INTRODUCTION
1. Galatians 2:19–21.
2. As in Sura 10:27—“As for those who have earned evil, the punishment of an evil is the like of it…”
3. Mani was a third-century CE Persian religious preacher who emphasized two separate powers of Good and Evil. Derived from his name and influence was the heresy in the Christian world of “Manichaeism.” St. Augustine had briefly been Manichaean before converting to Christianity.
4. Zoroaster, a Persian prophet of perhaps the seventh century BCE believed in a God of Good and Light (Ahura Mazda) and a God of Evil and Darkness (Ahriman).
5. Cf. The Teachings of Buddha: Bukkyoh Dendoh Kyohkai (Tokyo: Kosaido Printing Company, 1966).
6. Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought (London: Transaction Publishers, 2002).
7. Ibid., pp. 8–9.
8. Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), p. 10.
9. Sura 4:79.
10. Brian Masters, Killing for Company: The Case of Dennis Nilsen (New York: Stein & Day, 1985).
11. Ibid., p. 19.
12. This is because there are no “evil genes.” As we shall see in chapter 9. , there are certain genetic factors that predispose to poor impulse control, low empathy, and certain other negative personality factors. But none of these are powerful in and of themselves to condemn one to behave in ways we consider evil. These factors heighten the risk that the person may later on behave in such ways, but they are not determinative.
13. Masters, Killing for Company, p. 187.
14. Lengthy biographies of mental patients begin to appear in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century, such as Christian Spiess's Biographien der Wahnsinnigen (Leipzig, 1796), or in K. W. Ideler, Biographien der Geisteskranken (Berlin: Schroeder, 1841).
15. Leviticus 19:15.
16. Ezekiel 7:3.
17. Matthew 7:1.
18. Matthew 7:3.
19. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999 [1953]).
20. Deuteronomy 22:25–30.
21. Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York: Knopf, 1989).
22. Leviticus 18:21.
23. Many examples are recorded in George Ryley Scott's History of Torture (London: Bracken Books, 1940). Examples are the burning of the Albigensians in Provence in the thirteenth century and of the Jewish converts to Christianity during the Spanish Inquisition in the sixteenth century. In 1545 Calvin ordered twenty-three people burned at the stake for supposed witchcraft. To cite all such examples would require a separate book of considerable length.
24. This was the fear that inspired the witch trials in Salem and in other Massachusetts towns in 1692 during the judgeship of Cotton Mather. Cf. Cotton Mather, Discourse on the Wonders of the Invisible World (Roxbury, MA: WE Woodward, repr., 1866).
25. Neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux supports this view, as he made clear in his discussion with philosopher Paul Ricoeur in Changeux, What Makes Us Think: A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 284.
26. This topic is addressed in detail in the chapter 9.
27. Many of these we now call “psychopaths.” I will have more to say about these in the next chapter.
28. Related words in German are über (“over,” “atop”—as in “übermensch”) and übel (“bad,” “wicked”).
29. Insane is no longer a medical term; it is a legal term meaning that the person in question, because of mental derangement, did not know the nature of his acts, not that these acts were wrong.
30. By no means are all mentally ill persons, even those with a poor hold on reality, “insane.” Very few are, actually. For even when seriously mentally ill persons commit horrendous crimes, they usually know that what they have done was considered wrong by the community at large. Such persons are often viewed in the courts as being responsible, of course, yet with a lesser degree of responsibility, and are often sent to a secure forensic hospital rather than to a conventional prison.
31. Stephanie Stanley, An Invisible Man (New York: Berkley Books, 2006), p. 343.
32. Ron Franscell, The Rape and Murder of Innocence in a Small Town (Far Hill, NJ: New Horizon Press, 2007). Attorney Gary Spence made the comment about evil (on the back cover of Franscell's book), alluding to the author's experience as a child growing up in Wyoming who had heard about the murders and then wrote about them.
33. Chuck Hustmyre, An Act of Kindness (New York: Berkley Books, 2007), p. 223.
34. Joe McGinnis, Never Enough (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), p. 336.
35. Tina Dirmann, Vanished at Sea (New York: St. Martin's Paperbacks, 2008), p. 171.
36. David Reichert, Chasing the Devil: My Twenty-Year Quest to Capture the Green River Killer (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2004), p. 304.
37. Carlton Smith, The BTK Murders (New York: St. Martin's Paperbacks, 2006), p. 335.
38. Tom Henderson, Darker than the Night (New York: St. Martin's Paperbacks, 2006), p. 353. In a similar vein, Detective Morgan, commenting on Ann Brier Miller, who murdered her husband with arsenic, seemingly just to be “free,” said, “There are certain kinds of criminals motivated by something that no ordinary person can truly understand—evil.” Cited in Amanda Lamb, Deadly Dose (New York: Berkley Books, 2008), p. 210.
CHAPTER ONE. EVIL IN PEACETIME
1. Julia Fox, Jane Boleyn—The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007).
2. Ibid., p. 265.
3. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (first published in 1513).
4. The full story is told in Emlyn Williams's biography Beyond Belief: A Chronicle of Murder and Its Detection (New York: Random House, 1968). Ian Brady gave still further details in a book he wrote himself—about a subject he knows best: serial killing. The Gates of Janus (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2001).
5. Not so rare a phenomenon, as it turns out. Dr. Salter's data suggest that about 45 percent of such men make recordings of these acts. Anna C. Salter, Predators (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 114. She cites J. L. Warren, “The Sexually Sadistic Serial Killer,” Journal of Forensic Sciences 6 (1996): 970–74.
6. Alan Prendergast, The Poison Tree (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1986). Cf. Seattle Times, October 18, 1985.
7. Exodus 21:15.
8. Leviticus 20:9.
9. Malice aforethought is an aspect of mens rea (“guilty mind”), which must accompany an act of murder if an act resulting in death is to be regarded as murder in common law. Cf. Glanville Williams, Textbook of Criminal Law, 2nd ed. (London: Stevens & Sons, 1983).
10. The mechanism of overcoming humiliation by what the killer considers a “righteous slaughter” is brilliantly told by sociologist Jack Katz in Seductions of Crime: A Chilling Exploration of the Criminal Mind—from Juvenile Delinquency to Cold-Blooded Murder (New York: Basic Books), 1988.
11. Jean Harris, Stranger in Two Worlds (New York: Zebra Press, 1986). In this autobiography, Harris tells of discovering the panties of another woman, Lynn Tryforos, in a drawer in Tarnower's house, next to where Harris's clothes were kept.
12. C. P. Anderson, The Serpent's Tooth (New York: Harper & Row, 1987).
13. Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, The Only Living Witness (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983). There is some evidence that toward the end of his chain of murders, Bundy bit part of the breast off one of his victims. This would suggest that he began to escalate toward more pain-inducing, torturous acts before he was finally captured.
14. I expand on this point in chapter 9.
15. Vincent Bugliosi, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994 [1974]).
16. Schizophrenia is currently defined in a narrower way—as a severe mental illness characterized by a marked disorder of thought, disorganized speech, delusions (often of a persecutory type) and hallucinations, and flattening of emotional expression.
17. It is better known in the United States by the name Thorazine.
18. The first such medication was lithium, developed by Cade in Australia and used in Europe in the 1950s before it was made available in the United States in the 1960s through the pioneering work of Dr. Ronald Fieve and Dr. Lothar Kalinowsky.
19. Developed in the mid-1970s, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a technique used by radiologists to visualize bodily structures, in a way that yields greater clarity and definition than conventional X-rays. MRI is particularly useful in visualizing soft tissues, including brain tissues, whose detailed structures are often “opaque” to ordinary X-ray methods. The patient is placed within a powerful magnetic field capable of aligning the hydrogen atoms in the water of the body (water making up 70 percent of the body's volume). The hydrogen atoms produce a rotating magnetic field that the MRI scanner can detect, resulting in an image of the body areas under examination, which can then be reconstructed. Cf. Mark Brown and Richard Semelka, MRI: Basic Principles and Applications (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999). The basic principle was discovered in 1946, but the use of MRI for imaging was pioneered by Paul Lauterbur (1929–2007) in 1973. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2003. Cf. Nancy Andreasen, MD, Brain Imaging: Applications in Psychiatry (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1989).
20. V. L. Quinsey et al., Violent Offenders: Appraising and Managing Risk (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press, 1998).
21. http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/criminal_mind/sexual_assault/nathaniel_bar_jonah/13.html.
22. Though raised in a Protestant family, he claimed he wanted to take a Jewish name so as to have the experience of knowing what it was like to be the “object of prejudice.” He made this change while incarcerated for sexual offenses in Massachusetts. When I interviewed him years later, he denied that story and said he did made the change because he liked the Jewish faith. It is common for “career” criminals to take on aliases by way of eluding justice and distancing themselves from their true and original persona.
23. Peter Davidson, Death by Cannibal (New York: Berkley Books, 2006).
24. It is important to note that Lundgren was a charismatic con man who was given to outrageous boasts of this sort, by which he managed to mesmerize and dupe his followers. He was not a psychotic person with delusions of grandeur; that is to say, he knew that he was not God or a prophet, but he chose for his own nefarious purposes to speak of himself in that fashion in order to produce the effect he wanted—to enslave and make puppets out of his followers, who would do his bidding, no matter what. By way of comparison, Hitler's mesmerizing abilities were far greater than those of Charles Manson, whose powers were far greater than those of Lundgren.
25. The entire story is told in the chilling biography by Cynthia Statler-Sassé and Peggy Widder, The Kirtland Massacre: The True and Terrible Story of the Mormon Cult Murders (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1991).
26. The situation with Lundgren and Luff is analogous in certain ways to that of Saddam Hussein and his closest followers, to whom he gave pistols and commanded that they shoot a number of their colleagues whom Saddam considered untrustworthy “conspirators.” And shoot them they did—lest they be killed themselves by Saddam's guards. But the greater evil lay with Saddam, who sadistically trapped his followers into becoming murderers themselves, so they could no longer claim innocence. Cf. Con Coughlin, Saddam: King of Terror (New York: HarperCollins, 2002).
27. Billy Wayne Sinclair and Jodie Sinclair, A Life in the Balance: The Billy Wayne Sinclair Story, A Journey from Murder to Redemption inside America's Worst Prison System (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000).
28. The original play was produced in 1938. William Drummond's novel was published in 1966. Drummond, Gaslight (New York: Paperback Library, 1966).
29. This was the meaning of the term psychopathie, used by the famous German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin in his 1915 textbook Psychiatrie, 8th ed., 4 vols. (Leipzig: J. A. Barth).
30. The more specific definition derives from the monograph by American psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley. Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity (St. Louis: C. V. Mosby, 1941).
31. Robert D. Hare, Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (Toronto: Multi-Health Systems, 1991); T. J. Harpur, A. R. Hakstian, and R. D. Hare, “Factor Structure of the Psychopathy Checklist,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 56 (1988): 741–47.
32. The twenty items of the Hare Checklist are divided into two main factors. One concerns personality traits and emotional qualities. The qualities of both factors are found on page 117.
33. Michaud and Aynesworth, Only Living Witness.
34. Francine du Plessix Gray, At Home with the Marquis de Sade (New York: Penguin Books, 1998).
35. Jack Altman and Marvin Ziporyn, Born to Raise Hell: The Untold Story of Richard Speck (New York: Grove Press, 1967).
36. Michael H. Stone, Abnormalities of Personality: Within and Beyond the Realm of Treatment (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993).
37. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Vol. One: Inferno, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
38. Proverbs 6:16–19.
39. Some have considered Pride to be the worst, theologically, although from the standpoint of contemporary psychiatry, Envy often proves to be the most intractable.
40. Dante adhered to the orthodox Christian view of his era, one tenet of which was that beatitude was achieved via a “free gift of God predicated on faith in Christ” (cf. Inferno, Canto IV, p. 80, Durling's note to lines 34–42). As beatitude was not available to those who were born before Christ or who were not baptized, even if they lived some of their adult life during the early years of Christ's life (as was the case with Virgil), their souls remained in this First Circle as pagans. Some (like Virgil), albeit sinless, could not be considered “saved.”
41. A simonist was someone who acted like Simon Magus, who offered money to the apostle Peter for the power of laying on of hands (Acts 8:9–24). As Durling mentions, this man gave his name to the sin of simony: the selling of indulgences, by which priests in exchange for money gave various sacramental benefits (Inferno, Canto XIX, line 1).
42. Georges Bataille, Dark Stars: The Satanic Rites of Gilles de Rais (London: Creation Books, 2004).
43. Valentine Penrose, The Bloody Countess: The Crimes of Erzsébet Báthory (London: Creations Books, 1996).
45. Inferno, Canto XXXII, line 65.
46. Durling's notes to the Inferno, p. 510.
CHAPTER TWO. CRIMES OF IMPULSE: MURDERS OF JEALOUSY AND RAGE
1. Cf. Grover Goodwin, ed., Criminal Psychology & Forensic Technology (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2000).
2. Arthur P. Will, A Treatise on the Law of Circumstantial Evidence (Philadelphia: T. & J. W. Johnson & Company, 1896).
3. As in the life of the prizefighter Jake LaMotta, whose persecution of his innocent wife was depicted in the film Raging Bull, which accurately portrays a man in the grips of delusional jealousy.
4. Mass murder, according to criteria adopted by the FBI, is described as a number of murders (four or more) occurring during the same incident, with no distinctive time period between the murders, and occurring usually in the same location. An example is the 1984 mass murder at the San Ysidro McDonald's restaurant in San Diego, California, in which James Huberty shot twenty-one people to death within a very brief period. Cf. Serial Murder: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives for Investigators (US Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Behavioral Analysis Unit, 2008), p. 11.
5. Cf. J. Reid Meloy, Violent Attachments, chap. 3 (Northvale, NJ: J. Aronson Press, 1992). Dr. F. Wertham first used the term in 1937, mentioning the stages a person in this crisis state goes through: first, a shattering experience, then the victim blames another person or situation. Carrying out a violent act seems like the “only solution.” The violent act is committed, and the victim now feels relief of the original tension and a return to a state of apparent normalcy.
6. Cf. Jack Katz, Seductions of Crime: A Chilling Exploration of the Criminal Mind—from Juvenile Delinquency to Cold-Blooded Murder (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
7. Life as it may have been in the African savannah from which we all came is beautifully depicted in Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (New York: Penguin Books, 2006).
8. Cf. Baron Patrick Balfour Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries (New York: William Morrow), p. 146.
9. The nature and neurochemistry of love, including intense passion, is described in Helen Fisher, Why We Love (New York: Henry Holt/Owl Books, 2004).
10. Though some have cited William James or Ogden Nash as the author of the poem.
11. Chip Walter, Thumbs, Toes, and Tears, and Other Traits that Make Us Human (New York: Walker and Company, 2006), p. 40.
12. Exodus 20:7.
13. Matthew 6:13.
14. John Glatt, Blind Passion. A True Story of Seduction, Obsession, and Murder: An American Beauty Falls for a Dashing Greek Sailor—with Deadly Consequences (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000).
15. Clifford Linedecker, Driven to Kill (Boca Raton, FL: America Media, 2003).
16. Lisa Pulitzer, Fatal Romance (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001).
17. John Glatt, Never Leave Me (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2006).
18. Lisa Pulitzer, A Woman Scorned (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999).
19. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics Series, 2005 [1847]).
20. It was the presence of hallucinations that marked Rowe's depression as psychotic.
21. Julie Salamon, Facing the Wind (New York: Random House, 2001).
22. Eric Francis, A Wife's Revenge (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005).
23. Jim Fischer, Crimson Stain (New York: Berkley Books, 2000).
24. Carlton Smith, Bitter Medicine (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000).
25. Edwin Chen, Deadly Scholarship (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1995).
26. This stems from the 1843 McNaghten test in England, created after Daniel McNaghten, who, while targeting Prime Minister Robert Peel, killed his secretary, Edward Drummond, by mistake. McNaghten was declared not responsible because of his insanity; i.e., he had been laboring under such defect of reason as not to know the nature of his act nor that it was wrong.
27. According to US government statistics. Cf. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/.
28. Cf. http://www.psychlaws.org/BriefingPapers/BP11.htm.
29. Cf. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/24884/stm.
30. According to Sheilagh Hodgins, ed., Mental Disorder & Crime (London: Sage Publications, 1993). Also, John Monahan and Henry Steadman, eds., Violence and Mental Disorders (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
31. The complexities of the issue are well discussed in Vernon Quinsey, Grant Harris, Marnie Rice, and Catherine Cormier, Violent Offenders (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press, 1998).
32. Cf. http://www.psychlaws.org/PressRoom/presskits/Kendra%27sLawPressKit/kendraslaw.htm.
33. Cf. http://www.omh.state.ny.us/omhweb/Kendra_web/Khome.htm. In New York State, for example, the court mandates assisted outpatient treatment for certain patients with mental illness who, in the court's opinion, would be unlikely to survive safely in the community without such supervision. Each patient is assigned a care-coordinator who monitors the patient's compliance with the prescribed treatment (including medications), with the understanding that lack of compliance would result in notification to the authorities, who might then take whatever steps were necessary to remedy the situation so as to safeguard both the patient and (in the case of potentially violent patients) the community.
34. Cited in http://blogs.kansascity.com/crime_scene/2007/03/15/index.html.
35. New York Post, April 20, 1989. This man had been living in Ms. Berle's apartment without paying rent. When she began to insist that he contribute to her expenses, he became angry and argumentative. This was the context in which he then killed her.
36. http://freedomeden.blogspot.com/2008/01/lam-luong.html.
37. Suzy Spencer, Breaking Point (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002).
38. New York Times, September 8, 2001.
39. Peter Davidson, Death by Cannibal (New York: Berkley Books, 2006).
40. Such as the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals, founded in 1992 by the Los Angeles Police Department.
41. Cf. Hodgins, Mental Disorder & Crime; Quinsey et al., Violent Offenders. Also, John Monahan et al., Rethinking Risk Assessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and John Monahan et al., “Classification of Violent Risk (COVR),” Psychiatric Services 56 (2005): 810–15.
42. New York Times, February 20, 2008.
43. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/04/AR2006090400430.html.
CHAPTER THREE. OTHER CRIMES OF IMPULSE: EMPHASIS ON ANTISOCIAL PERSONS
1. The case of Dr. Bruce Rowan from the previous chapter had the element of attempted cover-up (via a staged “car accident”), but in personality he was not antisocial and, although seriously depressed, was not grossly psychotic. The persons highlighted in this chapter tended to have more antisocial traits; some were more obviously mentally ill.
2. Soo Hyun Rhee and Irwin D. Waldman, “Behavior-Genetics of Criminality and Aggression,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Violent Behavior and Aggression, ed. Daniel J. Flannery, Alexander T. Vazsonyi, and Irwin D. Waldman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 77–90.
3. http://lifestyle.aol.co.uk/go-green/home-arson-linked-to-radical/article20080304012.
4. Melissa Weininger, “The Trials of Lorena Bobbitt: A Study in Media Backlash.” http://www.digitas.harvard.edu/~perspy/old/issues/2000/retro/lorena_bobbitt.html.
5. Bryce Marshall and Paul Williams, Zero at the Bone (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991).
6. Roger Wilkes, Blood Relations (New York: Penguin Books, 1994).
7. New York Post, March 24, 1989.
8. Emmanuel Carrère, The Adversary (New York: Henry Holt, 2000).
9. New York City Daily News, November 7, 2006.
10. As in the case of Beatles star John Lennon, murdered by Mark David Chapman, December 8, 1980.
11. E.g., Colin Thatcher of Canada, former Saskatchewan premier, who shot his wife to death in 1983.
12. New York Times, July 6, 1999.
13. Cf. Newsweek, May 3, 1999.
14. http://www.albionmonitor.com/9907a/wcotc.html.
15. These cases involve psychopaths and are discussed further in chapter 6.
16. http://www.detnews.com/205/metro/0509/25DO1-326371.html.
17. New York Observer, January 28, 1991.
18. The technical term for throwing someone out a window. Historians will recall the famous defenestration in Prague in 1618 at the onset of the Thirty Years’ War, when Protestant assemblymen threw two Catholic imperial governors out the window, in reaction to what the Protestants considered a violation of their rights.
19. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/magazine/11Neurolaw.t.html.
20. As Flynn relates in his book Relentless Pursuit (New York: Berkley Books, 2008).
21. The grotesqueness of Harrell's act—evisceration of his victims—would seem to place him at the extreme end of the Gradations scale. But torture and sexual crimes were not part of the picture, so he would be placed in category 16: multiple vicious acts.
22. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Homicide (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1988), p. 83. These authors estimate the risk may be greater by a factor of a hundred.
23. Judith A. Rudnai, The Social Life of the Lion (Wallingford, PA: Washington Square East Publishers, 1973).
24. The parent lion may then recognize these cubs as his own, by means of histocompatibility genes common to parent and offspring. Cf. R. Gadagkar, “Kin Recognition in Social Insects and Other Animals,” Proceedings of the Indian Academy of Sciences (Animal Sciences) 94 (1985): 587–621.
25. Daly and Wilson, Homicide, pp. 87–89.
26. Ibid., pp. 107–10.
27. http://www.Psyih.com/2007/12/03/Kimberly-dawn-trenor-and-royce-zeigler.
28. The original is even harsher: “He that spareth the rod, hateth his son.” Proverbs 13:14.
29. http://www.wkyc.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=78719.
30. Because the actions of this couple involved torture, although without the sexual element, the appropriate level on the Gradations scale is 18: torture-murder, though the torture element is not prolonged.
31. Texas Prosecutor 35 (July/August 2005): 1, 11–15.
32. New York Post, June 15, 2006.
33. New York Daily News, June 15, 2006.
34. New York Post, March 25 and 27, 1990.
35. Cf. Mark Gado, essay on Julio Gonzalez, Crime Library/Time Warner, 2007, http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/mass/happyland/trial_7.html.
36. New York Times, December 4, 1998.
37. Jason Wright, Associated Press, December 7, 1998.
38. Dr. Katherine Ramsland, “About Evil,” Crime Library, http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/index.html.
39. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, no. 894, 1670.
40. Cited at http://michellemalkin.com/2007/12/12/whitewashing-the-murder-of-aqsa-parvez/. Also, Ellen Harris, Guarding the Secrets (New York: Scribners, 1995), pp. 228–29.
41. http://riverfronttimes.com/2006/06/05/news/still-lips-still-whisper.
42. http://michellemalkin.com/2007/12/12/whitewashing-the-murder-of-aqsa-parvez/, based on New York Times article, October 28, 1991; also Harris, Guarding the Secrets, p. 149.
43. Erica Lynn Smith, “Zein Isa—Honor Killings and a Family Affair: The Murder of Tina Isa,” http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art47666.asp.
44. Zein Isa's place in the Gradations scale is problematical: he subjected his daughter to torture and terror, though without sexual violation. His act is closest to those of Category 18.
45. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,141121,00.html.
46. Because so little is known about Gale, it is not possible to situate him accurately on the Gradations scale. Perhaps Category 6 would be appropriate (impetuous, hot-headed murderer, without marked psychopathic features); if he showed strong psychopathic features, a level higher on the scale would be more appropriate.
47. “Erfurt, 26 April,” Der Stern, April 30, 2000, p. 20: “auffällig unauffällig.”
48. A full classification is provided in a book by Paul Mullen, Michele Pathe, and Rosemary Purcell, Stalkers and Their Victims (London: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Another excellent source is Reid Meloy, Violent Attachments (Northvale, NJ: J. Aronson Press, 1992. The relentless pursuit of a psychiatrist by a psychotic patient she had seen just once is described by Doreen Orion in I Knew You Really Loved Me (New York: Dell Publishers, 1997).
49. Wilt Browning, Deadly Goals (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996).
50. What is meant here by obsessive love is what Meloy speaks of under the heading of borderline erotomania (Violent Attachments, p. 26). The original term erotomania referred to a delusional (psychotic) disorder where a person imagined that someone, usually of a higher social class, was secretly in love with that person. There is no real relationship between the two persons. In borderline erotomania, there has been a real relationship, but the object of the person's love is not as much in love with the erotomanic person, as the latter is with the love-object. That is: A loves B considerably more than B loves A—in this asymmetric and not-fully-requited love. I prefer the phrase obsessive love in this context. Persons showing this obsessional preoccupation with the love object are, of course, prone to feelings of overwhelming abandonment should the loved one break off the relationship. Intense jealousy is aroused also and may lead to violence, including murder.
51. D. T. Hughes, Lullaby and Goodnight—The Blood-chilling Story of a Woman Who Wanted a Baby Badly Enough to Murder for One (New York: Pocket Books, 1992).
52. Jacqui Goddard, “Mother Admits Killing Stranger to Steal Unborn Baby,” http://www.rense.com/general60/unbon.htm.
53. M. William Phelps, Sleep in Heavenly Peace (New York: Pinnacle Books, 2006).
54. A race involving two cars coming fast toward each other on the median strip of a road, with the “loser” being the driver who is first to swerve to avoid being killed. That person is called, derogatorily, the “chicken.”
55. http://pysih.com/2007/11/14/alexander-james-letkemann-and-jean-pierre-orlewicz/.
56. http://www.truecrimeweblog.com/2007/11/greater-evil-thrill-kill-in-michigan.html.
57. As described by the research group D. Lyman et al., “Longitudinal Evidence that Psychopathy Scores in Early Adolescence Predict Adult Psychopathy,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 116 (2007): 155–65.
CHAPTER FOUR. MURDER ON PURPOSE: THE PSYCHOPATHIC SCHEMERS
1. Donald Black, Bad Boys, Bad Men (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
2. Robert D. Hare, Without Conscience—The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us (New York: Pocket Books, 1993).
3. Robert I. Simon, Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1996).
4. Suzanne Finstad, Sleeping with the Devil (New York: William Morrow, 1991).
5. http://www.press-enterprise.com/newsarchive/2000/07/18/963897968.html.
6. http://www.spring.net/yapp-bin/public/read/tv/69.
7. Finstad, Sleeping with the Devil, p. 187.
8. Ibid., p. 207.
9. Ibid., p. 151.
10. Ibid., p. 135.
11. Ibid., p. 175.
12. J. R. Séguin, P. Sylvers, and S. O. Lillienfeld: “The Neuropsychology of Violence,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Violence and Aggression, ed. D. J. Flannery, A. T. Vazsonyi, and I. D. Waldman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 187–214.
13. Cf. A. R. Damasio, “A Neural Base for Sociopathy,” Archives of General Psychiatry 57 (2000): 128–29.
14. Steven Levy, The Unicorn's Secret (New York: Prentice Hall, 1988).
15. Ibid., p. 280.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., p. 282.
18. Times Herald Record, October 18, 2002.
19. http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/famous/einhorn/index_1.html.
20. Joseph Sharkey, Death Sentence: The Inside Story of John List (New York: Signet Books, 1990).
21. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_List.
22. http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/family/list/8.html.
23. Kay Halverson, “The List Murders Stun Westfield in 1971,” Westfield Leader and Times, February 17, 2001.
24. Ed Friedlander, http://www.pathguy.com/lbdsm.htm.
25. At a local production in Anaheim, California. John Glatt, Deadly American Beauty (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2004), p. 14.
26. The origin of the saying is George Herbert's 1651 Jacula Prudentum (Things Thrown to the Wise): “For want of a nail, the shoe is lost, for want of a shoe, the horse is lost, for want of a horse, the rider is lost.” This was cited later by Benjamin Franklin, commenting on how small troubles can breed great mischief.
27. Glatt, Deadly American Beauty.
28. Seamus McGraw, “The Rose Petal Murder,” http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/family/kristen_rossum/2.html.
29. As in the case of Martha Ann Johnson in Georgia, who killed her four children, http://www.crimezzz.net/serialkillers/J/JOHNSON_martha_ann.php.
30. T. E. Moffitt and A. Caspi, “Childhood Predictors Differentiate Life-Course Persistent and Adolescence-Limited Pathways among Males and Females,” Development and Psychopathology 13 (2001): 355–75.
31. Carlton Smith, Love, Daddy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003), p. 56.
32. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/05/31/48hours/main698725_page2.shtml.
33. Smith, Love, Daddy.
34. Category 13 (inadequate, rageful psychopaths) is not covered in this chapter. An example is that of Richard Speck, discussed in an earlier chapter.
35. Leona Helmsley had earned public opprobrium for her comment that “taxes are for the little people.”
36. Robert Scott, Kill or Be Killed (New York: Pinnacle Books, 2004).
37. Ibid., p. 95.
38. Ibid., p. 76.
39. Ibid., p. 135.
40. http://www.redding.com/news/2007/oct/21/murder-tale-to-air-on-tv/.
41. Adrian Havill: The Mother, the Son, and the Socialite (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999).
42. Adrian Havill, http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/women/kimes/1.html.
43. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/spousmur.pdf.
44. Steven Long, Every Woman's Nightmare (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2006). The man Long was writing about was Mark Hacking.
45. R. Robin McDonald, Secrets Never Lie (New York: Avon Books, 1998). The husband of this story was attorney Fred Tokars, who hired a hit man to kill his wife.
46. http://www.physicsforum.com/archives/index.php/t-174914.html.
47. Clifford Linedecker: The Murder of Laci Peterson (America Media Inc., 2003).
CHAPTER FIVE. SPREE AND MASS MURDER: EVIL BY THE NUMBERS
1. For example, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were a team of outlaws who robbed stores and gas stations in the South during the Depression era between 1932 and 1934. Bonnie never shot anyone; Clyde killed approximately ten people in that time span, until they were gunned down by the police in Louisiana in May of 1934.
2. Incorrectly referred to as “mass” rather than as “spree” by author William Allen in his Starkweather: The Story of a Mass Murderer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976).
3. The figure “four” is used by the FBI in Robert J. Morton, ed., Serial Murder—Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives for Investigators, US Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime/Critical Incident Response Group (June 2008): 11. The number is arbitrary. Some law authorities use the figure “three or more,” but one must take into consideration that there are many instances of attempted mass murder in which an assailant shoots or stabs three or four or a dozen people in one incident, killing no one, or killing one or two, with the rest surviving. The intention in such cases is obviously mass murder; one may choose (as I have done here) to call these examples mass murder manqué.
4. Mark Fiore, Daily Pennsylvanian, 1996, http://media.www.dailypennsylvanian.com/media/storage/paper882/news/1996/09/30/Resources/Gun-Violence.Strikes.Campuses.Across.U.s-2175918.shtml.
5. Mikaela Sitford, Addicted to Murder (London: Virgin Publications, 2000).
6. Paul B. Kidd, Never to Be Released: Australia's Most Vicious Murderers (Sydney, Australia: Pan Macmillan, 1993).
7. Ibid., p. 57.
8. James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin Books, 1987).
9. Michael H. Stone, Personality Disorders—Treatable and Untreatable (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 2006).
10. Lindsey Marie Welch, “Charles Manson,” http://ygraine.membrane.com/enterhtuml/live/Dark/Charles_Manson.html.
11. Ibid., p. 2.
12. Vincent Bugliosi, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, afterword (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), pp. 640–41.
13. Cf. Grant Duwe, “A Circle of Distortion—The Social Construction of Mass Murder in the United States,” Western Criminology 6 (2005): 59–78.
14. Ibid., p. 75, note 14.
15. Shelly Leachman, http://truthasaur.com/local/secretcity48.html.
16. Duwe, “A Circle of Distortion,” p. 75.
17. Ibid., p. 59.
18. Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (New York: American Library, 1965).
19. Duwe, “A Circle of Distortion,” p. 72.
20. Brian Lane and Wilfred Gregg, An Encyclopedia of Mass Murder (London: Penguin Group, 1997).
21. James Fox and Jack Levin, The Will to Kill (Boston: Pearson Education, 2006), p. 167.
22. The percentages cited here reflect my analysis of 150 mass murderers from the last thirty years.
23. Fox and Levin, Will to Kill, p. 166.
24. Sanmarco killed six, as did P. J. Ford; Phan Thi Ai set fire to a house and killed five; Sue Eubanks killed four of her children (properly speaking, she committed infanticide); Jill Robbins shot one person to death at the University of Pennsylvania campus: this was mass murder manqué (she wounded some others), as was the case of Laurie Dann.
25. Joel Kaplan, George Papajohn, and Eric Zorn, Murder of Innocence: The Tragic Life and Final Rampage of Laurie Dann (New York: Warner Books, 1990).
26. The pun on Dann/Danai (an ancient name for the Greeks) didn't occur to me till later.
27. Demeter, “Thomas Hamilton and the Dunblane Massacre,” http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1011701.
28. Ibid.
29. Cf. Robert Merton, “Social Structure and Anomie,” American Social Review 5 (October 1938). Merton characterized the intention behind certain dramatic crimes: to relieve the intolerable “anomie,” or sense of being incapable of fulfilling one's goals.
30. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-fast/steve-kazmierczak-the-sec_b_87031.html.
31. Yahoo! News, June 8, 2008.
32. AOL News, December 5, 2007.
33. http://massmurder.zyns.com/george_hennard_01.html.
34. http://www.users.on.net/~bundy23/wwom/hennard.htm.
35. New York Times, October 18, 1991.
36. Gary Kinder, Victim—The Other Side of Murder (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999 [1982]).
37. Jack Katz, The Seductions of Crime (New York: Basic Books, 1988), p. 282. Ordinarily primordial means “present from the very beginning, at the very origin of.” I am not sure in what sense Katz was using the word here: perhaps to signify “quintessential” or “evil at its very roots,” as though it is the example of evil by which all others are measured—a Platonic ideal of evil. Katz is probably reacting to the fact that it would not be easy to find an example of cruel and sadistic behavior in the crime literature that would match that of Pierre.
38. http://www.fbi.gov/libref/historic/famcases/graham/graham.htm.
39. http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/mass/jack_graham/12.html.
CHAPTER SIX. THE PSYCHOPATH HARD AT WORK
1. We know that Gilles de Rais, the lieutenant of Jeanne D'Arc in the mid-fifteenth century, besides being the richest man in France, was also a confirmed and murderous homosexual pedophile, raping and killing hundreds of boys whom he brought to his castle—until he was finally hanged and burnt in 1440: George Bataille, The Trial of Gilles de Rais (Los Angeles: Amok Books, 1990). But this was a century and a half after Dante. The Countess Erzsébet Báthory, whose sexual sadism was practiced on young girls, was a figure of the late sixteenth century. Regarding whether there were examples of such serial sexual killers from Dante's time or before, information is sparse or lacking. The Roman emperor Caligula is known to have indulged in sadistic sexual practices, many with lethal consequences for the victims (who could be of either sex): George Ryley Scorr, A History of Torture (London: Bracken Books, 1940), p. 142. What few examples of serial sexual killers we know of from the distant past belong to the nobility (however ignobly they behaved). We do not know of examples from men in the ordinary walks of life.
2. Elizabeth Daly et al., “Timeline on Kristin Gilbert,” http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Psyc%20405/serial%20killers/Gilbert,%20Kristen%20-%202005.pdf.
3. William Phelps, Perfect Poison (New York: Pinnacle Books, 2003).
4. James Stewart, Blind Eye (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).
5. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2000/09/21/national/main235425.shtml.
6. It is not clear whether Swango was aware of Hitler's hatred of his violent and physically abusive father, though it is of interest that for both men, hatred of the father served as fuel to energize their murderous proclivities. Hitler, of course, was eventually able to murder on a scale incomparably greater than that of Swango. This is part of the reason I have purposely restricted the discussion of evil here to persons committing certain acts in peacetime. Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Ceaus¸escu, and the like belong to a different realm: evil in wartime—a vital topic that demands a separate book.
7. Kelly Moore and Dan Reed, Deadly Medicine (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988).
8. M. H. Stone, M. Krischer, and M. Steinmeyer, “Infanticide in Forensic Mothers: An Evolutionary Perspective,” Journal of Practical Psychiatry 11 (2005): 35–45.
9. Irene Pence, No, Daddy, Don't: A Father's Murderous Revenge (New York: Pinnacle Books, 2003).
10. http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1018/p03s01-usju.html.
11. State of Illinois Review Board, October 2002 session, People's Response by Linda Woloshin and Catherine Sanders.
12. State of Illinois Review Board, October 2002 session, p. 25. Dr. Paul Karsten Fauteck granted permission for me to cite his observations.
13. Written after World War II by Ryonosuke Akutagawa and later made into a movie by Akira Kurosawa.
14. An apt phrase coined by Dr. Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1989).
15. State of Illinois Review Board, October 2002 session, p. 32.
16. Effectively, Duvalier's Gestapo.
17. Alan Hall and Michael Leidig, The Natascha Kampusch Story: The Girl in the Cellar (London: Hodden & Stoughton, 2006).
18. New York Times, January 18, 1993.
19. Mike Echols, I Know My First Name Is Steven (New York: Pinnacle Books, 1999).
20. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Parnell.
21. New Haven Register, August 11, 1991, p. 1.
22. Gene Miller, with Barbara Jane Mackle, Eighty-Three Hours Till Dawn: The Terrifying Chronicle of a Kidnapping (New York: Doubleday, 1871), pp. 323, 387.
23. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Parnell.
24. Barry Bortnick, Polly Klaas: The Murder of America's Child (New York: Pinnacle Books, 1995).
25. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Allen_Davis, p.1.
26. Jack Olsen, Son: A Psychopath and His Victims (New York: Dell, 1983), p. 31.
27. Ibid., p. 39.
28. Ibid., p. 44.
29. Ibid., p. 464.
30. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders, edition III-R (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1987).
31. For an account of the Chambers case, see Bryna Taubmam, The Preppy Murder Case (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988).
32. Dina Temple-Raston, Death in Texas: A Story of Race, Murder, and a Small Town's Struggle for Redemption (New York: Henry Holt, 2002).
33. Faulkner Fox, “Justice in Jasper,” http://www.salon.com/news/1999/02/cov_26news.html.
34. Chuck Hustmyre, An Act of Kindness (New York: Berkley Books, 2007).
35. http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/classics/genore_guillory/6.html.
36. Ibid.
37. Cynthia Stalter-Sassé and Peggy Murphy, The Kirtland Massacre (New York: Donald I. Fine, Inc., 1991), p. 98.
38. Colin Wilson, Rogue Messiahs: Tales of Self-Proclaimed Saviors (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing, 2000).
39. Stalter-Sassé and Murphy, Kirtland Massacre, p. 143.
40. I acknowledge some subjectivity here. I have shared this story with many people, including forensic specialists, psychoanalysts, and those in the general public. Opinion is divided as to which of the two fates were the worse: that Lundgren's wife died from a gunshot to the head, or that she suffer the memory all her remaining days of the horror and degradation she suffered from her husband's action. The pain from a slap or blow lasts but so long; the painful memory Lundgren forced her to acquire that day would live with her forever—like a “hot coal” in her brain. Admittedly, people differ as to their resilience. The most resilient could probably, after a long time, overcome the ill effects of such an experience; the less resilient might be psychologically crushed for many years. Bear in mind that what Alice was made to experience was done to her by her own husband. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, many survivors—who suffered equal or even worse degradations and pains—knew that their camp guards were not family members; they were the enemy, whose sickening and depraved acts were perpetrated by the Other. And to that extent, the evil acts were easier to “discount” psychologically (as being no reflection on anything “wrong” with the victim). It is easier for the victim of torture to retain moral high ground when the torturer is from an alien force; not so easy when the torturer is one's spouse; perhaps most difficult of all, when one is young and the torturer is one's own father or mother. Subsequent chapters provide examples of the latter situation.
41. Stalter-Sassé and Murphy, Kirtland Massacre, p. 197.
42. Ibid., p. 288.
43. Arthur Herzog, The Woodchipper Murder (New York: Henry Holt, 1989).
44. Wensley Clarkson, Deadly Seduction (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996).
45. M. William Phelps, Sleep in Heavenly Peace: The Worst Crime a Mother Can Commit (New York: Kensington Books, 2006).
46. David Krajicek, Crime Library, http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/classics/ken_mcelroy/.
47. Harry MacLean, In Broad Daylight: A Murder in Skidmore, Missouri (New York: Harper and Row, 1988).
CHAPTER SEVEN. SERIAL KILLERS AND TORTURERS
1. This point was made at the 1st International Symposium on Serial Killing in San Antonio, Texas, July 2005. Public welfare must sometimes be put ahead of scientific rigor, hence the suppression of the news until the third similar murder took place.
2. As told by M. Cox, The Confessions of Henry Lee Lucas (New York: Pocket/Star Books, 1991).
3. Chemical name: phencyclidine.
4. K. Englade, Cellar of Horrors (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988).
5. The triad was described by Hellman and Blackman in “Enuresis, Fire-Setting, and Cruelty to Animals. A Triad Predictive of Adult Crime,” American Journal of Psychiatry 122 (1966): 1431–35.
6. L. D. Klausner, Son of Sam (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981).
7. The research in this area is well summarized by S.-H. Rhee and I. D. Waldman, “Behavior-Genetics of Criminality and Aggression,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Violent Behavior & Aggression, ed. D. J. Flannery, A. T. Vazsonyi, and I. D. Waldman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 86.
8. Philip Carlo, The Night Stalker: The Life and Crimes of Richard Ramirez (New York: Kensington Books, 1996).
9. The magisterial study of Murray A. Straus and Richard J. Gelles demonstrated the inverse relationship between socioeconomic status and the risk for physical violence (which was much less common among the well-to-do than in the disadvantaged). Straus and Gelles, Physical Violence in American Families: Risk Factors and Adaptations to Violence in 8,145 Families (London: Transaction Publishers, 1992).
10. I am indebted for this schema to Dr. Debra Niehoff and her excellent book on the roots of violence: The Biology of Violence (New York: Free Press, 1998).
11. Further details can be found in Ray Biondi and Walt Hecox, The Dracula Killer: The True Story of the California Vampire Killer (New York: Pocket Books, 1992). The infamous Jack the Ripper of London's Whitechapel District in the fall of 1888 killed, mutilated, and eviscerated five prostitutes, without having sex with any. In that way, he is similar to Chase: a serial killer with sex on his mind (in the Ripper's case, targeting prostitutes) but without raping his victims before or after death.
12. Flora Rheta Schreiber, The Shoemaker: The Anatomy of a Psychotic (New York: Signet Books, 1984). Dr. Katherine Ramsland in her account (found online at http://www.trutv.com/library/crime) adopts a more measured view, suggesting that “whether he was actually a serial killer or even psychotic is anyone's guess. Kallinger may have been a psychopath who liked to confuse and manipulate people.”
13. Carlo, The Night Stalker.
14. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Ramirez.
15. The full biography is by Paula Doneman, Things a Killer Would Know (Crows Nest, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2006). Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, was another example of hypersexuality: he insisted on sex with his wife five times a day, which pushed her well beyond her comfort level. When she began to decline his favors, he embarked on a career of rape-murders of some eleven women in the Boston area (cf. G. Frank, The Boston Strangler (New York: New American Library, 1966).
16. This combination, with the preference for anal sex, is quite common in men with sexual sadism—as noted by Roy Hazelwood of the FBI and true-crime writer Stephen Michaud in their collaboration Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide, and the Criminal Mind (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001).
17. Scott Burnside and Alan Cairns, Deadly Innocence (New York: Time Warner Books, 1995). In this biography, the authors sketch a typical sequence of actions by sexual sadists: (1) spot a passive, naive, vulnerable woman, (2) charm her with attention and gifts, (3) persuade her to indulge in sexual acts beyond her previous experience—such as bondage, fellatio, anal sex, (4) isolate her from her friends and family so that she is totally dependent upon the man, and (5) make the woman into the object of the man's physical and psychological punishment. Bernardo's power over his wife, Karla, was such that he even got her to videotape him raping her younger sister—as a kind of “wedding gift” (Peter Vronsky, Female Serial Killers [New York: Berkley Books, 2007]).
18. The full story is told in Sondra London, Killer Fiction (Venice, CA: Feral House, 1997). The author had befriended Schaefer, who allowed her to collaborate with him on his short stories of sadistic murder.
19. As described in Dr. Katherine Ramsland's detailed account, “Dennis Nilsen,” http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/predators/nilsen/stranger_1.html.
20. Ibid. Even Nilsen's seeming conflation of life and death as two not-so-separate states is not so much a sign of mental illness as carryover of his experience as a child at the time of his grandfather's death—which his mother explained as his “just having gone asleep,” cf. Anna Gekoski, Murder by Numbers (London: André Deutsch, 1998), p. 187. Gekoski mentions Nilsen's lack of animosity as another manifestation of his “killing for company” (as emphasized in Brian Masters, Killing for Company: The Case of Dennis Nilsen (New York: Stein & Day, 1985), rather than for revenge or hatred. But murder is murder, and the judge who presided at the trial informed the jury that “a mind can be evil without being abnormal” (cited by Ramsland, “Dennis Nilsen”)—which was the judge's way of dealing with the confusing testimony of psychiatrists on either side of the case.
21. Cf. Margaret Cheney, Why? The Serial Killer in America: Stunning Revelations from the Mind of Serial Killer Edmund Kemper III and the Violent Society that Produces So Many (Saratoga, CA: R-E Publications, 1992).
22. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Kemper.
23. Cheney, Why? The Serial Killer in America.
24. According to DSM-III-Revised (1987), criteria for Sadistic Personality, where four or more of the eight descriptors are needed to make the diagnosis. Some persons had only three traits and were considered “subclinical” cases but were not entered into the percentages quoted here as being “sadistic.”
25. Robert I. Simon, Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1996).
26. Quoted in John Glatt, Cries in the Desert: The Shocking True Story of a Sadistic Torturer (New York: St. Martin's Paperbacks, 2002), p. 9.
27. As related by his fiancée-accomplice and almost-fifth wife, Cindy Hendy. Ibid., p. 12.
28. Glatt, Cries in the Desert; records from the investigation in New Mexico following the arrests of Ray and Hendy, 1999.
29. Glatt, Cries in the Desert, p. 159.
30. Ibid., p. 173.
31. From the transcription by Carol Crosley for the New Mexico state police, submitted June 3, 1999.
32. Attachment number 14 in the New Mexico state police dossier.
33. Berdella's biography is told in Tom Jackman and Troy Cole, Rites of Burial (New York: Pinnacle Books, 1992). The saga of Leonard Lake and his accomplice Charles Chitat Ng is recounted in Don Lasseter, Die for Me (New York: Pinnacle Books, 2000). Dennis Rader's story is told in Robert Beattie, Nightmare in Wichita: The Hunt for the BTK Strangler (New York: New American Library, 2005).
34. Others have made a similar point. Hazelwood and Michaud, Dark Dreams, pp. 9–14.
35. A full biography is Stephen Michaud, Lethal Shadows: The Chilling True-Crime Story of a Sadistic Sex Slayer (New York: Onyx, 1994).
36. http://www.psychiatryonline.com/content.aspx?aID=33062.
37. Dr. Katherine Ramsland, “Mike DeBardeleben: Serial Sexual Sadist,” http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/debardeleben/evil_3.html.
38. Marked rebelliousness in boys is often associated with “childhood-persistent” antisocial personality, low heart rate, need for novelty and thrill seeking, and a disobedience that does not respond to punishment. As Sheilagh Hodgins, professor of psychology at the Maudsley in London has shown, parents will often unwisely heighten their punishments in a vain attempt to make such sons obey—which only increases their rebelliousness in what ends up a (literally) vicious circle.
39. Ramsland, “Mike DeBardeleben: Serial Sexual Sadist,” http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/predators/debardeleben/index_1.html.
40. Stephen Michaud, http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/debardeleben/evil_5html.
41. Roy Hazelwood, http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/debardeleben/evil_4html.
42. The full comment can be found in Hazelwood and Michaud, Dark Dreams, p. 88.
43. The point about the damaging effects of father absence and its connection with antisocial behaviors and “secondary psychopathy” in adolescence is well made in David Lykken, The Antisocial Personalities (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995) pp. 197–212.
44. In Harry Harlow's famous experiments in the 1960s with rhesus monkeys, those reared with a “mother” made of cloth fared better than those reared with a monkey-shaped doll made of wire. The latter grew up severely handicapped in relating to other monkeys and in being able to perform sexually. Cf. Harry F. Harlow, “Development of Affection in Primates,” in Roots of Behavior, edited by Eugene Bliss (New York: Harper, 1962), pp. 157–66.
45. Don Lasseter, Die for Me (New York: Pinnacle Books, 2000).
46. http://www.indopedia.org/Leonard_Lake.html.
47. Lasseter, Die for Me, p. 123.
48. Ibid., p. 217.
49. R. Biondi and W. Hecox, All His Father's Sins (Rocklin, CA: Prima Press, 1987).
50. Cf. Ann Rule, Lust Killer (New York: New American Library, 1983).
51. http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/predators/jerry_brudos/7.html.
52. When I had occasion to interview some men on death row in Florida, all of whom denied the murders of which they were convicted, the supervisor told me, “We have 348 men here—and they all say they're innocent. One of them probably is—but we don't know which one.”
53. One of the full-length biographies of Sells is by Diane Fanning, Through the Window (New York: St. Martin's Paperbacks, 2003). Another, which is partly autobiographical, is by a woman who befriended Sells and writes under the name Tori Rivers. Rivers, Twelve Jurors, One Judge, and a Half-Ass Chance (St. Clair, MO: Riverbend Press, 2007).
54. http://www.geocities.com/verbal_plainfield/q-z/sells.html.
55. I believe that much of what falls under the heading of “homophobia” derives from the fear and hatred that heterosexual young men experience if forced into homosexual encounters (usually by stronger heterosexual men). I think this is a more powerful source of homophobia, since being “buggered” is a humiliating experience that can actually happen in a boy's life. The Judeo-Christian injunction against homosexuality and masturbation has more to do, I believe, with the great need for procreation if a small tribe is to survive (a point made by religious scholar Elaine Pagels); hence acts that steer away from procreation become forbidden. But that is a very abstract concern nowadays, compared with the fear a young man might experience at being overpowered and humiliated through forced sodomy.
56. http://www.amfor.net/killers/.
57. To get a better picture of what such a figure means, imagine a sample of a million boys, in which 50 turn out to become serial killers. Suppose also that 12,000 of the million boys had a father with a criminal record and the other 988,000 did not. Next, suppose that 3,000 of those 12,000 boys with a criminal father had been adopted (25 percent). In the larger group of 988,000 there were 17,000 adoptees. Out of the whole million, there were 50 who grew up to be serial killers. They were distributed as follows: of the 3,000 adoptees whose fathers had a criminal record there were six serial killers, and there were 32 in the 9,000 raised by their birth parents (where the father was a criminal). In the large group, suppose 2 of the 17,000 adoptees became serial killers, and 10 more among the 971,000 who had been raised by their birth parents. The numbers of serial killers is very tiny: 50 out of a million, but 8 of them had been adoptees—that is, 16 percent of the serial killers had been adopted. But altogether there were 20,000 adoptees out of that million (2 percent) and only 8 became serial killers. So the risk of an adopted boy becoming a serial killer is 4 in 10,000. The risk of a nonadopted boy is 4.3 in 100,000. This means that the risk is very small in either group but measurably greater in the adoptees when compared with the nonadoptees. This is why it is worth looking into the adoption issue more closely.
58. Maria Eftimiades, Garden of Graves: The Shocking Story of Long Island's Serial Killer, Joel Rifkin (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993).
59. John Gilmore, Cold-Blooded: The Saga of Charles Schmid—the Notorious Pied Piper of Tucson (Portland, OR: Feral House, 1996).
60. Cf. Anna Flowers, Blind Fury (New York: Windsor/Pinnacle Books, 1993); http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Stano.
61. The story is told by David Lohr on the Crime Library Web site in the chapter called Reckoning, http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/criminal_mind/sexual_assault/thomas_soria/17.html.
62. Jared Diamond, “Vengeance Is Ours,” New Yorker, April 21, 2008, pp. 74–87.
63. M. Cox, The Confessions of Henry Lee Lucas (New York: Pocket/Star Books, 1991).
64. Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, A Stranger in the Family: A True Story of Murder, Madness, and Unconditional Love (New York: Dutton, 1995).
65. Carlton Smith, The BTK Murders (New York: St. Martin's Paperbacks, 2006).
66. Cf. Gail S. Anderson, Biological Influences on Criminal Behavior (New York: Simon Fraser University Publications, 2007), pp. 53–73. The author in her lucid presentation distinguishes between the inheritance of complex personality traits and the inheritance of simpler traits like eye and hair color, which depend on just a small number of genes and are less modifiable later on by environmental influences.
67. One can get a sense of Rader's dry, matter-of-fact recounting of the murders when speaking in court to the judge, by accessing http://www.ksn.com/news/local/3835926.html.
68. Smith, The BTK Murders.
69. In my experience, serial killers were at least four times as likely to have killed or tortured a cat than were the men who killed their wives.
70. Curiously, the triad was not noted in any of the fifteen homosexual serial killers I have studied—none of whom had set fires and only four of whom had tortured animals. The whole triad, and the combination of fire setting and animal torture, was noted only in the men who went on to kill women.
71. David Reichert, Chasing the Devil: My Twenty-Year Quest to Capture the Green River Killer (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2004).
72. http://www.kingcountyjournal.com/sited/story/html/148496.
73. I had occasion to see the tapes at the International Congress on Serial Killing, held in San Antonio in 2005 under the auspices of the FBI.
74. We saw this with Archie McCafferty and George Hennard, in chapter 5.
75. This point is convincingly argued by psychoanalytic experts in the field of sexuality Richard Friedman and Jennifer Downey in their article “Sexual Differentiation of Behavior,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (to be published).
76. Original title: Fegefeuer, oder die Reise ins Zuchthaus. The story of his life is well told in John Leake, Entering Hades: The Double Life of a Serial Killer (New York: Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2007).
77. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Unterweger.
78. http://members.tripod.com/Fighting9th/History5.htm.
79. Recounted by Bruce Jackson, http://buffaloreport.com/020301abbott.html.
CHAPTER EIGHT. THE FAMILY AT ITS WORST
1. Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr. Wicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective (New York: Walker & Co., 2008), p. 37.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., p. 75.
4. Wilkie Collins's famous novel The Moonstone (1868) owed a debt to the Road Hill House case.
5. A half-hour's drive to the east of Hitler's birthplace in Linz, one cannot help noticing. Linz was also home to another former mechanic with a talent for “disappearing” people: Adolf Eichmann.
6. http://in.ibtimes.com/articles/20080430/austria-incest-scandal-fritzl-father-daughter-cellar.
7. New York Times, May 9, 2008.
8. New York Post, May 3, 2008, p. 14.
9. The Republic, Book VII, the section sometimes called the Allegory of the Cave.
10. K. Englade, Cellar of Horrors (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988).
11. Sacha Batthyany, “Das Böse ist unter uns” (Evil is underneath us), N22 Online, http://www.nzz.ch/nachrichten/international/das_boese_ist_unter_uns_1.725225.html.
12. Cf. D. J. Cooke and C. Michi, “Psychopathy across Cultures: North America and Scotland Compared,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 108 (1): 58–68. D. J. Cooke, A. E. Forth, and R. D. Hare, eds., Psychopathy: Theory, Research & Implications for Society (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 1998), pp. 13–45. Cooke cites Cleckley's famous book on the psychopath, where the author mentions that “like the poor, psychopaths have always been with us” (p. 13).
13. The case of Latasha Pulliam and her boyfriend.
14. Wensley Clarkson, Whatever Mother Says: A True Story of a Mother, Madness, and Murder (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995).
15. http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/family%E2%80%99theresa_cross/2html.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. The mothers were Deanna Laney and Dena Schlosser. Their story is told by Jane Velez-Mitchell in Secrets Can Be Murder (New York: Simon & Schuster/Touchstone Books, 2007), pp. 41ff.
19. http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=2005042822320990003.
20. Charles Carillo, New York Post, June 23, 1990.
21. Ibid.
22. http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/1996/05/17/1996-05-17_facing_father_from_hell__bur.html.
23. Ibid.
24. Lowell Cauffiel, House of Secrets (New York: Kensington, 1997).
25. Cf. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Homicide (New York: Aldine DeGruyter, 1988), pp. 83ff.
26. Carol Rothgeb, No One Can Hurt Him Anymore (New York: Pinnacle Books, 2005). Ilene Logan is not her real name but one used by the author to safeguard her identity
27. By Andrew's father. Ibid., p. 27.
28. http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-4414492/Prosecutor-writes-about-an-unforgettable.html.
29. Rothgeb, No One Can Hurt Him Anymore, p. 249.
30. Ibid., p. 299.
31. According to German psychiatrist Dr. Thomas Bronisch, the suicide rate among Holocaust victims was actually lower than average, after the war, compared with the rates in the general populations of the countries they had come from.
32. Any parents. I am not fond of the clinical word caretakers, so I am including under the label “parents”: natural parents, stepparents, adoptive parents, foster parents, mother's boyfriends, etc.
33. Lonnie H. Athens, The Creation of Dangerous Violent Criminals (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press), 1992.
34. Gitta Sereny, Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1998).
35. Beth Kephart, “The Bad Seed,” http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/feature/1999/04/14/child_killers/index2.html.
36. Ibid.
37. Sereny, Cries Unheard.
38. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Bell.
39. Beth Kephart makes this point in her essay.
40. To make it less abstract, Theresa Knorr once shot her daughter, Suesan, in the shoulder and then (being a nurse) extracted the bullet, patched up the wound, with no one the wiser. Had the bullet struck an artery, Suesan would have died then and there; her mother's crime would have been that much more depraved.
41. New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/nyregion/18cnd-nixzmary.html?_r=1.
42. http://kalimao.blogspot.com/2008/02/children-parental-abuse_11.html.
43. http://newsday.com/news/local/crime/ny-mynixz0202,0,5361314.story.
44. http://aolsvc,news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20050220141509990002.
45. http://exchristian.net/2/2005/09/detective-speaks-out-on-dollar.php.
46. http://nobloodforhubris.blogspot.com/2006/08/in-nightmares-begin-responsibilities.html.
49. http://nobloodforhubris.blogspot.com/2006/08/in-nightmares-begin-responsibilities.html. The power of religion cannot be underestimated in the area of Tennessee from which the Dollars hailed. Of interest: the famous Scopes Trial of 1925 took place in Dayton, Tennessee, on the other side of Knoxville from the Dollars’ former academy.
50. http://mydatanet.com/story/64536317.html.
51. http://exchristian.net/2/2005/09/detective-speaks-out-on-dollar.php.
52. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/bradford/7203382.stm.
53. Ibid.
54. Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto XXXII 65–66. Sassol was a member of the Florentine family of Toschi. He murdered his cousin for the sake of an inheritance, which then fell to Sassol when the uncle died shortly thereafter. As Durling mentions in his 1996 translation for Oxford University Press, Sassol was punished by being rolled through the city in a barrel full of nails and then beheaded (p. 510).
55. Rachel Pergament, http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/famous/menendez/murders_2.html.
56. Ibid., p. 9.
57. The defense attorney persuaded some of the jury that José had “sexually molested” the boys, hence their rage and thirst for retribution. This was far-fetched, especially in light of the fact that José had many mistresses; sodomizing his sons was not on his mental map at all, ever.
58. Harold Schechter, Fatal: The Poisonous Life of a Female Serial Killer (London: Pocket/Star Books, 2003), p. 60.
59. Emily Allen, Alana Averill, and Emmeline Cook, “Jolly Jane,” http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Psyc%20405/serial%20killers/Toppan,%20Jane%20-%202005.pdf.
60. Schechter, Fatal, p. 201.
61. Ibid., p. 305.
62. Ibid., p. xii.
63. Martin Gilman Wolcott, The Evil 100 (New York: Kensington Publishers, 2003), p. 156. Since Wolcott conflates political killers with persons operating only in private life, his schema is not at all relevant to this book and is quite arbitrary. Jane is noteworthy because of the sheer number of victims, plus the unusual attribute of being “turned on” sexually by close contact with her dying victims—most of whose deaths were relatively painless (the arsenic cases aside). She does not compare in the malignancy of, or in the excruciating suffering caused by, the likes of David Parker Ray, Leonard Lake, Theresa Knorr, Herman Mudgett, John Weber, and many another “peacetime” sadistic killer reviewed here.
64. The novel was by William March; the play, by Maxwell Anderson, http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Toppan.
65. Publilius Syrus, writer of Latin maxims, 1st century BCE.
66. http://www.fenlandcitzen.co.uk/latest-east-anglia-news.
67. Roger Wilkes, Blood Relations: Jeremy Bamber and the White House Farm Murders (London: Pocket/Star Books, 1994).
68. Ibid., p. 440.
69. Ibid., p. 42.
70. For example: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-455875/Is-Bambis-killer-innocent.html.
71. Some mothers who are truly overwhelmed with the prospect of losing their children or of being unable to care for them do commit murder-suicide. A few such mothers survive their own suicide attempt, are usually considered mentally ill, and are sent to a forensic hospital. Those mothers who kill their children for “wicked” reasons—like getting back at a husband who has left them—are the ones seen as “evil” by the public. An example: Dr. Debora Green (Ann Rule, Bitter Harvest [New York: Simon Schuster, 1997]), who burned down her house with her three children in it, two of whom died.
72. Bonnie Remsberg, Mom, Dad, Mike and Pattie: The True Story of the Columbo Murders (New York: Bantam Books, 1992).
73. Ibid., p. 340.
74. Ibid., p. 315.
75. Ibid., p. 127.
76. This special “chemistry” of obsessive love when thwarted is thoroughly discussed in Helen Fischer, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (New York: Henry Holt/Owl Books, 2004). Relevant points about her research will be mentioned in the following chapter.
77. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935): famous American jurist and Supreme Court justice.
78. http://www.ccadp.org/jimmyrayslaughter.htm. Slaughter was executed on March 15, 2005. The full story of his psychopathy and his crimes is told in Bill Cox, Over the Edge (New York: Pinnacle Books, 1997). The father of Melody Wuertz said at Slaughter's trial: “He's not a man. He's an evil and he must be destroyed. What this man has dumped into our lives is nothing short of a toxic bomb of evil,” http://www.clarkprosecutor.org/html/death/US/slaughter955.htm.
79. Kieran Crowley, Almost Paradise (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005).
80. Obscene is an apt word in this context. The origin of the word is obscure. The large Latin dictionary by Lewis and Short suggests the roots are ob plus caenum, the latter word conveying the meanings of “filth” or “loathsomeness.” My Latin professor at university used to say the derivation was related to the Greek, meaning “tent,” or “stage” (from which we get our word scene), the idea being that, as Aristotle advised, certain actions during a theatrical play were too horrifying or indecent to portray on the stage and therefore could only be hinted at off stage; i.e., ob plus scaenum. Because the actions of John Ray Weber were to a great extent obscene (by whichever root meaning), they are properly alluded to only indirectly—off stage, as it were, not literally.
81. Lynard Barnes, in his 1995 review of Ray Garton's In a Dark Place (New York: Dell Publishing, 1992).
82. Peter Davidson, Death by Cannibal (New York: Berkley Books, 2006), p. 84.
83. As the philosopher Wittgenstein said, in a very different context, “Whereof we cannot speak we must be silent.”
84. Barnes, review of Garton, In a Dark Place.
85. Cf. Hazelwood and Michaud, Dark Dreams. The authors point out that the longer the time the sadist fantasizes about the acts he wants to commit, the more specific the victim's characteristics will be (as to age, size, etc.), p. 36. As to the components of a ritualistic sadist like Weber, there are certain subtypes one encounters. Weber fits into the “paraphilic” sexual sadist category, practicing bondage, sexual sadism (with sexual excitement during killing), and cannibalism, p. 43.
86. Steven Daniels, coordinator of Annual Homicide Conference, personal communication.
87. Submitted by Wayne Wirsing for the Price County district attorney, as part of the case of Wisconsin v. John R. Weber.
88. Barnes, review of Garton, In a Dark Place.
CHAPTER NINE. SCIENCE LOOKS AT EVIL
1. Non-shared environment related to the fact that even siblings led largely separate lives, were in different classes at school, had different friends and different skills and interests, etc. “Shared” environment (the whole family sitting down to the same dinner table, taking a vacation together) accounts for barely 3 percent of the difference in our personalities.
2. Example: ex-con Jess Dotson killed his brother in an argument—plus five other family members. New York Times, March 9, 2008.
3. An exception might be in places like Brazil, where kidnap for modest sums of ransom money is something of a cottage industry. I once treated a Brazilian patient whose wife was kidnapped for about three days. This was fairly traumatic for him, since he had no idea when she would be released. The wife was rather calm throughout the ordeal, knowing that the kidnappers were not asking for much money and that her father was wealthy and easily able to afford the extortion.
4. Lee Butcher, To Love, Honor, and Kill (New York: Pinnacle Books, 2008).
5. Joseph Starkey, Deadly Greed (New York: Prentiss Hall, 1991).
6. Such as the man in chapter 1, who beheaded his father and threw the head out the window, for fear it might get reattached. Another example would be that of China Arnold, a mentally unstable woman in Dayton, Ohio, who in 2005 killed her baby daughter by burning her in a microwave because she was worried that her boyfriend would leave her if he found out the baby wasn't his. The reaction of the community (“evil—pure evil”) may well have been more intense than in cases of infanticide where the child suffered no mutilation or disfigurement.
7. Such as Coy Wesbrook in Texas, who was invited for a supposed reconciliation with his estranged wife, only to discover that she was having sex with two men at once when he entered her apartment. Two other people were there also, both of them mocking Mr. Wesbrook. He went to his car, got his rifle, and shot all five to death. Had he caught his wife in flagrante delicto with just one lover and shot either the wife or the lover, a Texas jury would have been lenient (if they convicted him at all). But with five bodies, they could not in good conscience look the other way.
8. Example: a Jewish Vietnam vet was unable to afford the fee for Yom Kippur services at his temple. In a vengeful rage, he drew a swastika on the temple door. His arrest was attended with a lot of publicity.
9. As we saw with Sharon Tate in the Manson case.
10. As in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and of Martin Luther King Jr.
11. In previous chapters we mentioned Richard Jahnke Jr., who shot his father to death but had been abused severely (as was his sister) by the father; also Mary Bell, whose mother had tried numerous times to kill her daughter, and who at age eleven killed two boys. The true victim in either case was the child.
12. As in the murder of psychologist Kathryn Faughey by the paranoid schizophrenic David Tarloff. New York Times, Feb. 13, 2008. Or the murder of the judge in an Atlanta courtroom by prisoner Brian Nichols in March 2005. Another example concerns the murder of Tennessee pastor Matthew Winkler by his wife, Maryann, as described in Ann Rule, Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder (New York: Pocket Books, 2008), pp. 386–484.
13. Ken McElroy, mentioned in chapter 6. , is an example.
14. Among the numerous examples: the murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming by Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, who tied Shepard to a wire fence after stabbing and burning him.
15. As in the intentional bombing of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan by the Taliban in 2001, or the mallet attack on Michelangelo's Pietà by the paranoid Australian geologist Laszlo Toth in 1972. Toth was later declared “insane” and deported back to Australia.
16. Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979).
17. F. L. Coolidge, L. L. Thede, and K. L. Jang, “Heritability of Personality Disorders in Childhood,” Journal of Personality Disorders 15 (2001): 33–40. If a twin has conduct disorder, for example, his co-twin is about twice as likely to have conduct disorder also if the twins are “single-egg” (monozygotic), as compared with dizygotic. Twins from two different eggs are no more alike than two siblings born at different times.
The close relationship between childhood conduct disorder and (adult) antisocial personality disorder (or at the extreme, psychopathy) can be glimpsed by noticing the similarity of behaviors: children (boys, usually) with conduct disorder are prone, for example, to lying, stealing, assaultiveness (“bullying”), cruelty to animals, arson, property destruction (such as vandalism), and aggression that may reach the level of severe violence.
18. Mikal Gilmore, Shot in the Heart (New York: Viking Press, 1994).
19. This was the view expressed by Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman in Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi, A Universe of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 38; also in Gerald Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of Mind, chap. 3 (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
20. A useful summary of her work can be found in “The Neural Basis of Addiction: A Pathology of Motivation and Choice,” American Journal of Psychiatry 162 (August 2005): 1403–12.
21. Hippocampal damage and its attendant memory impairment is one of the key abnormalities in Alzheimer's disease.
22. Joseph LeDoux, article on the amygdala in Scholarpedia 3, no. 4: 2698.
23. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleus_accumbens.
24. American Journal of Psychiatry 157 (January 2000): 3.
25. A. Bechara et al., “Insensivity to Future Consequences Following Damage to the Human Prefrontal Cortex,” Cognition 50 (1994): 7–15.
26. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbitofrontal_cortex.
27. Lecture at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, 2007.
28. Lee Butcher, To Love, Honor and Kill (New York: Kensington Publishers, 2008).
29. Examples would be Tommy Lynn Sells, Leonard Lake, and David Parker Ray—serial killers sketched in chapter 7.
30. Émile Durkheim, “Forms of Social Solidarity,” in Selected Writings, trans. Anthony Giddens, 29th printing (London: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 124.
31. Larry J. Siever, “Neurobiology of Aggression and Violence,” American Journal of Psychiatry 165 (April 2008): 429–42.
32. http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/asperger/detail_asperger.htm. Others have also pointed to the tendency of clinicians not familiar with Asperger's to misdiagnose persons with this syndrome as “schizophrenic”: B. G. Haskins and J. A. Silva, “Asperger's Disorder and Behavior: Forensic-Psychiatric Considerations,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law 34 (2006): 374–84. About one such patient in five was preoccupied with violent themes (p. 377).
33. V. S. Ramachandran and L. M. Oberman, “Broken Mirrors,” Scientific American, November 2006, pp. 63–69.
34. Tania Singer of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, cited in http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/31400/title/Asperger%E2%80%99s_syndrome.
35. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070418/ap_on_re_us/virginia_tech_shooting.
36. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cho_Seung-Hui.
37. www.freelibrary.com/Fetal+Alcohol+Syndrome+National+Workshop+2002-a0112129793.
38. A. Badawy, “Alcohol and Violence, and the Possible Role of Serotonin,” Criminal Behavior and Mental Health 13 (2006): 31–44.
39. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, act 1, scene 7, ll. 59–61.
40. Ibid., ll. 8–10.
41. Edmund S. Higgins, “The New Genetics of Mental Illness,” Scientific American Mind, June/July 2008, pp. 41–47.
42. http://www.francesfarmersrevenge.com/stuff/serialkillers/marthajohnson.htm. She is considered a serial killer of the nonsexual type, because the four murders took place over a five-year span between 1977 and 1982.
43. Terrie E. Moffitt, “A Review of Research on the Taxonomy of Life-Course Persistent versus Adolescent-Limited Antisocial Behavior,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Violent Behavior and Aggression, ed. D. J. Flannery, A. T. Vazsonyi, and I. D. Waldman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 49–74.
44. Sheila Johnson, Blood Lust (New York: Pinnacle Books, 2007).
45. S. Kapur and P. Seeman, “NMDA Receptor Antagonists Ketamine and PCP Have Direct Effects on the Dopamine D2 and Serotonin 5HT2 Receptors. Implications for Models of Schizophrenia,” Molecular Psychiatry 7 (2002): 833–44. Also, M. A. Fauman and B. J. Fauman, “Violence Associated with Phencyclidine Abuse,” American Journal of Psychiatry 136 (1979): 1584–86.
46. J. M. Kretschmar and D. J. Flannery, “Substance Use and Violent Behavior,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Violent Behavior and Aggression, ed. Flannery, Vazsonyi, and Waldman, pp. 647–63.
47. A. J. Reiss and J. A. Roth, “Alcohol, Other Psychoactive Drugs, and Violence,” in Understanding & Preventing Violence, vol. 3, Social Influences (Washington, DC: National Academy Press), pp. 182–220.
48. R. Myerscough and S. Taylor, “The Effects of Marijuana on Human Physical Aggression,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 49 (1985): 1541–46.
49. Higgins, “The New Genetics of Mental Illness,” p. 46.
50. In any case marijuana had been implicated in a 40 percent increase in the development of mental illness by adolescents who use it; the incidence of suicidal thoughts also is greater among adolescent marijuana smokers. These effects can in certain young persons contribute further to criminal (including violent) behavior. Cf. Jennifer Kerr, “Teen Pot Use Can Lead to Dependency and Mental Illness,” http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080509/ap_on_he_me/teens_drugs. The persistent effects of marijuana and other drug use in adolescence has also been highlighted by Brenda Patoine in “Teen Brain's Ability to Learn Can Have a Flip Side,” BrainWork/Neuroscience News, November/December 2007, pp. 1–2.
51. D. Murdoch, R. O. Pihl, and D. Ross, “Alcohol and Crimes of Violence,” International Journal of the Addictions 25: 1065–81.
52. Corey Mitchell, Pure Murder: A Deserted City Park, A Vicious Killing Frenzy (New York: Pinnacle Books, 2008).
53. From the observations of Dr. John Harlow, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage.
54. Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1994), p. 33.
55. P. Ratiu and I.-F. Talos, “The Tale of Phineas Gage, Digitally Remastered,” New England Journal of Medicine 351 (December 2004): e21.
56. A “stable family home is a protective factor against crime”—as emphasized by Gail S. Anderson in Biological Influences on Criminal Behavior (New York: Simon Fraser University Publications, 2007), p. 112.
57. Joanna Schaffhausen, “The Biological Basis of Aggression,” http://www.brainconnection.com/topics/?main=fa/aggression2.
58. G. Lavergne, A Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman Murders (Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press), 1997.
59. L. Fosburgh, Closing Time: The True Story of the Goodbar Murder (New York: Dell Books, 1975).
60. Though when an intruding male lion does succeed, he behaves according to the script for new male lions, as mentioned in chapter 3.
61. Debra Niehoff, The Biology of Violence (New York: Free Press, 1998), p. 153.
62. Ibid., p. 155.
63. R. Rowe et al., “Testosterone, Antisocial Behavior, and Social Dominance in Boys: Pubertal Development and Biosocial Interaction,” Biological Psychiatry 55 (2004): 546–52. A similar finding was made earlier by B. Schaal and colleagues in Montréal: “Male Testosterone Linked to High School Dominance but Low Physical Aggression in Early Adolescence,” Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 35 (1996): 1322–30.
64. J. D. Higley et al., “Cerebrospinal Testosterone and 5-HIAA (Serotonin) Correlate with Different Types of Aggressive Behaviors,” Biological Psychiatry 40 (1996): 1067–82.
65. S. Rajender et al., “Reduced CAG Repeats Length in Androgen Receptor Gene Is Associated with Violent Criminal Behavior,” International Journal for Legal Medicine (March 2008).
66. Schaffhausen, “The Biological Basis of Aggression.” She discusses predatory aggression (seen also in animals who stalk and kill other species), defensive aggression (as when a person or animal is “cornered”), and social aggression (associated with testosterone and the quest for social dominance).
67. Paul Aitken, “XYY—One Chromosome Too Many,” http://www.altpenis.com/penis_news/xyy.shtml.
68. P. Briken et al., “XYY Chromosome Abnormality in Sexual Homicide Perpetrators,” American Journal of Medical Genetics (January 2, 2006). It should be noted that XYY is not even a heritable condition. It results from a random mutation when the sex cells (sperm and egg), each with twenty-three chromosomes, line up to reconstitute the full forty-six-chromosome cells of our species. One sperm cell in this rare mutation ends up with two “Y's” instead of just one; the fertilized egg becomes XYY. Cf. Anderson, Biological Influences on Criminal Behavior, p. 82.
69. Otto Kernberg, Aggression in Personality Disorders and Perversions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 77.
70. “Global,” Time, June 16, 2008, p. 10. Another example is the documentary by Ernestina Sodi Miranda, who had been kidnapped—and later freed—in Mexico in 2002: Líbranos del Mal (Deliver Us from Evil) (Mexico City: Aguilar, 2006).
71. Maria Eftimiades, Sins of the Mother (New York: St. Martin's Paperbacks, 1995).
72. A powerful study of empathy in this sense has been conducted by Professor Simon Baron-Cohen of Cambridge University in The Essential Difference: Male and Female Brains and the Truth about Autism (New York: Basic Books, 2004), pp. 187–99.
73. James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: Free Press, 1993), pp. 29–54.
74. M. William Phelps, I'll Be Watching You (New York: Pinnacle Books, 2008). He refers to Snelgrove as the “embodiment of pure evil” (p. 9).
75. A. Raine et al., “High Rates of Violence, Crime, Academic Problems and Behavioral Problems in Males with Both Early Neuromotor Deficits and Unstable Family Environments,” Archives of General Psychiatry 53 (1996): 544–49.
76. A. Raine et al., “Reduced Prefrontal and Increased Subcortical Brain Functioning Assessed Using Positron Emission Tomography in Predatory and Affective Murderers,” Behavioral Science and the Law 16 (1998): 319–22. In a related study, psychopathic criminals showed overactivity in the fronto-temporal cortex for processing affective stimuli: Kent Kiehl, A. M. Smith et al., “Limbic Abnormalities in Affective Processing by Criminal Psychopaths as Revealed by Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging,” Biological Psychiatry 50 (2001): 677–84.
77. A. Raine et al., “Reduced Prefrontal Gray Matter Volume and Reduced Autonomic Activity in Antisocial Personality Disorder,” Archives of General Psychiatry 57 (2000): 119–27.
78. A. Raine and P. H. Venables, “Tonic Heart Rate Level, Social Class, and Antisocial Behavior,” Biological Psychiatry 18 (1984): 123–32.
79. A. Marsh et al., “Reduced Amygdala Response to Fearful Expressions in Children and Adolescents with Callous-Unemotional Traits and Disruptive Behavior Disorders,” American Journal of Psychiatry 165 (2008): 712–20.
80. J. Moll et al., “Morals and the Human Brain: A Working Model,” Neuroreport 14 (2003): 299–305.
81. E. C. Finger et al., “Abnormal Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Function in Children with Psychopathic Traits during Reversal Learning,” Archives of General Psychiatry 65 (2008): 586–94.
82. H. Larsson, E. Viding, and R. Plomin, “Callous-Unemotional Traits and Antisocial Behavior: Genetic, Environmental and Early Parenting Characteristics,” Criminal Justice and Behavior 35 (2008): 197–211.
83. J. Taylor, W. G. Iacono, and M. McGue, “Evidence for a Genetic Etiology of Early-Onset Delinquency,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 109 (2000): 634–43. Also, L. Arsenault et al., “Strong Genetic Effects on Cross-Situational Behavior among 5-Year-Old Children According to Mothers, Teachers, Examiner-Observers, and Self-Reports,” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 44 (2004): 832–48.
84. T. C. Eley, P. Lichtenstein, and J. Stevenson, “Sex Differences in the Etiology of Aggressive and Nonaggressive Antisocial Behavior: Results from Two Twin Studies,” Child Development 70 (1999): 155–68.
85. Anderson, Biological Influences on Criminal Behavior, p. 112.
86. Deborah Spungen, And I Don't Want to Live This Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1983).
87. Niels Habermann, Jugendliche Sexualmörder (Juvenile Sexual Murder) (Lengerich, Germany: Pabst Science Publishers, 2008).
88. David J. Pelzer, A Child Called “It”: An Abused Child's Journey from Victim to Victor (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, 1995).
89. S. K. Loo et al., “Genome Wide Scan of Reading Ability in Affected Sibling Pairs with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder,” Molecular Psychology 9 (2004): 485–93.
90. Finger et al., “Abnormal Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Function,” p. 593.
91. A. Caspi et al., “Role of Genotype in the Cycle of Violence in Maltreated Children,” Science 297 (2002): 851–54.
92. C. M. Filley et al., “Toward an Understanding of Violence: Neurobehavioral Aspects of Unwarranted Physical Aggression,” Neuropsychiatry, Neuropsychology and Behavioral Neurology 14 (2001): 1–14; also R. Cadoret, L. D. Levé, and E. Devor, “Genetics of Aggressive and Violent Behavior,” Psychiatric Clinics of North America 20 (1997): 301–22.
93. A. R. Hariri et al., “A Susceptibility Gene for Affective Disorders and the Response of the Human Amygdala,” Archives of General Psychiatry 62 (2005): 146–52.
94. Sheila Hodgins, lecture at the Jephcott Forensic Symposium, Royal Society of Medicine, London, UK, April 22, 2008.
95. Ibid.
96. Vincent Bugliosi, Helter Skelter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974/1994), p. 125.
97. Anna C. Salter, Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, & Other Sex Offenders (New York: Basic Books, 2003).
98. The full story is found on pages 98–99 in ibid.
99. Ibid., p. 100.
100. This man, who would be at Category 22 on the Gradations scale, represents a particularly heinous form of evil because his victim was his own son. If a stranger had abducted and violated the boy in a similar fashion—provided the boy's parents were warm and loving—the boy's capacity to trust others would not be as shattered as it would be knowing that he was violated by his own father, who was supposed to be his guardian and protector.
101. Examples are the serial killers Edwin Snelgrove Jr., mentioned above, and Dennis Rader (known in the press as BTK—for bind-torture-kill). Both these men came from normal homes and became sexually aroused from sadistic fantasies when still quite young. Dennis Rader was able to lead a “split” life, marrying and raising a family, while also leading a secret “double-life” as a sadistic killer. Edwin Snelgrove was a loner, unable to relate intimately with women—whom he grew to hate, as though it were their fault that he couldn't form close attachments to them.
102. Francine du Plessix Gray, At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), p. 30. Aristocrats could not be executed in those royal times; this was the same reason why the Countess Báthory was simply immured in her castle, when arrested, rather than being executed.
103. Salter, Predators, p. 114.
FINAL THOUGHTS
1. Irvine Welsh, Crime (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008), p. 255. “Nonce” is Scottish slang for “pedophile.”
2. Slavenka Drakulic´&csMarker;, They Would Never Hurt a Fly (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 189.
3. Drakulic´, They Would Never Hurt a Fly, p. 111. The very same story about Erdomovic´ is also mentioned in a book by German social psychologist Harald Welzer, who discusses how ordinary men can end up committing mass murder: Täter—Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden (Perpetrators—How quite normal men become mass murderers) (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2008), pp. 242–45.
4. Niklas Frank, Der Vater: Eine Abrechnung (Munich: Bertelsmann, 1987). Later translated as In the Shadow of the Reich (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1991).
5. One of Eichmann's sons condemned his father's actions but did not write a book about him, http://www.jewishf.com/content/2-0-/module/display/story_id/20954/edition_id/431/format/html/displaystory.html.
6. My translation from his 1992 letter.
7. Frank, Der Vater, p. 350.
8. Lieutenant Calley's character structure left something to be desired even before he went to Vietnam. Outwardly, however, he certainly seemed like an “ordinary man.” Not surprisingly, when he was brought to trial for the massacre, he showed his moral meagerness when he said in his defense, “What the hell else is war than killing people?” This was cited in Welzer, Täter, p. 245.
9. The officer was one Daniel Mitrone. Martha Huggins, Mika Haritos-Fatouras, and Philip G. Zimbardo, Violence Workers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 239.
10. Huggins, Haritas-Fatouras, and Zimbardo, Violence Workers, p. 240.
11. Cited by Rita Maran, Torture: The Role of Ideology in the French-Algerian War (New York: Praeger, 1989), p. 83.
12. Bruce Falconer, “The World's Most Evil Man,” American Scholar 77 (2008): 33–53.
13. Niels Habermann in his book on adolescent sexual murder (Jugendliche Sexualmörder [Berlin: Pabst Science Publishers, 2008]) drew attention to how a third of the nineteen adolescent murderers he studied had deformities of one sort or another that contributed to their poor self-image and shyness, and played a role in their eventual crimes.
14. One of the rare forms of evil in peacetime partakes of this dynamic: consider Hinckley's attempt on the life of President Reagan, or David Mark Chapman's murder of John Lennon. A brilliant comment on this kind of anomie-driven evil was made by Martin Amis in his piece “Terrorism's New Structure,” Wall Street Journal, August 16, 2008, pp. W–1, 6.
15. Among myriad examples: Napoleon's troops committed atrocities against the Spanish when they invaded Spain (1807–1812); the Spanish citizenry retaliated by flaying alive or sawing in two some of the invading troops. David A. Bell, The First Total War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), p. 290.
16. As Welzer (Täter, p. 263) points out, killing (whether of soldiers or civilians) in wartime is reduced to a job that unfortunately has to be done. Here he echoes Himmler's pep talk to the SS (cited in ibid., p. 23) in referring to the mass murder of the Jews as an unpleasant task that the Fatherland needs to perform for its salvation. In his address to SS leaders in 1943, Himmler waved aside any accusation of “anti-Semitism,” speaking of the Jews as “lice”; their eradication simply a matter of cleanliness, or “delousing” (Katrin Himmler, The Himmler Brothers [New York: Macmillan, 2007], p. 231). Violence, in this perverse and topsy-turvy schema, is no longer something destructive but rather a “constructive” exercise in social hygienics.
17. I am using the word “men” here, for brevity's sake, to refer to both men and women. Men enormously outnumber women when we speak of evil, whether in peacetime or war. And as we have seen, serial sexual homicide and mass murder are anyway almost exclusively male phenomena.
18. John Seabrook, “Suffering Souls,” New Yorker, November 10, 2008, pp. 64–73.
19. Barbara Bentley, A Dance with the Devil: A True Story of Marriage to a Psychopath (New York: Berkley Books, 2008), pp. 351–52.
20. Professor of English Harold Schechter insists that “there is no such thing as a serial killer who has come from a healthy, happy home. All of them are the products of distinctly dysfunctional backgrounds.” The Serial Killer Files (New York: Ballantine Books, 2003), p. 256. Schechter is simply wrong. Examples of the contrary come not only from my own records and clinical experience, but also from the clinical observations of Niels Habermann (Jugendliche Sexualmörder). He gave vignettes of nineteen adolescent sexual murderers, including a few who became serial killers. Most did come from dysfunctional homes, but several, such as his case of “Matthias,” did not. These boys did tend to be schizoid loners from birth—meaning that they inherited risk genes for this personality type that interfered severely with their ability to connect with, and develop intimacy with, girls as they entered puberty. They came from good homes, as did US serial killer, adoptee Joel Rifkin, whose schizoid personality also stood in the way of his developing closeness with women.
21. Simon Baatz, For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder that Shocked Chicago (New York: HarperCollins, 2008). Leopold, sensitive and sexually in the thrall of the more psychopathic Loeb, conspired to kill a boy just for the excitement of doing it. Loeb was killed in prison by another inmate. Leopold, remorseful, was freed after thirty-four years and then led a socially useful life.
22. This point is made convincingly by Dr. Stanton Samenow in Inside the Criminal Mind (New York: Times Books, 1984), pp. 175–90.
23. The details can be found in the biography of Athens by Richard Rhodes: Why They Kill (New York: Random House, 1999).
24. Anthony Flacco with Jerry Clark, Slave in the Necropolis (Martin Literary Management, 2008, preprint of book to be published, 2009), pp. 16–62.
25. John Dean, House of Evil (New York: St. Martin's Paperbacks, 2008).
26. Ibid., p. 218.
27. Her original title read “Oni ne bi ni mrava zgazili”: They wouldn't step on an ant, but the idea is the same.
28. Gary King, Stolen in the Night (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2007). Also http://news.aol.com/article/confessed-child-killer-sentenced-to/141596?icid=100214839x1.
29. http://fifthnail.blogspot.com/.
30. http://en.allexperts.com/e/j/jo/joseph_e_duncan_iii.htm?zlr=4.
31. His story is recorded in the New York Times, June 14, 1996.
32. Samenow, Inside the Criminal Mind, p. 177.
33. The murder took place in 2006 in the state of Maine, after he was inappropriately released from a mental hospital at a time when he was harboring murderous thoughts about his mother. Wall Street Journal, August 16, 2008, pp. A–1, A–8; also http://www.nylj.com/nylawyer/probono/news/07/080307a.html.
34. Joel Norris, Arthur Shawcross: The Genesee River Killer (New York: Windsor Publications, 1992). Also, Jack Olsen, Misbegotten Son (New York: Dell/Island Books, 1993).
35. http://news.aol.com/article/confessed-child-killer-sentenced-to/145196?icid=100214839x1.
36. http://mediahangout.blogspot.com/2008/11/Quentin-patrick-halloween-arrest.html-220k.
37. http://www.allserialkillers.com/clifford_olson.htm, p. 6. Cf. also W. Leslie Holmes and Bruce Northrup, Where Shadows Linger: The Untold Story of RCMP's Olson Murder Investigation (Surrey, BC: Heritage House Publishing Company, 2000).
38. According to Section 745.6 of the Criminal Code, as mentioned by the stepfather of thirteen-year-old murder victim Colleen Daignault, who was raped, tortured, and killed by Olsen in 1981. The stepfather has urged the repeal of that statute. http://www.owl125.com/colleen.html.
39. Billy Wayne Sinclair and Jodie Sinclair, A Life in the Balance: A Journey from Murder to Redemption Inside America's Worst Prison System (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000).
40. His story is told in Tom Jackman and Troy Cole, Rites of Burial: The Shocking True Crime Account of Robert Berdella, the Butcher of Kansas City, Missouri (New York: Windsor Publishing/Pinnacle Books, 1992).
41. Reprinted here with Dennis Nilsen's permission: his letter of July 31, 2008.
42. Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra, ed. and trans. Stanley Appelbaum (Mineola, NY: Dover Press, 2004 [1883–85]), p. 10. The original reads “Der Mensch ist ein Seil, geknüpft zwischen Tier und Übermensch—ein Seil über einem Abgrunde.” Übermensch is often translated “overman” to avoid the word superman, which has overtones either of the comic-book character or the goose-stepping Nazis. Nietzsche did not have in mind brutish men like the Nazis; rather, an independent, morally superior, artistic man—beyond or more than the ordinary person. For easier comprehension, I prefer the phrase “superior man” here: one who would be at the farthest remove from the commission of evil, in the sense I have been using it in this book.
EPILOGUE
1. See chap. 2, p. 62.
2. “ISIS Burns 19 Yazidi Women to Death in Mosul for Rejecting Sex Slavery,” Behind the News (blog), June 10, 2017, https://behindthenewsisrael.wordpress.com/2017/06/10/isis-burns-19-yazidi-women-to-death-in-mosul-for-rejecting-sex-slavery/.
3. Wikipedia, s.v. “Akihabara Massacre,” last modified April 25, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akihabara_massacre.
4. BBC News, July 15, 2016; “What We Know about the Bastille Day Killings,” Wall Street Journal, July 15, 2016.
5. People v. James F. Cahill, Court of Appeal Report, November 25, 2003, p. 3: “Pursuant to CPL 400.27, the court conducted the jury trial in two phases. In the first phase, the jury found the defendant guilty of both counts of first degree murder, first degree assault (based on the April 1998 beating) and related charges.”
6. D. J. Krajicek, “Wife and Death: Doc Gives Murder and Adultery a Shot,” Daily News, August 29, 2015.
7. Terrence McCoy, “With His Dying Words, Alexander Litvinenko Names Putin as His Killer,” Washington Post, January 28, 2015.
8. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
9. Ibid., p. 11 of the illustrations.
10. Shi Young and James Yin, The Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Photographs (Chicago: Innovative Publishing Group, 1997).
11. Ibid., p. 56.
12. V. N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1995); P. Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response (New York: HarperCollins, 2003); B. N. Ketchian, In the Shadow of the Fortress: Survivors’ Memoirs; the Genocide Remembered, no. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Zoryan Institute Survivors’ Memoirs, 1988).
13. “Marriages and Divorces, 1900–2012,” Infoplease, https://www.infoplease.com/us/marital-status/marriages-and-divorces-1900a2012.
14. Association of American Medical Colleges, “U.S. Medical School Applicants and Students: 1982–83 to 2011–12,” 2012, https://www.aamc.org/download/153708/data/; Staff Care, “Women in Medicine: A Review of Changing Physician Demographics, Female Physicians by Specialty, State and Related Data” (white paper), 2015, https://www.staffcare.com/uploadedFiles/women-in-medicine-changing-physician-demographics-white-paper.pdf.
15. D. J. Besharov and A. West, “African American Marriage Patterns,” Hoover Institution, 2001), p. 96, http://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/0817998721_95.pdf.
16. G. D. Sandefur, Molly Martin, Jennifer Eggerling-Boeck, Susan E. Mannon, and Ann M. Meier, “An Overview of Racial and Ethnic Demographic Trends,” chap. 3 in America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2001), available at https://www.nap.edu/read/9599/chapter/4.
17. C. Brandon, Murder in the Adirondacks: An American Tragedy Revisited (Utica, NY: North Country Books, 1986).
18. Betsy Kepes, “Infamous Murder Revisited,” review of Murder in the Adirondacks, by Craig Brandon, Adirondack Explorer, March 2017, https://www.adirondackexplorer.org/book_reviews/murder-in-the-adirondacks.
19. Murderpedia, s.v. “ Dr. Bennett Clarke Hyde,” http://murderpedia.org/male.H/h/hyde-bennett.htm; Nadia Pflaum, “Dr. Bennett Clarke Hyde's Trial in the Swope Family Poisonings Provoked Media Frenzy,” Pitch, March 23, 2010, http://www.pitch.com/news/article/20586923/dr-bennett-clark-hydes-trial-in-the-swope-family-poisonings-provoked-media-frenzy.
20. New York Times, February 11, 1910, p. 1a.
21. T. E. Gaddis, Birdman of Alcatraz (New York: Random House, 1955); “Robert ‘the Birdman of Alcatraz’ Stroud,” Alcatraz History, http://www.alcatrazhistory.com/stroud.htm.
22. Encyclopedia Britannica, s.v. “Robert Stroud: American Criminal and Ornithologist,” last updated March 31, 2017, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Stroud.
23. H. Schechter, Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America's Most Fiendish Killer (New York: Pocket Books, 1990), p. 85.
24. Wikipedia, s.v. “Albert Fish,” last modified May 12, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Fish.
25. Harold Schechter, The True Story of America's Most Fiendish Killer (New York: Pocket Books, 1990).
26. Leslie Margolin, Murderess! The Chilling True Story of the Most Infamous Woman Ever Electrocuted (New York: Pinnacle Books, 1999).
27. Troy Taylor, “The ‘Dumb-Bell Murder,’: The Crime of Ruth Snyder & Judd Gray,” Dead Men Do Tell Tales, 2004, http://www.prairieghosts.com/ruth_judd.html; cf.: Margolin, Murderess.
28. Anthony Flacco, The Road Out of Hell (New York: Sterling Books, 2009).
29. Diane Wagner, Corpus Delicti (New York: St. Martin's Paperbacks, 1986).
30. William Allen, The Story of a Mass Murderer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976).
31. Ibid.
32. Robert Greenfield, Timothy Leary: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, 2006).
33. Ryan McMaken, “FBI: Us Homicide Rate at 51 Year Low,” Mises Wire (blog), Mises Institute, June 15, 2016, https://mises.org/blog/fbi-us-homicide-rate-51-year-low.
34. Michael H. Stone, “Mass Murder, Mental Illness, and Men,” Violence & Gender 2 (2015): 51–86.
35. Kate Zernicke, “Jury Finds Spying in Rutgers Dorm Was a Hate Crime,” New York Times, March 16, 2012.
36. Wikipedia, s.v. “Suicide of Audrie Pott,” last modified August 4, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Audrie_Pott.
37. Michelle Dean: The Story of Amanda Todd. The New Yorker October 18, 2012.
38. CBC News, April 12, 2013: US Teen's death eerily similar to Rehtaeh Parso's story.
39. Sandra Constantine, “South Hadley, MA Superintendent Gus Sayer Says DA's Findings in Phoebe Prince Case Consistent with School's Investigation,” Republican (Springfield, MA), March 31, 2010.
40. Mark Dunphy, “Phoebe Prince Death Inspires Anti-Bullying Bill in New York,” Clare Herald, May 11, 2010.
41. Laura Crimaldi, “DA: School Knew of Brutal Bullying of Phoebe Prince,” Boston Herald, March 29, 2010.
42. Waldon R. Porterfield, “Little Charlie Ross and the Crime That Shocked the Nation,” Milwaukee Journal, October 2, 1974; Norman Zierold, Little Charlie Ross (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967). Shortly after the kidnaping, the boy's father, John E. Potter, wrote The Father's Story of Charley Ross, the Kidnapped Child, in 1876.
43. Rupert Cornwell, “The Lindbergh Mystery: Could America's Most Famous Crime Be Solved at Last?” Independent, October 19, 2012, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-lindbergh-mystery-could-america-s-most-famous-crime-be-solved-at-last-8215537.html.
44. Tim O'Neil, “A Look Back: 1953 Bobby Greenlease Jr. Kidnapping Ended in the Missouri Gas Chamber,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 4, 2009; cf.: J. J. Maloney, “The Greenlease Kidnapping,” Missouri Death Row, http://missourideathrow.com/doc-history/the-greenlease-kidnapping.
45. Gene Miller, 83 Hours ’Til Dawn (New York: Doubleday, 1971); cf.: Wikipedia, s.v. “Barbara Mackle Kidnapping,” last modified February 1, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Mackle_kidnapping.
46. Wikipedia, s.v. “Kidnapping of Jaycee Dugard,” last modified May 7, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Jaycee_Dugard.
47. Phil Garrido's father, personal communication with the author, 2009.
48. John Glatt, The Lost Girls (New York: St. Martin's Paperbacks, 2015); “Ariel Castro Kidnappings,” Wikipedia, last modified May 14, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_Castro_kidnappings.
49. Susan Claremont, “A Murder, Two Accused, But No Body,” Hamilton Spectator, May 21, 2009.
50. Kristina Sauerwein, Invisible Chains (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2008).
51. Associated Press, “Life in Prison for Kidnapper of Smart,” New York Times, May 25, 2011; cf.: Wikipedia, s.v. “Elizabeth Smart Kidnapping,” last modified May 6, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Smart_kidnapping.
52. Shamita Das Dasgupta, “Acid Attacks,” in Encyclopedia of Interpersonal Violence, vol. 1, 1st ed., ed. Claire M. Renzetti and Jeffery L. Edleson (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2008).
53. Beth Stebner, “Linda Pugach: Woman Blinded by Burton Pugach Dies Aged 75 in New York” (obit.), Daily Mail (London), January 24, 2013, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2267638/Linda-Pugach.
54. Anne O'Neill, “Acid Death Case Goes to New Trial,” Los Angeles Times, July 5, 1994.
55. Jill Young Miller, “The Cruelest Cut of All: Marla Hanson Carries a Visible Reminder of the Night Her Face Was Slashed. But She Says It Was What Came after the Attack That Left the Deepest Scars,” Sun Sentinel, http://articles.sun.sentinel.com/1987-11-23/features/8702070506_1_invisible; cf.: Dean Balsamini, “Chelsea Slashing Is Chilling Reminder of 1986 Nightmare,” New York Post, January 9, 2016.
56. Bill Mayer, “The Plain Dealer,” Associated Press, February 11, 2009; Adam Sullivan, “Rodgers Sentenced for Lye Attack,” WCAX.com, Local Vermont News, February 11, 2009.
57. Thomas Erdbrink, “Iranian Woman Blinded by Spurned Suitor Persuades Court to Punish Him Similarly,” Washington Post, December 14, 2008.
58. Jeff Barker, “Judge Calls Sifrit ‘Butcher,’ Gives Him 38 Years in Prison,” Baltimore Sun, July 8, 2003.
59. Doyle Murphy, “Texas Killer Convicted of Murder in Burning Death of 8-Year-Old Sex Abuse Victim,” New York Daily News, February 9, 2015.
60. Madeline Baro Diaz, “Man Convicted of Killing 9-Year-Old Florida Girl,” Sun Sentinel, March 8, 2007.
61. Christie Blatchford, “The Chilling Online Posts That Luka Magnotta Jurors Were Not Shown,” National Post (Canada), December 15, 2014; cf.: Petti Fong, Andrew Chung, and Hilda Hoy, “Foot and Hand Sent to Vancouver Schools,” Toronto Star, June 5, 2012; “Head Found in Montreal Park Belongs to Jun Lin,” CBC News, July 4, 2012; “‘Canadian Psycho’ Murder Suspect Arrested in Berlin,” RNW Media, June 5, 2012; Brian Daly, “Personality Disorder Best Explains Luka Magnotta: Crown Expert Magnotta Trial,” Toronto Sun, February 9, 2015.
62. Cara Lee Carter, Canadian Psycho: The True Story of Luka Magnotta, Crimes Canada, vol. 5 (Canada: VP Publications, an imprint of RJ Parker Publishing, 2015).
63. Ibid., pp. 58, 100ff.
64. R. D. Hare, The Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (Toronto: Multi-Health Systems, 1991).
65. Peter Davidson, “Albert Fentress: Middle School Madman,” chap. 2 in Death by Cannibal: Minds with an Appetite for Murder (New York: Berkley Books, 2015).
66. Ibid.
67. Roy Hazelwood and Stephen Michaud, Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide, and the Criminal Mind (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001).
68. In their article on Asperger's disorder and criminal behavior, “Asperger's Disorder and Criminal Behavior: Forensic-Psychiatric Considerations,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law 34 (2006): 374–84, Barbara Haskins and J. A. Silva mention studies showing a modest increase in criminality among (male) Asperger patients—that does not justify the public's worry about violence in that population (despite the few dramatic cases in the recent press).
69. Stone, “Mass Murder.” In my study of 302 mass murderers from the United States and other countries, Asperger's syndrome and other forms of autistic disorders were present only in four cases (1.5 percent), whereas other forms of psychosis were present in forty-two other persons (16.4 percent). Grant Duwe, in Mass Murder in the United States (London: McFarland, 2007), cites (pp. 139 ff) percentages from TV coverage (males account for 94 percent of mass murderers) and New York Times (95 percent male) and weekly news magazines (100 percent), so my 97 percent is a reasonable estimate.
70. Dinesh Ramde, “Wisconsin Temple Shooting: Oak Creek Incident Leaves at Least 7 Dead,” Huffington Post, August 5, 2012; cf.: Wikipedia, s.v. “Wisconsin Sikh Temple Shooting,” last modified May 12, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Sikh_temple_shooting.
71. “Male Headwear,” Raqs, last updated April 22, 2015, http://www.raqs.co.nz/me/clothing_headwear_male.html.
72. Kristina Savali, “Adam Lanza's Possible Motive: Mother Cared More about Sandy Hook Students Than Him,” NewsOne, 2013; cf.: Michael Daly, “We Already Know What Adam Lanza's Real Motive Was at Sandy Hook,” Daily Beast, November 26, 2013; Alison Leigh Cowan, “Adam Lanza's Mental Problems ‘Completely Untreated’ before Newtown Shootings, Report Says,” New York Times, November 21, 2014. For other background details, see “Adam Lanza: Murderer,” Biography, last updated June 13, 2016, http://www.biography.com/people/adam-lanza-21068899.
73. T. Moran, “Inside Cho's Mind,” ABC News, August 30, 2007.
74. Stone, “Mass Murder.” In my survey of prominent mass murders from 1900 to 2016 in the United States and other countries, I noted that in the decades from 1900 to 1959, there were between five to seven such murders per decade; in the decade 1960–69, there were twelve. In the following decades, the figures rose from twenty-two (1970s) to forty (1980s) to eighty-eight (1990s), and then tapered somewhat to sixty (2000s). But in the years 2010–2016, not even a complete decade, there were already fifty-nine. Semiautomatic pistols and rifles accounted for most of the mass murders.
75. John Cloud, “The Troubles Life of Jared Loughner,” Time, January 15,2001, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2042358,00.html.
76. Georgina Lloyd, “Chapter 13: The Snuff Movie Murder,” in Murders Unspeakable (1992; repr., London: Robert Hale, 2008), pp. 153–61.
77. Ibid., p. 161.
78. David A Gibb, The Shocking Double Life of Canadian Air Force Colonel Russell Williams (New York: Berkley Books, 2011); Timothy Appleby, A New Kind of Monster: The Secret Life and Shocking True Crime Story of an Officer…and a Murderer (New York: Broadway Books, 2011).
79. Dennis McDougal, Angel of Darkness: The True Story of Randy Kraft and the Most Heinous Murder Spree of the Century (New York: Warner Books, 1991).
80. Murderpedia, s.v. “Dr. Teet Härm,” http://murderpedia.org/male.H/h/harm-teet.htm.
81. Nancy Dillon, “California Chef David Viens Who Ate His Wife's Boiled Corpse Sentenced to 15 Years to Life in Prison,” Daily News, March 22, 2013, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/california-chef-15-years-life-killing-eating-wife-article-1.1296775.
82. Christine Pelisek, “David Viens Murder Trial: Chef Says He Slow-Cooked His Wife's Body,” Daily Beast, September 20, 2012, http://www.thedailybeast.com/david-viens-murder-trial-chef-says-he-slow-cooked-his-wifes-body. ; James Nye, “Revealed: Wife Who Was Murdered and Cooked in a Pot by Her Chef Husband Had Been Saving Up Money as ‘Escape Fund,’” Daily Mail, February 2, 2014, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2550485/How-wife-trying-escape-marriage-weeks-killed-cooked-California-chef.html.
83. “Brazilian Goalkeeper Charged with Murdering Ex-Girlfriend,” Daily Telegraph (London), July 30, 2010.
84. Jonathan Watch, “Outrage after Brazil Football Team Signs Goalkeeper Convicted of Killing Girlfriend,” Guardian, March 13, 2017; Emily Shugerman, “Brazilian Goalkeeper Charged with Torture and Murder of Ex-Girlfriend—‘Mistakes Happen. I'm Not a Bad Guy,’” Independent, March 21, 2017, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bruno-fernandes-de-souza-brazil-goalkeeper-torture-murder-ex-girlfriend-boa-esporte-mother-child-a7641836.html.
85. Kieran Crowley, The Surgeon's Wife: A True Story of Obsession, Rage, and Murder (New York: St. Martin's Paperbacks, 2001).
86. John Glatt, To Have and to Kill: Nurse Melanie McGuire, an Illicit Affair, and the Gruesome Murder of Her Husband (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2008).
87. Camille Kimball, What She Always Wanted: A True Story of Marriage, Greed, and Murder (New York: Berkley Books, 2010).
88. Cliff Linedecker, The Murder of Laci Peterson (Boca Raton, American Media, 2003).
89. Linda Rosencrance, An Act of Murder (New York: Pinnacle Books, 2006).
90. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977).
91. Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (New York: Atria Books, 2010).
92. Jean Twenge, Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before, rev. and updated ed. (New York: Atria Books, 2014).
93. Justin Heckert, “A Positive Life: A Son Survived Being Injected with HIV by His Father,” Gentleman's Quarterly, April 28, 2016, http://www.gq.com/story/son-survives-hiv-injected-by-father-brian-stewart.
94. Ian Lovett and Adam Nagourney, “Photos Led to Arrest in Abuse of Pupils,” New York Times, January 31, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/education/former-teacher-61-arrested-in-california-on-abuse-charges.html.
95. Victoria Kim and Howard Blume, “L.A. Unified Alerted to Possible Sexual Misconduct by Berndt in 1983,” Los Angeles Times, September 26, 2014.
96. Paul Thompson, “Father ‘Decapitated and Dismembered Cerebral Palsy Son, 7, with a Meat Cleaver and Left His Head at Side of Road,’” August 16, 2011, Daily Mail, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2026318/Jeremiah-Lee-Wright-decapitated-cerebral-palsy-son-Jori-Lirette-7-meat-cleaver.html. ; “Father ‘Who Hacked His Disabled Son's Head Off and Left It by the Road for His Mom to See’ Ruled Insane and Found NOT Guilty of Murder,” Daily Mail, February 14, 2014, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2559816/Father-hacked-disabled-sons-head-left-road-mom-ruled-insane-not-guilty-murder.html.
97. John E. Douglas, Journey into Darkness (New York: Pocket Books, 2010).
98. Michael Benson, Murder in Connecticut: The Shocking Crime That Destroyed a Family and United a Community (Guilford, CT: Lyons, 2008).
99. Shama Alexander, Nutcracker: Money, Madness, and Murder; A Family Album (New York: Dell Books, 1983).
100. Jonathan Coleman, At Mother's Request: A True Story of Money, Murder, and Betrayal (New York: Athenaeum, 1985).
101. Alexander, Nutcracker, pp. 326–27.
102. Ibid., p. 327.
103. Wesley Clarkson, Whatever Mother Says (New York: St. Martin's Paperbacks, 1995).
104. Keith Laidler, Ranavalona: Female Caligula—the Mad Queen of Madagascar (Chichester, West Sussex, England: John Wiley & Sons, 2005).
105. Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).
106. Cf. the Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Sanhedrin, folio 57a; three main crimes punishable by death are Giluy Arayot, s'phikut haDam, and birkat haShem—equating, respectively, with incest, murder (“spilling of blood”), and blasphemy.
107. Roger Scruton, On Human Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), p. 134.
108. Ibid., p. 135.
109. Ibid., p. 137.
110. Ibid.
111. Hazelwood and Michaud, Dark Dreams, p. 88.
112. Wikipedia, s.v. “Rape in English Law,” last modified May 15, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_English_law.
113. Ecclesiastes 1:9.
114. See chap. 3, p. 111.
115. Thomas H. Cook, Early Graves: The Shocking True Story of the Youngest Woman Sentenced to Death (New York: Dutton, 1990).
116. Chris Berry-Dee, Monster: My True Story (London: John Blake, 2004).
117. “An Updated Definition of Rape,” Department of Justice Archives, January 6, 2012, https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/blog/updated-definition-rape.
118. David Lohr, “Amanda Johnson, Valerie Bartkey Allegedly Sexually Assaulted High School Student with Pliers,” Huffington Post, February 2, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/02/valerie-bartkey-amanda-johnson_n_1248510.html; Keith Edwards, “Woman Gets Probation in Bizarre Sexual Assault Case,” WQOW, July 27, 2012, http://www.wqow.com/story/19132589/woman-gets-probation-in-bizarre-sexual-assault-case.
119. Brett Bodner, “Ohio Woman Charged with Raping, Robbing, Taxi Driver Who Was Held at Knifepoint by Accomplice,” Daily News, April 10, 2017, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/ohio-woman-charged-raping-robbing-taxi-driver-article-1.3039994.
120. Scruton, On Human Nature, p. 55.
121. À propos war, it is worth recalling that President Wilson spoke of the events of 1914–1918 as a “war to end all wars.” This was a tragic error rendered all the more fanciful for being uttered by a former professor of history. There hasn't been a year since (or before) 1918 during which the world has not witnessed a war.
122. It is noteworthy in this regard that the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—was a cornerstone of Jesus's teaching (Matthew 7:12). Akin to that was his message: “Love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matthew 19:19). The sentiment embodied in the Golden Rule was espoused also by Confucius several centuries earlier, and the message is also implicit in the Old Testament. Jesus spoke of the rule as summarizing what was already in the laws of Moses and in the teaching of the Old Testament prophets. We meet it again in the categorical imperative of Immanuel Kant in his 1785 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, where it stated that one should treat others as one wishes to be treated (or, in the negative: “Do not impose on others what you do not wish for yourself”). Even in wartime, one's actions can be proper and just, rather than evil—as noted in Lord Krishna's advice to the warrior Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita (chap. 2, verse 45).