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We studied our serial killers, nonces and murderers in the same way we did our scientists, intellectuals and artists, looking for answers to the mystery of our nature.

—Irvine Welsh, Crime1

In this book the spotlight has been on evil in peacetime: extreme violent actions, that is, committed by people who for the most part are outside the ordinary run of mankind. As we have seen, some are people ordinary in appearance and conduct before they explode into violence. They shock us not just by their actions but by the sheer unexpectedness of their actions. We tend to regard those whose violence moves or revolts us as evil—as “monsters.” An acquaintance of mine from Sydney, Australia, for example, learned that her seemingly nice neighbor was a serial killer. With others who encounter violent persons, the shock doesn't come until a violent act has been performed because they already seemed quite different from ordinary folk—either because of mental illness, peculiarity of personality, or chronic antisocial behavior.

The situation in times of group conflict, especially in wartime, is different. To be sure, many of the leaders in such times, especially the aggressors, partake of this “otherness”—being awash in violence—to the point of becoming monsters. We must not forget the butchery carried out, or inspired, by Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz, Dr. Zawahiri from the caves of Afghanistan, or the recently captured Serbian doctor, Radovan Karadžic´—a psychiatrist, no less. Yet much of the actual damage (or even carnage) is inflicted by ordinary people who become swept up in the tide of battle, their minds replaced temporarily, as it were, by the mind of the leader. The behavior of the soldiers or of other participants is uncharacteristic of their usual selves. Still, many of those “ordinary” soldiers who commit atrocities are not all that ordinary: they may have been the ones who beat their wives, were harsh or cruel with their children in such a way that they found war a welcome opportunity to give vent to sadistic tendencies that were kept somewhat under wraps in civilian life. These were not good men, that is; they were ordinary only in the sense that as civilians they had led unremarkable lives that garnered little attention. It is not likely that neuroimaging studies would reveal much brain abnormality in such men.

This crucial difference has been highlighted in a recent work by Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic´ in her book They Would Never Hurt a Fly. One of her more interesting comments is, “War turns ordinary men into monsters.”2 She contends that in times of war and group conflict, men (and even some women) are transformed into moral zombies, capable of committing the most appalling atrocities upon the enemy—civilians included—only to revert, once the cease-fire has sounded, to their previous lives as grocery clerks, taxi drivers, farmhands, teachers, and, yes, doctors. But again, although they may revert to being ordinary people, they may not be good people.

As with evil, the word monster is one we reserve for behavior that is so unlike our behavior as to create a comfortable distance between our self-image and our perception of those freakish aberrations of nature, those monstrosities (as we prefer to regard them), who actually are inclined to behave like, well, evil monsters. The cartoonist Walt Kelly put it all very simply when Pogo, the main character of the titular comic strip—who happens to be an opossum—says, in a moment of reflection, “We have met the enemy—and he is us.”

Since most of us go from cradle to grave without ever participating in evil acts, it is tempting to think—flattering to think—that many of us are truly inoculated against evil, as though there were some invisible divide separating the majority of us from those “others”—the monsters. Certainly it helps to come from a good family, surrounded by a supportive and accepting community, and to be blessed with the good fortune not to have inherited risk genes (either for mental illness or abnormal personality), nor to have suffered birth complications or sustained a serious head injury.

But put yourself in the place of twenty-four-year-old Dražen Erdomovic´, a half-Serb, half-Croat soldier transported in mid-July with his unit in 1995 to Srebrenica, not knowing what his mission was. His commander, Brano Gojkovic´, soon made his mission clear: he was to join with his mates in shooting to death some twelve hundred Muslim civilians, men and boys, who had been bused there for the purpose. As Drakulic´ tells the story, Dražen had no taste for this sort of thing. When he expressed his disinclination to take part in the massacre, his mates mocked him. He was after all only a half-Serb in their eyes: not someone they could readily trust. His commander then told him: “If you don't want to do it, walk over there and stand with the prisoners so we can shoot you too. Give me your machine gun.”3 Now Dražen is given the choice between a good and an evil. He could stand on moral high ground—and die. Or he could kill some innocent men and boys—and live, perhaps to tell the world of the still greater evil into which he was forced by his commander, who obeyed an even worse commander, General Mladic´, who gleefully carried out the orders of Dr. Karadžic´, who—ignoring the Hippocratic Oath (“First, do no harm”)—happily obeyed the genocidal edict of President Slobodan Milošević. Dražen chose life—for himself, which meant the deaths of the sixty people he spent a quarter-hour shooting. He did tell the story, and because his story was believable, his sentence at court was reduced from ten years to five. Was it better that Dražen live to let the world know what happened on that killing field? Or would it have been better if he (and all the men compelled to take part in the massacre) died, leaving the truly evil and guilty commanders and generals and presidents to live out their lives unsuspected and unpunished? Because Dražen had a conscience, he lives on as a spiritually broken man. And Mladic´ and Karadžic´ live on, too—contented and unrepentant. In the young soldier's place, what would I have done? What would you have done? I ask this only as a rhetorical question. If we are honest, we cannot say what we would have done.

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The banality of evil, of which Hannah Arendt spoke, was the banality of Adolf Eichmann, the oil company agent; of Josef Mengele, the doctor; of Joachim Ribbentrop, the champagne salesman; of Martin Bormann, the estate agent; of Hans Frank, the attorney; of Reinhard Heydrich, the violinist and navy officer. None of these men were mentally ill; none had suffered a head injury or any illness affecting the brain. Most of these men had what Dr. Kernberg has called malignant narcissism—they were egocentric, ambitious, ruthless, yet capable of loyalty to their group or within the confines of family. Several had been raised in virulently anti-Semitic families (Heydrich, Alfred Rosenberg) and were uncommonly arrogant. Of Ribbentrop it was said that he was disliked by everyone except his wife and Hitler; even Hitler found him tiresome. Only two of the top Nazis denounced Hitler during the 1945–1946 Nuremberg trials: the Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach, and the architect Albert Speer. All these men had come under the sway of Hitler, but for which they would not have set in motion the Holocaust; all would have died in the same obscurity in which they had been born. Hitler was the catalyst that activated the potential for evil in these men. And I suspect all these men would have shown little or no abnormality if tested with MRI.

Hans Frank, who went on to become governor general of occupied Poland, was one of the war criminals hanged at the Nuremberg trials. His son Niklas was seven at that time and had been raised amid luxury in the castle his father had taken over. His mother used to take him in the chauffeured limousine to go into town and buy mink coats for a few złotys from Jewish women who were about to go, unknowingly, to their deaths at Auschwitz. Despite such beginnings, Niklas developed a strong moral center—how this happened is a mystery—and later wrote a book condemning his father, regretting that he was not privileged to witness his father's hanging.4

Niklas was almost alone among the children of the Nazi higher-ups to condemn, rather than excuse, their fathers.5 Some twenty years ago I wrote him a letter, asking if he had any clue what helped him gain high moral ground in the face of the evils that both parents represented and that surrounded him on all sides. He responded, expressing how he felt red with both shame and joy at receiving my letter. He had no answer for how he retained moral integrity while growing up in that home. But he did comment how it was clear from his own text the danger we all are in, adding, “Who knows whether, if I had been born in my father's time, I wouldn't have ended up like my father?”6 In his efforts to come to grips with the ordinariness of many who commit atrocities in wartime, Niklas Frank pondered the question in this way: “There are two people inside each German. One of them is well-behaved, hardworking, a solid citizen. That is the official version of the respectable German. But beneath it, behind it, as if made up of negative ions, there are the authentic Germans, a people of murderers.”7 Here he was too harsh in condemning his countrymen as a whole—especially those born after the war. But his remark does underline as if with yellow highlighter how vulnerable we are as human beings to shift in wartime from the honorable to the despicable; how easy is the transition in such times from a life of innocence to a life of evil.

What I am saying here does not lessen the responsibility of those who, in wartime, make the descent from the ordinary into the evil of atrocity, who selectively switch off their compassion—that essential ingredient of goodness—and end up blind to the humanity of the noncombatants, even of the children of the enemy. This means that Lieutenant William Calley of Vietnam's My Lai massacre was responsible;8 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who confessed to beheading the Wall Street Journal bureau chief Daniel Pearl, was responsible; the American soldiers who tortured Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib were responsible; the Russian guards who brutalized Ivan Denisovich in the gulag (the prisoner immortalized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) were responsible; and so on in an endless list. All of these men started out as ordinary men. Ordinary men, carrying out the orders of their fanatical or sadistic leaders, or, in the case of the highly educated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, radicalized by experiences in times of group conflict.

Ordinary men, briefly put, can turn into monsters in time of war or group conflict, committing acts that horrify and disgust—acts we label “evil.” And then they can turn back again into ordinary men. Once the leader has dehumanized the enemy, the value system the followers may have brought to the conflict originally is scrapped and supplanted by the leader's value system. And that system is quite simple: the enemy is the enemy; the enemy is not really human. Uniformed troops, guerillas, combatants, civilians, men of fighting age, women and children…all are fair game. Thus the three thousand civilians killed on 9/11 were not “really” civilians; they were “soldiers” in the front lines of the Great Satan's infidel capitalist army. The North Vietnamese at My Lai were women who might be hiding bombs, children who might one day grow into enemy soldiers. Best not to take chances.

Apart from a declared war, there are innumerable instances of civil strife and politically inspired terrorism where we witness the transition: ordinary man–torturer–ordinary man once again. The Brazilian police during the military regime of 1964–1985 had been carefully instructed in torture and murder by way of suppressing those considered “subversives” in that era. Beggars were taken off the streets and tortured—for practice—the torturers having been carefully mentored by a US police officer.9 The policemen involved showed “no evidence of premorbid personalities that would have predisposed them to such careers”; those with cruel tendencies were actually steered away from that work by the authorities.10 This, from a chapter in Violence Workers entitled “Ordinary Men Doing Evil Deeds.”

The behavior of the common soldiers in the Franco-Algerian war of 1954–1962 went along similar lines. The tortures taking place on both sides led French journalist Jacques Servan-Schreiber to write: “There is no one who is naturally evil…. There are situations which inflame the beast in man…. You have seen in Algeria how easily men can become the helpless playthings of the set-up into which they are thrown.”11 Servan-Schreiber is, I believe, nearly correct: the “naturally evil” are rare; they are the psychopathic men (and the still rarer women) who, in peacetime and without maltreatment or provocation, kill and torture for sport. Usually they occupy Category 22 of my Gradations of Evil scale, though the majority of them have been so brutalized in their younger years that it would be improper to call them “naturally evil.”

In an earlier chapter we saw how uncommon it was to encounter a murderer whose acts could be attributed to Bad Seed alone. There is of course an intermediate group: persons who have spent all their adult lives (and much of their adolescent lives) doing one violent or socially repugnant act after another. These are the persons who seem “perpetually” evil. Some have endured neglect or humiliation in their early years (Charles Sobhraj, who killed a string of tourists in Southeast Asia; the Angel of Death nurse Jane Toppan; San Francisco's “Zodiac Killer” Arthur Allen; Florida serial killer Daniel Conahan; Francisco Montes, the Spanish man who sneaked into youth hostels in a dozen countries, raping and killing young women). Others came from apparently good homes (such as Vancouver's serial killer, Clifford Olson).

About certain others, we know little concerning their early years: Franklin Delano Floyd, who kidnapped a girl, kept her for many years as his “daughter” and then killed her when she tried to leave him and marry; Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who imprisoned his daughter in the bunker under his house and had seven children by her. Then there is Paul Schaefer, whose life was depicted under the arresting title “The World's Most Evil Man.”12 That is a gross exaggeration, though there is ample evidence to place Schaefer as one among the most evil men. A man of twenty-four at the end of World War II, he became a charismatic cult leader and moved with his flock from Germany to Chile. He created a compound, Colonia Dignidad, cut off from the rest of the country and ruled his subjects with absolute control—engaging in the sexual molestation of boys, forced labor, weapons trafficking, kidnapping, torture, and murder. A large but unknown number of murder victims lay buried in the hinterlands near Santiago. Through intimidation of his followers, the news of the unspeakable practices going on at the Colonia were so slow to reach the outside world that Schaefer was not arrested until 2006—when he was eighty-five. Given a twenty-year sentence, he will die in prison, but his crimes are no worse than those of David Parker Ray or Leonard Lake, described in an earlier chapter. There is no “most evil man”—though there are many serious contenders.

As for the men who have fomented the wars or the political conflicts, and in whose names atrocities were committed, their abnormalities were confined to the subtle area of personality. Sensitivity about short stature (Joseph Stalin) or physical abnormality (Joseph Goebbels, with his deformed leg from childhood osteomyelitis) affected some of these men.13 Mental illness and brain injury were not a part of the picture; instead was a picture composed in varying fractions of grandiosity, hatred, sadism, vengefulness, bigotry, and a lust for power. Also, we should not overlook the quest for fame, as we see in many of today's terrorists who, nonentities at the outset, purchase fame through martyrdom, knowing that leading a blameless life earns no notoriety—but slaughtering a few innocents makes headlines.14

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Evil in peacetime is quite another matter. In the absence of prior attack by an enemy bent on one's degradation and destruction, evil acts emerge neither from the aggressors nor from extremes of retaliation by the victims.15 As outlined in the chapters of this book, evil in peacetime sometimes has its origins in aberrations of personality alone, but the more usual background picture is an amalgam of abnormal personality and other factors relating to mental illness or brain disorders. An extremely harsh early environment is commonplace (parental brutality, disparagement, or neglect), especially in the ranks of men committing serial sexual homicide. This was true of many of the leaders in wartime but is not a regular feature of those whom they inspire to carry out the atrocities against the enemy. Once the enemy has been demonized and dehumanized, the all-too-ordinary men committing these acts seldom regard them as atrocities.16

Evil in peacetime lends itself to neuroscientific study: the men involved in evil acts in peacetime are seldom the “ordinary” men of wartime soldiery.17 As noted earlier, however, many of those “ordinary” soldiers committing these atrocities are not all that ordinary. Probably a good many were wife beaters, cruel and perhaps even sadistic to their children, men who found satisfaction in wartime situations where they could, now free of all restraint, unleash their sadistic desires.

But when we examine the persons who are responsible for the evil acts done in peacetime, we are usually looking at persons who have something decidedly the matter with them. Especially among those in whom mental illness, birth complications, and brain damage are not part of the picture, there will often be a “residue” of psychopathy. And as we have seen, psychopaths will often have abnormalities in certain key brain areas: the top-down areas mentioned in chapter 9, the paralimbic region that Dr. Kiehl is currently studying with fMRI.18 Dr. Kiehl is optimistic that psychopathy will one day yield to treatment (including medications). I do not share his optimism. Even though brain abnormalities have been detected in some psychopaths via MRI, psychopathy as an aberration of personality is in all of the brain. Whether the condition arose on a genetic basis or on the basis of brutalization or extreme neglect (especially maternal neglect), the predatory nature of the psychopath and his deeply entrenched inability to care about the suffering of his victims will persist. And if the psychopath becomes a serial rapist like Fred Coe or James Bergstrom, or a serial killer like Ted Bundy or David Parker Ray, the idea of pardon and release for such dangerous men is completely out of the question.

Equally beyond the range of treatment and rehabilitation are the psychopaths who ruin the lives of others through a lifelong pattern of fraud, imposture, deceit, and theft but who either stop short of murder, or whose attempts to murder are thwarted at the last minute. Because murderous assault and actual murder are more likely to trigger the response of “evil,” the imposter whose victims survive doesn't often make the headlines. Shock and horror stay confined to a narrower circle. This is evil too—but of a quieter kind. In her book A Dance with the Devil, Barbara Bentley gives a moving account of her marriage to a man, John Perry, who led her to believe he was an admiral in the navy and was the son of the famous Admiral Perry. He told her that he had won, among his many other medals, the Congressional Medal of Honor for his courageous exploits. A charming and clever parasite, he nearly bankrupted her with his extravagance, stealing her credit cards and charging huge sums, promising her that still huger sums were owed him and were about to come in any day, along with a substantial inheritance. Little by little she discovered he had spent three years in federal prison for impersonating an air force officer, that he actually was the son of Admiral Perry but had won no medals, and had used half a dozen aliases (one of the telltale signs of the psychopath). Nor was he was the heir to any fortune. As she began to learn the truth, he tried on several occasions, fortunately without success, to kill her. Barbara had to move mountains to win a favorable divorce (she actually got a law passed in California to protect victims such as herself). John was given five years in prison for attempted murder but was released after twenty-two months. He then continued as the same John Perry, this time tricking a wealthy widow into supporting him. As she began to realize he was defrauding her, he used the same ploy to win sympathy as he had with Barbara: faking a heart attack by taking a cocktail of pills. This time the cocktail killed him—a con artist and a killer manqué to the last of his sixty-seven years.19

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Sexual crimes, particularly those involving children, readily trigger in us the “evil” response. Their perpetrators usually come from seriously troubled families, show multiple paraphilias, prime themselves with alcohol or drugs just before the crimes, and may be mentally ill besides. Yet even among them, there are a few who come from unremarkable, or even excellent, families: Dennis Rader and Richard Starrett are two examples.20 Crimes of impulse, including those we regard as evil, often stem from problems in the brain's bottom-up areas. Drives go unchecked by the braking system. Murders committed by adolescents often have this characteristic, including the occasional “thrill-kill” by boys from respectable families. This seemed to be the case with the famous “Crime of the Century” by Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, eighteen and nineteen when they conspired to murder fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks.21

What is most important to remember, when considering the origins of violent criminal actions, is that the sociological explanations favored by many—that crime is an outgrowth of poverty and bad environment—is simplistic and misleading.22 Some persons, consistently brutalized by parents in their formative years, do pass into the stage of virulency, described by Lonnie Athens (chapter 8 of Richard Rhodes's biography Why They Kill). But inherited factors may have paved the way for the ensuing brutality to have its devastating effects. Dr. Athens's own life gives the lie to his one-sided theory. He himself had been brutalized by his father in ways that would be sickening to describe here.23 Yet he did not go on to become a violent (let alone virulent or evil) criminal. How can this be? The safest assumption is that Dr. Athens was dealt some genetic high cards that allowed him to endure his father's tortures without succumbing to a life of vengeance and criminality, becoming instead an eminent sociologist with some special insights into the lives of violent felons.

A similar case of “good seed” concerns Sanford Clark, the half-brother of Gordon Northcott. When Sanford was thirteen, he was taken by his much older brother (whom he was raised by their mother to believe was his uncle) to a California chicken ranch. There he was raped and beaten regularly by Gordon and forced at gunpoint to participate in the rape-murders of twenty Mexican boys. It was Sanford's job to flay the victims, crush their skulls, and dispose of their remains. After two years of this enslavement, he was able to escape and give evidence against Northcott, who was hanged two years later in 1930. After overcoming immense psychological traumas, Sanford was able to make a good recovery. He married and adopted two boys, afraid lest the taint of the family pass to any children he might have of his own (there were other violent and abusive relatives besides his half-brother). As with Lonnie Athens, Sanford Clark was able to lead an exemplary life—for reasons as mysterious as why Athens's father and Clark's brother were so consistently evil.24

We will find the fewest abnormalities in those who, driven by jealousy, murder a lover or spouse. This was the case with Clara Harris and Jean Harris, whom I have placed in Category 2 of the scale, where murder is a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence in an otherwise fairly well-integrated person. So far, we are speaking of the external aspects of evil: actions whose description, when we hear of them, make us wince in horror and disgust.

Equally important is the most significant internal aspect of evil: lack of compassion. Some professionals prefer the term empathy, but as I explained earlier, compassion is the more accurate word—and it is the word Drakulic´ emphasizes in her book. The evil acts of peacetime are only occasionally accompanied by a total and across-the-board lack of this vital human sentiment. In my experience the most striking example is that of the cannibal-killer, David Paul Brown/Bar Jonah. Going back to the time when he, while still himself a child, tried to kill another child, there is no evidence he felt compassion for anyone. This “liberated” him to perform the most unspeakable acts with utter nonchalance. Just as there are gradations of evil, there are gradations of compassion.

Of the persons sketched in this book, some had little compassion in general; others showed a kind of “splitting” in this regard: they had no compassion for their targeted victims, yet they retained a measure of compassion toward certain family members and friends. Serial killer Gary Ridgway, for example, felt close to his third wife (during that marriage, the frequency of his murders declined considerably), yet when interviewed by the authorities after his capture, he spoke of the women he killed as “garbage.”

Sometimes an evil act arises unexpectedly in a person who is deficient though not devoid of compassion when subjected to an unanticipated stress relating to someone viewed as “them” but not “us.” A common example is that of the parent who is kind to his own children but cruel to an adopted or foster child. Getrude Baniszewski is a case in point. A divorced and impoverished woman of thirty-seven in Indianapolis with seven children of her own, Gertrude took in other children as boarders to supplement her meager income.25 Embittered, punitive, and mentally unstable, Gertrude was quick to use the switch with her own children, but her punishments fell short of “evil.” When she agreed in the summer of 1965 to take care of a fifteen-year-old girl, Sylvia, and her younger sister while their parents were away, Gertrude's punitiveness suddenly rose to evil proportions. In a crime that was considered the most horrifying in Indiana's history at that time, she, along with her children and some of their friends, embarked on a campaign to torture. Sylvia—a virginal girl whose “offense” was to be prettier than Gertrude's eldest (and already pregnant) daughter Paula—was beaten, burned, scalded, booted in the groin, forced to eat and drink waste matter, and then branded with a hot needle that etched into her abdomen the words “I am a prostitute and proud of it.” She was then tied to a bed in the basement and starved to death. At trial the prosecuting attorney, alluding to the branding of the victim, asked his counterpart on the defense side, “Where is the compassion, Mr. Nedeff?”26 As with all those committing evil acts in peacetime, there was no Commander Gojkovic´ holding a gun to Gertrude's head. Her actions came from within. Gertrude died at age sixty-two still experiencing no remorse for the torture of Sylvia.

Cindy Hendy, the female accomplice of serial killer David Parker Ray, showed a similar compartmentalization of compassion. She referred to the women she lured to the Toy Box to be tortured by Ray and herself as “packages.” A kind of “them”—as distinct from “us”—to be used and then thrown away.

No one held a gun to Hendy's head either, when she joined Ray in his systematic torture of his victims. In other killer teams—Fred and Rose West, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Gerald and Charlene Gallego, Doug Clark and Carol Bundy, Paul Bernardo and his wife, Karla Homolka—the women were not forced. Theirs was a volunteer army. Many had been incest victims, accustomed to control by an amoral “father figure.” Their attitudes hugged the extremes: intense loyalty to, and vengeful feelings toward, the men on whom they depended. They were easily led into taking part in the evil actions of their lovers or husbands. Not all were strangers to compassion, but somehow after they had been sufficiently mesmerized by their men, their compassion went off-line, sometimes for good. Myra Hindley had been a kindly, albeit very dependent woman before she met Ian Brady. Once under his influence, she did not demur when he recorded the screams of the children he strangled in front of her. She died years later in prison without a particle of remorse for what she and Ian had done.

Throughout the book I have placed particular emphasis on actions. Horrifying actions elicit the reaction “evil”—it is the first word that comes to our minds when we learn of these acts of violence or extreme degradation. Yet as I hope to have shown, the persons behind these actions are not all the same. We can think of a kind of spectrum at one end of which are persons so devoid of human sentiments and so driven to commit evil acts repeatedly that we speak of both the person and his actions as evil. At this end of the spectrum, any idea of redemption is unthinkable, treatment ineffective, and release from incarceration a terrible mistake. Most of the persons who share these qualities are psychopaths; a few suffer from extreme forms of psychosis that do not respond to treatments currently available (or, if they were to be released, could not be trusted to continue taking their medications). At the opposite end of the spectrum, we confront persons for whom redemption, treatment, and eventual release back into the community are all feasible. Here are some examples, beginning with the unredeemable and progressing to those capable of rehabilitation:

I hope these examples will illustrate the difference between evil in peacetime and evil in time of war and group conflict. In the latter is the element of subjectivity (with each side convinced that evil lay on their opponent's side). Also, the atrocities that inspire revulsion, that trigger the response of “evil,” are most often committed by persons compelled by evil leaders: persons whose lives before and afterward were inconspicuous (though not necessarily innocuous). These are the soldiers and lower-ranking administrators of Hannah Arendt's banality of evil; the people who, as Slavenka Drakulic´ wryly put it, “would never hurt a fly.”27 The people behind the evil acts of peacetime often shock us all the more, because they were acting quite on their own. That is, they were not swept up in mob psychology, not caught like Dražen Erdomovic´ in a kill-or-be-killed situation; they were not like certain narcissistic leaders who, suddenly finding themselves at the top, become unshackled from moral constraints. In addition, there is little or no subjectivity at issue. The only person who would argue against the murder of a child as being evil is another child murderer. I am not being melodramatic here: Joseph Edward Duncan III, who began raping (and later murdering) boys when he was twelve,28 after raping a boy at knifepoint when he was seventeen, spent the next fourteen years in prison. Highly intelligent (he later obtained a Phi Beta Kappa key from college), he authored a blog on the Internet, declaring: “[M]y reaction is to strike out toward the perceived source of my misery, society. My intent is to harm society as much as I can…. As an adult all I knew was the oppression of incarceration. All those years I dreamed of getting out…and getting even.”29 In his blog, Duncan advocated for release of sex offenders and for abolition of sex-offender registries, as well as recording many of his violent sexual fantasies.30

The other main ingredients of evil—that the act be shocking and that the perpetrator be lacking in compassion—are routinely present in both wartime and peacetime. But even here there is a difference. We grow up knowing the depths to which humanity can sink in wartime. The morning newspaper and the evening news teach us this. To most of us, these events seem far away. Our shock doubles, however, when a serial killer is our next-door neighbor (Gary Ridgway in Seattle), our church deacon (Dennis Rader in Kansas City), or our alderman (John Gacy in Chicago). I can personally attest to this doubling of shock: serial rapist and killer John Royster committed one of his near-murders in Central Park, across the street from where I live.31

EVIL IN PEACETIME: WHAT CAN BE DONE?

A great many of the vicious acts we witness in peacetime, the ones we register as “evil,” are committed by men (and a few women) who have the characteristics of the psychopath. Some are born that way, as we have noted, others are transformed into psychopaths through environmental adversity. Rob a child of warm maternal nurturance and you rob the child of his humanity—usually. Compassion may fail to develop. Hatred toward the more fortunate majority may easily develop, along with the desire for revenge. But protective genes may prevent a bad outcome even in a brutalized child. There is little to be done, however, with the “born” psychopath—with persons, that is, whose inherited predisposition to psychopathy overrides even the most compassionate nurturing, as appears to have been the case with Gerald Stano and his adoptive parents. Such persons behave as though wired to break the law, no matter what the law is. A psychopath interviewed by Dr. Stanton Samenow told him, “If they made rape legal, I'd have to do something else.”32

Many socially valuable strengths come naturally, that is, with little explicit instruction. Most young girls don't need to be taught to be maternal: they come by it naturally (helped by the affection and competence of their own mothers). Teaching “maternal adequacy” in our high schools would not likely accomplish much. But we could teach something about the disastrous effects of parental cruelty. We might even be able to get across the idea that corporal punishment meted out to the rebellious, let alone callous-unemotional child (who will usually be a boy), will be more likely to make him into the next Gary Gilmore than into a law-abiding citizen, respectful of the feelings of others.

Every generation will have a small but irreducible percentage of paranoid schizophrenic and other psychotic persons, a few of whom will commit—often at the urging of “command-hallucinations”—crimes of spectacular awfulness. Such was the case with David Tarloff, murderer of Dr. Faughey (mentioned in chapter 2, note 12), or with William Bruce, who killed his mother with a hatchet.33 Both were paranoid schizophrenic men, released by an overworked and inattentive hospital staff in the first case, and by overzealous “patient advocates” in the second. Patient advocates (who are not trained psychiatrists) sometimes take patient rights to such an extreme as to interfere with a delusional patient taking appropriate medication or preventing hospital staff from communicating with family members—all to the detriment of patient care and to the increase in risk of violence to others. These tragedies could be minimized through better attention to the matter of dangerousness. Mentally ill persons who are chronically dangerous (as suggested by their past history) may need institutional care for prolonged periods. Not all can be trusted to comply with taking prescribed medications once they are released from a hospital. Patient rights need to be respected, yet the rights of the community must also be respected. There will always be some guesswork in the estimation of dangerousness, though the work of Dr. Hare and his colleagues, Dr. Monahan and his group, Dr. Hodgins, Drs. Caspi and Moffitt, and others has made our estimates more accurate than ever before. We can strike a more proper balance between the competing rights of the mentally ill and the community, in such a way as to reduce the violence to which certain patients might otherwise be prone.

The violent crimes committed by certain psychotic persons are often so bizarre as to elicit the label of evil even more readily than some of the (far more common) violent crimes committed by psychopaths—especially serial killers and wife murderers who take great pains to evade detection. Tossing your father's head out the window to make sure it does not get “reattached” and result in still more cruel behavior from your father is quite crazy. The public's first reaction is completely understandable. It is when closer acquaintance with the offender's illness becomes possible, after psychiatric examination, that the public becomes aware that the act was evil, but the offender—though perhaps still dangerous—was not so evil. The psychotic killer, for example, is often driven by fear and is not rational. To that extent he is less “evil” than is the rational and calculating psychopath who harms others not out of fear but out of self-aggrandizement or the quest for thrills.

An even greater problem than the premature or ill-advised release of certain mentally ill patients is the premature release of certain offenders in our prisons. Prisoners greatly outnumber the mentally ill. In my records of serial killers, fully a fourth have been, through carelessness or improper evaluation, released into the community after having been incarcerated for rape or murder or both. In rare instances (as in the case of David Paul Brown/Nathaniel Bar-Jonah), pressure was brought from the outside despite the grave warnings issued by the hospital or prison staff. Premature release of a serial killer often results in the subsequent murder of a dozen, or even many dozens of victims. Since the mentally ill seldom murder in such numbers, the consequences of releasing a psychopath who has committed a rape-murder are much more serious. Let us focus on seven of the more well-known serial killers for the moment, following their premature or otherwise unwarranted release from prison for serious violent sexual crimes: William Bonin, Ted Bundy, Gary Heidnick, Ed Kemper, Clifford Olson, Derrick Todd Lee, and Jack Unterweger. All went on to rape and murder at least an additional 107 victims.

One of the most egregious examples of the unwarranted release of a prisoner is that of serial killer Arthur Shawcross.34 Described as “diabolical” and “evil” by his schoolmates, Shawcross came from a working-class family in Watertown, New York. Humiliated and physically abused by his mother, he also suffered at least six serious head injuries with prolonged unconsciousness during his early years. A moody, friendless outcast in school, he was kept back three grades, dropping out when he was seventeen. He showed the “triad” of prolonged bed-wetting, fire setting, and animal torture—setting dogs and cats on fire, tying up cats and hurling them into the river, and pounding squirrels and chipmunks flat. At twenty-two, he went to Vietnam, where he boasted of fantastical exploits (“beheading mama-sans and nailing their heads to trees, as a warning to the Vietcong”), when in fact he never saw combat. Back in the United States, he raped and killed a boy and a girl back in his hometown and was given a lengthy sentence at Greenhaven prison. Inexperienced social workers and staff considered him “no longer dangerous,” and after serving twelve years he was given an undeserved release by the governor of New York in 1984. A few years later, prostitutes in Rochester, New York, began disappearing—at least eleven that we know of. All were the victims of Arthur Shawcross, who, until his death in 2008, had been serving a life sentence (with no possibility of parole) at a different facility. Psychiatrists during his earlier incarcerations had assessed him (accurately) as a schizoid psychopath; their warnings about his dangerousness went unheeded. Shawcross was the embodiment of just about every risk factor mentioned in this book. A neuroscientist's nightmare, he was genetically disadvantaged, of below-average intelligence, brutalized, hypersexual, rageful, brain damaged, violent, and psychopathic—with all the callousness, grandiosity, deviousness, and lack of compassion that go to make up that personality configuration.

The two rape-murders when he was twenty-seven should have been enough to ensure a life in prison. Because sexual crimes tend to be repeated, men committing rape, especially if followed by murder, require much stricter treatment by the courts than was given to Shawcross or the dozens of other serial killers who, having been given a “second chance,” used it to add to their list of victims.

A still more shocking example concerns serial killer Joseph Duncan, mentioned above. After a long series of rapes and murders of young boys, he was released as a “sex offender” (rather than as a “sex predator”) thanks to a lax prison system. Reoffending shortly afterward (sexually groping a six-year-old boy), he manipulated a friend into putting up bail money—and then skipped bail. A month later, Duncan kidnapped a boy and a girl, after killing their mother, brother, and the mother's fiancé. Taking them from Idaho to Montana, he raped and tortured them for two months, making a video of the torture, and finally killing the nine-year-old boy. The sister managed to escape further abuse when Duncan was apprehended with her while in a convenience store. Convicting Duncan in 2008 in Idaho, the jury recommended the death penalty. Because the public's reaction to the torture and murder of children is stronger than its reaction to the murder of prostitutes, Duncan's case embodies evil to an even greater extent than does Shawcross's. Most have forgotten that Shawcross got his start by killing two children. In the words of the grandmother of the last boy Duncan tortured and killed, “I see nothing but an evil, empty, cold-hearted shell.”35 Both Shawcross and Duncan meet criteria for Category 22 on my scale; unlike Shawcross, Duncan came from a good home, was not abused, was very bright, and did not show the triad—though he did wet the bed until age thirteen. The factors behind his psychopathy seem attributable more to nature than to nurture. But it was the inappropriate release from prison that allowed both these sex offenders to continue their violent careers—their violence actually escalated in the postrelease years.

Mass murder is a different matter. Those responsible for mass murder, such as the men discussed in chapter 5—though typically paranoid, disagreeable men like Thomas Hamilton, Seung-Hui Cho, and George Hennard—usually explode into violence without much warning. Since mass murder is all but impossible without guns, better gun control might reduce this form of evil. In the United States, with two guns for every three people, it is quixotic even to think of such a solution, though we might at least aim toward making AK-47s and other repeat weapons less available. They are not instruments for hunting, after all; they are meant for killing people. A shocking case came to light recently: Quentin Patrick, an ex-convict in South Carolina somehow mistook for a robber a twelve-year-old boy who was trick-or-treating on Halloween night and rang his doorbell. Patrick, who, as an ex-convict shouldn't have had a gun in the first place, shot thirty rounds into the boy with his AK-47, killing him instantly.36

In chapter 9 there were illustrations of how alcohol and drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine can paralyze the “braking system” in persons contemplating acts of violence. It is an exercise in futility to aim at the eradication of the coca crop in Bolivia or the poppy crop in Afghanistan. “Meth” is home-grown in clandestine labs all around the United States. Cocaine and methamphetamine are, in effect, double evils, since they often ruin the lives of those addicted to them (leading them to turn to prostitution, robbery, and worse to maintain their habit), as well as the lives of those who are killed by the addicts during a violent crime. We would also have to include the lives lost to serial killers who prime themselves with such drugs before committing their murders. As a species, we evolved with brain wiring that makes us fear snakes, scorpions, spiders, and crocodiles. We cannot wait for evolution to solve the much more dangerous gun and drug problems. This becomes a task for the educational system. Since parents cannot always be relied on to instill the proper fear of these potential instruments of death and destruction, the schools should play a larger role in making children aware of the dangers. We do try to “hardwire” moral values (the Golden Rule) and survival values (cross the street on the green light) into young children. It would be good if we could add avoidance of drugs to the list of survival values.

People summoned to jury duty are routinely taught how our Anglo-American justice system evolved from one of trial by fire or of draconian sentences for even minor offenses to a much fairer system based on the supposition of innocence until proven guilty. Sentencing was assigned in accordance with the seriousness of the offense; when an offender's time was served, his debt to society was paid. Our system offers justice to many but has proven at times inadequate when faced with certain repeat offenders, especially those with psychopathic personalities. Many such offenders know how to earn “time off for good behavior,” and then resume their violent careers immediately upon release. Clifford Olson, currently residing in Vancouver's Supermax prison for the serial murder of eleven children, was asked by a journalist what he would do if he were ever released. Olson replied, “I'd take up where I left off,” adding, when asked if he felt remorse toward the families, “If I gave a shit about the parents, I wouldn't have killed the kids.”37

The Canadian system is such that eligibility for parole is considered every two years even in a case like Olson's; a life sentence tends to mean only twenty-five years; a murderer can apply for early release after fifteen years.38 Olson's is not a debt that can ever be repaid, no matter the time he serves: he has put society on notice that he remains as dangerous as the day he was first incarcerated. This, and cases like this, argue for a justice system that is flexible enough to pay greater attention to the likelihood of continued dangerousness than to statutes stemming from earlier times, when some of the crimes most closely associated with the concept of evil (like serial sexual homicide) were scarcely known or rarely encountered.

The Olson case and those like it point the way to something we actually have in our power to do: reduce the amount of evil in society. If we accept that evil equates with criminal acts that shock and horrify us—the central thesis in this book—then evil will always be with us. We cannot change heredity. We cannot eliminate head injury, mental illness, and drug abuse. But if we hone our skills in spotting dangerousness, and make sure that those whom we deem most dangerous remain separated from society either permanently or for very long periods, then the most dangerous offenders, once apprehended, will be less free to repeat their crimes. This is especially so with violent psychopathic offenders, in whom the likelihood of rehabilitation and redemption is vanishingly small. Olson, for example, before he embarked at age forty on his career of serial sexual homicide of some eleven children, had been jailed and released and jailed and released several dozens of times for assault, animal torture, armed robbery, and the like. There was a lot of handwriting on the wall. The courts could have intervened and seen to it that his career—and the careers of many like him—were thwarted at the earliest stage.

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Getting to know certain violent criminals through personal interviews and as their lives unfold over time can teach us another important—and more hopeful—point. Some persons regarded as evil early in their criminal careers do turn out to be capable of redemption as they mature over the years. We saw this in the example of Archie McCafferty (chapter 5). Despite the tumultuousness of his earlier years, he emerged as a man capable of compassion and a measure of remorse; his personality was clearly antisocial at first but lacked the psychopathic traits of utter callousness, conning, and the other extreme narcissistic traits. Early appearances to the contrary, he turned out to be salvageable. An even more compelling example is that of Billy Wayne Sinclair, mentioned in chapter 1.39 Sinclair committed a murder during an armed robbery but proved himself in prison to be a man of strong moral values. He was the “whistle-blower” who exposed the corruption of the parole system in his prison. As I learned from him, the relatives of the victim will never forgive him. Though their sentiments are understandable, their hardheartedness is, I believe, misplaced: Billy Wayne Sinclair, now in his sixties, is clearly a redeemed man, an upright citizen, and a credit to the community.

Arthur Shawcross, who should never have been released, was—and went on to kill a dozen more people; Billy Sinclair, who should have been released after a reduced sentence, nearly died in the electric chair and was fated to die of old age in prison, until, nearing sixty, he finally was released. The system is not perfect. We need to pay more attention to the subtleties of personality, becoming more restrictive with the psychopathic killers and more liberal with the nonpsychopathic prisoners who begin to show genuine signs of remorse, reform, and redemption. Redemption is not a possibility for all. Redemption is akin in the spiritual sense to what salvageability is in the realm of treatment. Essential ingredients would be remorse, a capacity for guilt, and some ability to make the transition from contempt to compassion for the kinds of persons one formerly singled out to victimize. Those who have made a career out of systematic torture—Theresa Knorr, David Parker Ray, David Paul Brown, Robert Berdella,40 Mike DeBardeleben, Belgium's pedophile torturer Marc Dutroux, Spain's Francisco Montes—lacked those ingredients. Some (Brown, Berdella, Montes) had never established a friendship, let alone an intimate relationship, with anyone their whole life. All were at the far end of the scale (22) and were beyond redemption. Some had their humanity knocked out of them by extreme parental cruelty (Berdella, DeBardeleben); we can at least sympathize with the dehumanizing forces to which they were exposed in their earliest days. Others had decent parents and arrived at their inhumanity via less obvious routes.

But even among the torturers are some in whom we can spot islands of humanity, qualities that allow us to sympathize; they behaved monstrously at times, but, in line with Slavenka Drakulic´'s understanding, they were not simply “monsters.” Ian Brady, mentioned briefly in chapter 1, is a case in point. For years, this man, who recorded the screams of the children he strangled in the English moor country, was my exemplar of the worst human being ever—in peacetime, that is. This was until I learned of the considerably worse tortures to which Leonard Lake and David Parker Ray subjected their victims. But Brady, one of the most intelligent and literate of the serial killers, wrote me a letter not long ago, now that he has spent some forty years in prison, in which he reminisced about the gourmet restaurants and delicatessens he enjoyed during his visits to the United States (before the murders). Brady has refused to eat these past few years and is kept alive by force-feeding through a stomach tube. He asked me for a map of the places he had visited in the United States, adding wistfully that, as he has no present nor future any longer, he has only the past. Prevented these past two-thirds of his seventy years from committing more of the vicious acts of the first third, these islands of humanity have become a bit more visible in this otherwise intensely narcissistic man. These islands are visible, if we peer long enough and hard enough, in a fair number of the men and women whose acts in peacetime reached the level of evil. More often this will be the case with those in the lower categories of the scale; occasionally, even with a serial killer who was not given to torture. This was something I learned only when I began to make personal acquaintance with a fair number of these otherwise “monstrous” killers. Getting to know murderers committing evil acts allows for distinctions one cannot draw from books alone. Actually this thought condensed in my mind only recently. The idea came in the form of a dream I had on August 17, 2008:

I'm home with another man: an elderly, rather diminutive man dressed in a pajama-like outfit. We are trying to get the old man to talk about his past. He seemed to be on a pass from prison where he had been interred because he had been a serial killer. The man is very reticent to talk about his childhood, though he mentions that he was raised by his mother, since his father had absconded from the family. I go to the dining room at one point. The old man follows and gets into conversation with my wife, who, quite unafraid, chats with him in her usual amiable way. I feel nervous, wondering, what if he reverts to his old ways, what with all the knives in the dining room drawers? But he remains harmless, and moments later answers his cell phone—and begins crying. He mutters something in Russian. I ask him, in Russian, “Shto slucheelos?”—What happened? He indicates that some woman he had been fond of had just rejected him. I feel sorry for him.

Shortly before the dream, I had been reading a letter that a former serial killer, Dennis Nilsen (mentioned in chapter 7), had sent me from the prison where he has been for the past twenty-five years. He closed his letter with a poem he had written that touched on his lifelong and intense loneliness. Nilsen had been raised mainly by his mother and her father, whose death was the traumatic event of Nilsen's early years. Here is a portion of his poem:

Here I sit—long and long
Quite alone—on the beach
Besides the whispering sea
Listening, waiting, hoping
Tear-flecked patches on the sand
As the tide gives up her dead.

……

As the sea gives up her life,
We creatures on the sand—
You—me
Always and always
Waiting for the man.41

His letter put me in mind of what my mentor in forensic psychiatry, Dr. Charles Smith, once said about evil: there are no evil people, only evil acts. I believe what he meant was that there are no people who shock us with their acts of violence and harm throughout the whole of their lives. He is largely right, but not entirely right. Many of the serial killers and other murderers I came to know around the country had been languishing in prison for a very long time. Capture having abbreviated their careers in evil, their human feelings had been able, in several of them, to rise to the surface. These were mostly the men and women who had led “double lives.” They had friends, lovers, mates, but they sneaked off at odd hours to commit atrocious acts. This was true of Dennis Nilsen, Ian Brady, Dennis Rader, Tommy Lynn Sells, Sante Kimes, and Gary Ridgway. But then there were those—the exceptions that proved Dr. Smith's rule—who had no remorse, no redeeming features, no possibility of cure, persons in whom the propensity for evil was pervasive and without end. Here I think of David Paul Brown/Nathaniel Bar-Jonah, Ed Sexton, Dale Pierre, Phil Skipper, Charles Manson, Mike DeBardeleben, and Angels of Death such as Dr. Harold Shipman and Dr. Michael Swango.

Before that dream, I had also been reading the case histories of adolescent sex murderers in Niels Habermann's book Jugendliche Sexualmörder (Juvenile Sexual Murder). Most of these young men had committed their first rape-murder after having been rejected by a girl. Some were psychopaths and went on to become serial killers. Others, antisocial (but not psychopathic) while young, spent time in prison, were released, and did not reoffend. I had also seen a patient earlier that day who complained that, as far as she was concerned, most people weren't really “human.” To her way of thinking, they were just animals. She asked if I didn't agree with her, especially since I worked with prisoners and forensic patients. I tried to make her understand that even those whose actions descended to evil were every bit as human as the rest of us. Or, as Nietzsche would have added, “Human, all too human.” In his famous essay Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche created a powerful image relating to our task as human beings.42 We pass through the years of our lives like a tightrope walker perched precariously on his rope. “Man,” as he put it, “is a rope stretched between animal and the superior man; the rope lies over the abyss.” We can fall back to the animal level—or we can strive toward the goal of self-transcendence and moral superiority. I am a little uncomfortable with the “animal” image. It is only we humans, not our animal cousins, who are capable of evil, though people (referring to some evil act) are accustomed to say, “He behaved like an animal.” Perhaps a more up-to-date analogy might be: We are a rope stretched between Bundy and the Buddha. And the abyss is the descent to the evil of Ted Bundy and his like, where all regard for the welfare of one's fellow man evaporates, leaving one capable of immeasurable cruelty and harm. Harm that shocks us. Evil.