, and in a high-profile case like this one, a public reaction. In this light, the Gradations scale represents a method for acknowledging this reaction but then analyzing the case further as more information becomes available. There is the additional aim, as mentioned earlier, to look more closely at the resulting compartments—as a first step in learning whether there are particular background factors and causative elements that occur with special frequency among the persons grouped together in this or that category, or level.

For most people to consider List's act as evil, it would suffice that he had killed his (aging) mother, his (ailing) wife, and his (blameless) kids. But then there was the icy detachment in his twisting the words of the Holy Book in ways as yet unheard of—to justify getting rid of people in the way. In the manner of the CEO of a failing corporation who knows that you must either increase sales or decrease expenses, the easiest place to start is to cut down expenses. You do this by firing employees who bring in no income: the workers in the mailroom, the human resources personnel. List was not accountant enough to bring in more money—but he knew that one mouth to feed (his) was 83 percent cheaper than feeding six. Simply put: Five had to go.

Kristin Rossum

And there she lulled me asleep

And there I dreamed—Ah! Woe betide!—

The latest dream I ever dreamt

On the cold hillside.

I saw pale kings and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci

Hath thee in thrall!’

—John Keats, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, 1819

The inspiration for Keats's famous poem is said to have been a hoax played on his brother Tom, who was deceived in a romantic liaison,24 or perhaps Keats's own conflict over whether to marry a certain Fanny Brawne, of whom his friends disapproved.

Kristin Rossum fits the image of Keats's mistress well: a beautiful woman without compassion. She did not start out that way, so far as one can tell. The eldest of three children born to Professor Ralph Rossum and his wife, Constance, Kristin had the advantages of beauty, brightness, and balletic talent. After a triumph as the lead in the Nutcracker,25 she seemed headed for a successful career in ballet—but she then sustained a leg injury and was no longer able to dance. This incident set in motion a disastrous sequence of events reminiscent of the old saying “For want of a nail, the kingdom is lost.”²⁶

As stated in her biography,²⁷ Kristin modeled as a child and excelled at school, but at sixteen she became depressed and disillusioned after the injury. A friend at her Los Angeles high school suggested she share in smoking some crystal methamphetamine. This gave Kristin a “high” in which, as she later explained,²⁸ she felt revved up and energetic and happy. Her personality deteriorated rapidly: she developed an eating disorder, scratched her face, and added cocaine to her drug abuse. Discovering her drug use (and her lying about it), her parents reprimanded her severely. They found their credit cards, personal checks, and camera missing—all used presumably to generate cash for illicit drugs. Kristin cut her wrists, became manipulative, and threatened suicide. She was sent to Narcotics Anonymous and for a time was clean, but she relapsed; she managed to finish high school, but was then expelled from college because of drug abuse. Reverting to crystal meth, she would drive over the Mexican border to Tijuana to get drugs from a dealer.

Kristin, still only eighteen in 1994, ran away from home and began using crystal meth every day—and became sexually promiscuous. During a chance encounter on a bridge to Tijuana, she dropped her jacket, which was retrieved by a young man from a good family: Gregory de Villers. It was love at first sight for Gregory, who vowed to help her kick the drug habit. For a time it seemed he had succeeded. Her feelings for him were mixed, yet the two remained together and, despite Kristin's wanting to cancel wedding plans at the last minute, they did marry in 1999. Meantime, she had returned to college and graduated cum laude in 1998. Ironically, or perhaps not so ironically, Kristin majored in toxicology and began work in a toxicology lab in San Diego. Her boss, Michael Robertson, was a toxicologist from Australia, older, handsome—and married. By 2000, Kristin was already feeling trapped in her marriage and had begun an affair with Michael, who in turn was cheating on Kristin with yet another woman. Kristin also reverted to her old drug habits and became once again dependent on methamphetamine—this time filched from the lab.

Greg found out about her infidelity, which she denied. Kristin and Michael exchanged numerous love letters via e-mail, one of which Greg came across and printed out. He became furious. Kristin shredded the letter, which Greg then tried to reconstruct. When Greg threatened to tell the lab higher-ups, Kristin misled him with protestations of “love,” all the while still carrying on the affair with Michael. Finally she used her toxicological skills and access to drugs from the workplace to create a deadly cocktail—with which she poisoned Greg to death in November of 2000. One of the ingredients was fentanyl—an opioid analgesic eighty to one hundred times as potent as morphine, and capable in small amounts of causing death from profound respiratory depression. Kristin staged Greg's death to appear as a suicide, with their wedding picture near his pillow and some of her notes nearby in which she wrote of wanting to leave the marriage. These pieces of evidence led the police at first to conclude that Greg simply couldn't live without her.

But toxicologists from a different lab discovered in Greg's tissues fentanyl levels that were seven times the lethal dose. From this and other evidence accumulated by Greg's brothers two years later, Kristin was brought to trial, convicted, and sentenced to life without parole. She showed no remorse and continued to lie about the murder even while in prison. How her personality would have unfolded without the drug abuse is unknowable. For want of a ballet career—the lost nail in her case—she took to drug abuse, which led to deceitfulness, manipulativeness, promiscuity, absence of remorse, stealing drugs: altogether, the picture of “acquired psychopathy” in someone ultimately driven to murder in order to get her husband “out of the way.” The descent into evil actions—such as murder or infanticide—under the impact of powerful drugs like crack cocaine or crystal meth is a story heard all too often by the police and in the courts. This happens more often among those who were neglected or abused as children,29 but it can happen even in those who started out, like Kristin Rossum, with what seemed like every advantage.

CATEGORY 11: PSYCHOPATHIC KILLERS OF PEOPLE IN THE WAY

The distinction between Categories 10 and 11 lies not in the behaviors of persons in these groups but in the degree and origins of their psychopathic tendencies. Those in Category 11 are more “dyed-in-the-wool” psychopaths, showing signs of conduct disorder or marked antisocial behaviors consistently from age eight or nine all the way through adolescence and beyond. These are the people whom some call early-onset or life-course persistent antisocial offenders.30 A proportion of them later on show the characteristics of full-blown psychopathy.

Christian Longo

The elder of two brothers raised originally in a Catholic family, Chris Longo's parents divorced when he was four. His mother, Joy, was a teenager when she divorced her first husband after he beat her over the abdomen in an effort to make her abort the child she was carrying. She remarried, this time to Joe Longo, and then converted to Jehovah's Witness when Chris was ten. Joy persuaded Joe to convert also. In this strict religious group parents often avoid contact with the “worldly people,” and homeschool their children. Chris wet his bed until he was ten, which is often a sign of emotional instability. He started out in public school, but didn't do well, so he hacked illegally into the school computer in order to hoist his grades. It was at that point, as Chris was about to enter high school, that Joe and Joy pulled him out of that school and henceforth homeschooled him.³¹

Chris was not allowed to date even when he was turned eighteen. His reaction to that edict was to leave home the following week. Shortly after, he married Mary-Jane, also a Jehovah's Witness and seven years older than he. Chris had not graduated high school and had no good skills or prospects. He got a job in a jewelry store, from which he stole $108, resigning after he paid the money back. He was sued several times for nonpayment of other monies he owed. Chris wanted the best of everything—another sign of departure from the Jehovah's Witnesses, who emphasize austerity. He began using false names and stolen credit cards to maintain his lifestyle, and he once drove off in a test car and disappeared, using yet another alias. Forging $30,000 worth of checks to raise cash, he hastily moved his family from Michigan to Ohio. By then, he had three small children, all born between 1997 and 1999. At one point Mary-Jane discovered an e-mail between her husband and another woman. When confronted, Chris told Mary-Jane he had stopped loving her when she had all those children, and that she wasn't fun anymore.32

Mary-Jane, raised to be subservient to a husband no matter what, put up with his infidelity and his scams. Keeping a step ahead of the authorities, he stole a van and moved the family to Oregon, where he was only able to get a low-paying job—necessitating further thefts to feed the family. As the police were finally about to close in on him, he drowned Mary-Jane and the three children, dumping their bodies in different Oregon rivers, after which he fled to Cancun, Mexico. The body of his three-year-old daughter, Sadie, had been weighted down with a rock. Clearly he imagined their bodies would never be found, and he would be free to begin life over under a more favorable star. It was as though he taken to heart Joseph Stalin's famous quip (upon ridding himself of a rival): “No body, no problem.”

Once in Cancun, he assumed the identity of another man, Michael Finkel, who wrote feature articles for the New York Times. He was arrested in Cancun a few weeks later, still in the guise of the well-known journalist, partying and enjoying his ersatz celebrity. His true identity soon uncovered, he was convicted and sentenced to death. He rationalized the murders as his way of sending his family to a “better place”—in keeping with his religious teaching.³³ Chris had the outward persona of a Prince Charming, convinced he could talk his way out of anything. One of his wife's sisters had a certain admiration for his talents at charm and deception, commenting that Chris was capable of conning anyone.

CATEGORY 14: RUTHLESSLY SELF-CENTERED PSYCHOPATHIC SCHEMERS³⁴

Some of the persons included in Category 14 were, like those we have already met in this chapter, eager to get someone permanently out of the way, whether that person might be a parent, a wealthy stranger, or a spouse. Usually, however, it was a spouse. And because there are many more men willing to kill a wife than there are wives willing to kill a husband, uxoricides (the fancy term for wife killers) greatly outnumber husband killers. But there is something more diabolical, more glaringly premeditated and psychopathic—hence more evil—in the eyes of the public about this type of criminal than those described in the earlier sections. Many had longer criminal careers and a more checkered past than those in the lower categories. Among the six hundred biographies I have relied on for much of this book, the highest percentage of the individuals are found in Category 14—one person in seven. I will have more to say on the topic of wife murder at the end of this section, but at this point it is worth noting how often staging crops up in the stories of spousal murder when it occurs in the educated and the well-to-do. Relative to our focus on evil, there is not only the “regular” evil of murder, but the added evil of chutzpah: the brazen assumption by these killers that they are far more clever than the police and thus immune to prosecution. It is as though they believe that, paraphrasing the late Leona Helmsley, jail is for the little people.35Staging refers to the deliberate alteration of a murder scene to make it look like an accident. The use of a hired hit man—as we saw in the Minns case—is another way a spouse (more often a husband than a wife) may try to feign innocence and elude guilt by distancing himself from the crime. The case that follows illustrates this point.

Todd Garton

The younger of two sons from a northern California family of Irish American descent, Todd from his earliest days was addicted to risk and thrill seeking. He was a compulsive weaver of tall tales, embellishing his image with stories of derring-do and accomplishments that were all make-believe. Granted that the con artist has a keen nose for the gullible, Garton's virtuosity at deception put him in a class by himself. He got his friends to believe that when he was only twelve—or was it fifteen?—he was already a mercenary in Belfast for the Irish Republican Army, serving as a “sniper” before “returning” to his home in California. He boasted that he had killed two “bad guys” when he was sixteen and had thrown their bodies in the Columbia River. Garton was actually a fairly competent bass player and headed up a band that enjoyed some popularity in Oregon and northern California—a band that was destined, according to his braggadocio, to become the “next Beatles.” He became absorbed with the fantasy of organizing an assassination squad to be known as “The Company.” To show that he meant business, Todd would shoot cats, as he walked along with a friend, Norman Daniels, whom he would later recruit into his plan for murder. To Daniels he said that the “Company” was headed by a mysterious Colonel Sean who was “out of Langley” (the headquarters of the CIA) and was into “cover-up stuff.”36 Todd also lined up another friend, Dale Gordon, to participate in “justified killings”—in which Todd would portray a certain Dean Noyes as a “scumbag” who “stole money from a hospital group and beat up his wife.”³⁷ Dale later said: “I believed him because the stories were very real stories. He [Todd] would give you smells, sights, everything.”³⁸

When he was twenty-one, Todd married Carole Holman, though he had been having an affair with Lynn Noyes, who had been a “groupie” when Todd was still running his band. Having tired of Carole seven years later, he wanted to resume his relationship with Lynn on a full-time basis. As an added inconvenience, Carole was eight months pregnant. Revving up his gift of gab to the max, Todd convinced both Norman and Dale that Carole was an “evil woman from the IRA” who was threatening others, and that they needed to join his Company and assassinate Carole before she got the chance to kill them. Realizing there was a fee for such services, Todd took out insurance policies of $125,000 for himself and for Carole so each would have something in case the other died³⁹—a sum that would more than cover the amounts he promised his hit men friends. Then, on May 16, 1998, Dale Gordon shot Carole to death (with one of the five shots directed at her abdomen, killing the eight-month-old fetus) as she lay asleep. Growing remorseful afterward, Dale confessed to the authorities. As the plot involved Dale, Norman, Todd, and Lynn, all four were arrested and ultimately convicted. Todd, as the mastermind and psychopath, was quickly converted from con man to convict, and was given the death penalty. He has never confessed. The prosecutor in the case, Greg Gaul, having read Robert Scott's account of the murder, warned the public: “Don't believe everything you hear,” referring to Todd's flamboyant lies, and adding, “There are evil people out there…and Todd Garton was an evil person.”⁴⁰ Given the timing of the murder (Carole was in her eighth month of pregnancy), there is good reason to suspect that the “why?” of this case has much to do with the utter refusal on Todd's part to accept the responsibilities of fatherhood.

Sante Kimes

Sante Kimes and her son Kenny Jr. achieved notoriety in the summer of 1998 for the murder and disappearance of a wealthy New York widow, Irene Silverman. This was but the last in a dizzying and lifelong career of theft, conning, escape, and murder, stretching back to Sante's childhood, and later, to her tutelage of her own son in the ways of crime.41 Just to list the complete catalog of Sante's crimes and her many aliases would about double the length of this chapter. Readers with a fascination for the macabre may wish to read either Adrian Havill's book The Mother, the Son, and the Socialite or his shorter account featured on the Crime Library Web site.⁴²

Sante was born in 1934 in Oklahoma, the third of four children. Her mother was Irish; her father, Rattan Singhrs, was from India. A few years later the family moved to California. The father deserted and the mother became a prostitute, the children ending up in orphanages or foster homes. For a time, Sante was a street child in Los Angeles, where she was arrested at age nine for stealing food. She had apparently also been sexually abused. This was her situation until a woman suggested to her sister and brother-in-law that they adopt her, which they eagerly did. Now as Sante Chambers, she was a high school student, who was known as a cheerleader and boy-crazy flirt. She also began shoplifting and using her stepfather's credit cards to steal. After high school she married, briefly, first to Lee Powers, and then to Ed Walker, by whom she had a son, Kent Walker. Attractive at that stage of her life, she was sometimes mistaken for Elizabeth Taylor. This proved a help in her scams and thefts, including an auto theft she carried off by conning a dealer into letting her test-drive a new Cadillac, alone. She simply drove off with it, and when she was eventually caught, she told the police she was “still testing it.” For a time she worked as a prostitute in Los Angeles. Somehow, and stories differ on this, she met up with a self-made millionaire, Kenneth Kimes (Big Ken), in 1971. He was seventeen years older. Sante had a son by him, and she gave herself and the boy the Kimes name, even though they were not as yet married. Despite Kimes's wealth, Sante continued to steal and began teaching her son, Kenneth Kareem Kimes (Ken Jr.), the tricks of the trade.

Big Ken was no more weighted down with scruples than was Sante; the two now plotted to meet the great and near-great in Washington, DC. They touted themselves as “honorary ambassadors” and even crashed a party at the house of Vice President Gerald Ford. Although it was no longer necessary economically to steal, Sante stole for the thrill of it: at another gathering in DC she contrived to steal a mink coat lying on a chair, by donning first the mink and then over it her own coat. Arrested for that, she evaded trial for five years with one excuse after the other, and when declared guilty, she simply disappeared. Whenever ensconced in her luxurious La Jolla home with the two Kens, Sante hired maids from Mexico, whom she then enslaved in cruel ways—branding one with a hot iron, locking another in a closet, striking others for not cooking a meal the way Sante liked it. For these cruelties she was arrested and for the first time actually went to prison—for three years, until her release in 1989.

Apart from her abusiveness toward servants, Sante had so far confined her activities to property crimes. That was to change. Now, with the cooperation of Ken Jr., she embarked on a more ambitious career of conning—and killing—rich people. When a lawyer conspired with Sante and Ken Jr. to burn down one of their homes for insurance money, he boasted about it to strangers in a bar. The authorities learned of this and convinced him to be an informant. Sante and Ken invited him to join them on vacation in Central America—a trip from which she and her son returned, but not the lawyer. His body has never been found. In the Bahamas, they fooled and later killed banker Sayed Bilal Ahmed and then went on to make some real estate deals with David Kazdin, an old friend of Sante's now dead husband (who managed to die of natural causes). But when Kazdin didn't go along with Sante's scams and was about to inform against her, he ended up shot to death, his body then deposited unceremoniously in a dumpster.

Having heard about Irene Silverman, a wealthy Fifth Avenue widow, Sante and Ken moved to New York to launch a still more ambitious scheme: to rent a suite of rooms at her mansion, use their con artist abilities to get into the woman's good graces, forge a document that gave over the mansion to Sante and Ken, kill her, and then make the body “disappear.” With Sante assiduously practicing Silverman's handwriting, they went through with the entire plan, lugging Irene's body out of the Fifth Avenue mansion boxed up in a big trunk, returning later with the forged document supposedly conveying the place to the Kimes. But Sante had made a careless phone call to a man she then invited to run the New York property. The FBI were onto him; he cooperated with the authorities, incriminating evidence was found (including paper on which Sante had practiced Irene's handwriting over and over), and Sante and Ken were arrested. Irene's body has never been found—a fact that Ken thought would shield them from the police. As Ken (perhaps another admirer of Stalin) told the court: No body, no crime. Both are now serving life sentences. I thought it might be interesting to interview Sante, since she is incarcerated in a women's prison just thirty miles north of my office. She answered my letter in a most gracious manner, giving me to believe that she had been the victim of false accusations. The interview never took place, nor do I think that, even if it did, her account of her story would bear the stamp of truth.

A COMMENT ON WIFE MURDERERS

I noted earlier that as we move up the Gradations of Evil scale, we move away from reactive or “impulsive” murders toward murders and other acts of violence that are more and more premeditated or “instrumental.”

In America, spouse murders are, in general, committed twice as often by husbands as by wives.43 In the numerous biographies I have surveyed, where spousal murders were often of the instrumental type, a comparable ratio existed: there were two and a half times as many husbands (114) who murdered their wives as there were wives (44) who murdered a husband. All but two of the men were white (there was a black physician and a black dentist). Impulsive wife murders accounted for only one case in nine. We have already mentioned three such men (Gingerich, Rowe, and Skiadopoulos) in earlier chapters. All the rest were “schemers.” This is a much higher ratio than we would see in the whole population, where murder on impulse is the rule, even in the murder of a spouse.

Men are, in general, more aggressive than women: wife battering is common, husband battering is rare. This means that wives who kill their husbands have usually been provoked by physical abuse, though I also found in my series of “schemers” that the women in almost half the cases killed for insurance money. The motives of the men were occasionally to get insurance money (one in ten), but much more often they had to do with jealousy, anger at the wife for demanding a divorce, or wanting to be with a mistress. Those three motives accounted for three out of five of the cases. One man in ten killed to protect himself from public disgrace, as when the wife was aware of some sordid and illegal action and was about to tell the authorities. In one case the wife found out her husband, who claimed to be a medical student, was an imposter.44 In another, the wife learned that her husband was a crooked attorney involved in get-rich schemes with illegal drugs.⁴⁵

Homicide is the leading cause of death among pregnant women in the United States.⁴⁶ In this chapter we sketched the case of Todd Garton; there were three others in my series, including the more well-known case of Scott Peterson, who killed his wife, Laci, also when she was in her eighth month of pregnancy.⁴⁷ It was not the wife but the unborn child that pushed these men over the edge.

But of all the things I learned from looking at the histories of wife murderers, the most remarkable were these two points: the men hardly ever confessed, even when convicted, and they staged the wife's body to make it look like death was “accidental”—or used a hit man. These measures were the rule rather than the exception among the “schemers” (that is, the husbands who committed premeditated murder). Confession was common in the impulsive husbands (7 out of 10); only one in five among the “schemers” ever confessed. Both these qualities contribute to the aura of evil that surrounds these cases of wife murder. The vast majority of people are incapable of lying with anything like the poise and facility that the psychopath brings to this task. In contrast, the vast majority of people, though in their mind they may now and again plot to hurt or kill someone who has deeply offended them, have adequate inner controls that slam the brakes on these vengeful thoughts, which then whither and disappear.