4

Reaching a Verdict

An injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, in a letter to his son

I never imagined that someone I know personally would have their life end in what was some kind of violent snap, but in the course of writing this book, the unthinkable happened.

This story does not begin, as the news stories did, with the horrible event itself; it begins two years earlier in West Virginia, at a spectacular place called Seneca Rocks. Seneca Rocks is a thin fin of jagged rock splotched with gray and white, jutting up almost a thousand feet in the air like an enormous concrete wall still under construction. In fact, the fin of rock is the hardened core of the green mountain ridge that runs for miles north to south. Over eons the soil at this spot eroded, leaving this hardened skeleton exposed. Seneca Rocks is a popular place for rock climbing, because there is no other way to reach the summit than by technical ascent up the sheer vertical wall. To stand on the summit of Seneca Rocks, at places no wider than a sidewalk but dropping down on both sides for hundreds of feet, the sensation is a spectacular, dizzying mix of exposure, beauty, triumph, and awe. The remains of what must have been a wild torrent in an early geological period now flows as knee-deep Roy Gap Run, trickling in the shade between a cleavage that breaks the wall into two parts. Roy Gap Run flows into the headwaters of the Potomac River, which runs for hundreds of miles to empty into the Atlantic Ocean. Most of the wall extends to the north of Roy Gap; the southern fragment stands like a partial Roman ruin, and is called the Southern Pillar. This is where two rock climbers, David and Kaine, were attempting their ascent. Suddenly something went terribly wrong.

“I heard the guy hit the tree as he flew through the air,” recalled Brendan, a rock-climbing guide. “I looked right over and saw him fall the rest of the way.” Brendan was teaching a climbing course at the Southern Pillar. The climber, Kaine, had just reached the top of a difficult climb called Judgment Seat before falling forty feet to the ground.

The sickening boom reflected off stone by the strange acoustics of mountains and reached climbers far across Roy Gap Run climbing on the northern face. “Is everybody all right?” someone called.

“We’re gonna have to evac! We need a litter!” Brendan yelled.

“It’s terrible,” he said recalling the sound and sight of a climber falling to the ground. “I thought the worst.”

Brendan ran to the victim. When he reached the fallen climber, the man was struggling to stand up. He was badly injured about the face and eyes; his fractured wrist bone was nearly puncturing the skin.

“We were worried about there being a spinal injury, but you know he had so much adrenaline going he believed he could walk out of there.”

Within minutes climbers from Seneca Rocks Mountain Guides in town, only a short jog down the mountain, grabbed a metal stretcher (or litter) designed for extracting injured climbers from the mountain. The litter is kept out in front of the shop at all times for anyone to use in an emergency. Climbing instructors spontaneously marshaled students from Garrett Community College who were taking a class at the shop to form a rescue team.

“We do a lot of simulations with them, but this was full-on,” Brendan said of calling on the students to help.

“By the time I got there they already had Kaine on the litter,” said Jennie, another climbing guide responding to the accident.

“Dave was sitting on Roy Gap Road just looking horrible—just looking at the ground,” she said. Disheveled-looking twenty-nine-year-old David DiPaolo was the partner of the climber who had just fallen.

As Jennie scrambled quickly past Dave up the steep slope, she could see them lowering Kaine down in the litter on a rope anchored to the same tree that had broken his fall. Six climbers manned the litter, three on each side, as they negotiated it gingerly down the loose rocky slope to gravel-topped Roy Gap Road, where the ambulance would be waiting.

“It wasn’t a climbing accident. It was a lowering accident,” Brendan explained.

Climbers typically ascend a rock in small teams. Two climbers tie themselves together with a rope 50 to 70 meters long. The lead climber ascends the rock, trailing the rope behind, and the second climber, the “belayer,” threads the rope through a friction device attached securely to his harness so that he can catch his partner should he fall. As the climber ascends, he clips his rope through temporary anchor points he wedges periodically into small cracks in the rock. These are not used to assist his ascent; these points, called “protection,” will catch him should he fall. The belayer pays out his end of the rope through the friction device to help him handle the enormous forces of a falling climber. The belayer makes a solemn compact with his climbing partner never to release his hand from the safety rope, not even for a second.

Rather than climb all the way to the summit of a mountain, for practice many climbers will climb only the first part of a climb (half a rope length, or “pitch”), and return back to the ground—especially if the segment is a difficult climb. In this way climbers challenge themselves and improve their skills by climbing the hardest pitch rather than simply following a multi-pitch route to reach the summit. This is what Kaine and David were doing.

“He had climbed it without falling,” Brendan recalled of watching Kaine on the difficult route next to him as he taught his climbing course. “Very competent climber.”

Kaine had reached a narrow ledge and he clipped the rope from his harness through the eyes of stainless-steel bolts drilled into the rock to provide the anchor point to lower him back to the ground.

“Ready to lower!” Kaine yelled, giving the standard command for his belayer, Dave, to lower him back to the ground suspended from his rope as it passed through the anchor. Facing the rock, he transferred his full weight onto the rope and stepped back into the air. Dave, on the ground below, began paying out his end of the rope, watching his partner carefully as he lowered him slowly. The rope warmed his palm as it slid smoothly through his clenched fist. When Kaine was about forty feet from the ground, Dave suddenly felt the rope vanish from his grip. The end of the rope had reached his friction device and snapped through it in a flash. Dave watched helplessly as his end of the rope ripped away into the air like a cracked whip and Kaine’s arms and legs flailed in the air as he plummeted backward to the ground.

The rope was not long enough to lower Kaine all the way back down. The distance from the ground to the belay anchor on Judgment Seat was farther than half its length. Even so, this was an accident that should never have happened.

“You always want to have a closed system [when] climbing. So you would have each climber tied into each end of the rope, or you would at least put a knot in each end so the knot would jam up against the belay device and not go through it,” Brendan explained.

David had not tied into his end of the rope.

Jennie remembers seeing Dave sitting on Roy Gap Road as she and the others charged up the slope with the litter. “When I got to the scene Dave was sitting looking very depressed,” she said. She offered to take Dave back to town. “It was one of the most awkward car rides I’ve ever had,” she said. “You know, we were trying to stay cheerful and stuff, but Dave definitely wasn’t trying to be cheerful. He felt horrible and I think he was silent the whole time.”

“You know, accidents happen. That’s how you learn,” she recalls telling him, trying to relieve his guilt as he sat silently in the backseat on the drive back to town. “But he felt horrible.”

Dave didn’t accompany his partner to the hospital either. The two didn’t really know each other. In fact, Dave, who is a strong climber, had no regular partner at Seneca Rocks. He roamed the two climbing shops in town looking for anyone to climb with him. That day, it had been Kaine, someone he’d apparently just met. The consequences of that meeting would utterly consume Dave and dramatically change the course of his life.

It was not until a year later that the guide, Jennie, would see Dave at Seneca again. “He finally came up to me and he stuck out his hand and said ‘Do you remember me, I’m that guy who dropped that guy at the Southern Pillar?’”

“I just said, ‘Yeah I remember,’ and I tried to make light of the situation, but that’s definitely how he identified himself: as the guy who dropped his partner.”

“From then on he was known as Carderock Dave—he dropped his partner. He’s so incompetent. How could he do such a horrible thing? What an idiot.”

Carderock is the name of a climbing spot in Maryland, where Dave had learned to climb from his mentor, Geoff Farrar.

Carderock

David had been introduced to climbing as a kid at the popular climbing area near Washington, DC, called Carderock, an outcropping of rugged cliffs carved away by the Potomac River. Geoffrey Farrar, a lanky senior, his hair the color of snow on slate and wearing glasses with large lenses long out of style, had spent decades climbing at the popular suburban climbing spot and he made sure everyone knew it. He knew every route, every feature of the rock, and the correct sequence of moves to execute each climb.

“If you spent much of any time at Carderock, you were bound to at least hear Geoff’s booming voice, typically giving advice,” a climber said tactfully of him.

Among the climbing community he was known as Carderock Geoff, because he seemed to always be there dispensing unsolicited advice and political opinions. He struck up fervent monologue-loud conversations with everyone he encountered.

“Talked until blood shot out of your eyes,” another climber said.

Nearly two decades ago, Geoff had taken Dave under his wing at the age of eleven and taught him to climb. Over the years Dave came to be known as Carderock Dave. Geoff called him Little Dave, as did others. Many, however, had less favorable nicknames for him, such as Stoner Dave.

“He always seemed more than a bit unusual—not violent per se, but definitely somewhat manic and certainly reckless. It was difficult to carry on a coherent conversation with him, and I thought he was going to kill himself the way he placed pro[tection] and climbed. I always felt the need to watch my gear closely when he was around,” a climber recalled.

Geoff favored climbing without a rope, and he often did so right through other parties of climbers ascending under belay. When done a safe distance from the ground, ropeless climbing, called bouldering, is a challenging workout that quickly builds climbing muscle and skill. Those who practice the sport set up intricate traverses, moving laterally along the face of the rock just above the ground, that require awkward body positions, delicate balance, and a very strong grip. Some, however, begin to climb higher than is safe to do without a rope. Geoff would do this habitually. For many, it was difficult to see it as anything other than Geoff showing off. Such climbing without a rope is called free soloing, and it is extremely dangerous. A fall means certain injury or death. Geoff challenged David to do as he did, and soon Dave was free soloing some of the most difficult routes at Carderock that very few climbers could ascend without falling.

—

At age thirty-one, two years after dropping Kaine at Seneca Rocks, Dave went with Geoff for a climb at Carderock. It was one of those glorious breaks in winter when the frigid temperatures spike briefly up into the 50s. The next day, Sunday, there would be cold rain. The brief window of opportunity drew a few die-hard climbers to escape cabin fever three days after Christmas 2013. The air temperature on this cloudy day was reasonable, but the stone was cold, sucking warmth from bare fingers.

Another member of the Carderock family, John Gregory, arrived to climb that day too. Known as the Mayor of Carderock after thirty-five years of climbing at the site, he was often around. Fellow climbers found him outgoing while at the same time soft-spoken. John was never obtrusive, as many found Geoff to be. John wouldn’t criticize or boast, but he was always available to help anyone who had any questions. John knew the rocks and all the history and gossip surrounding them. He wrote the official climbing guide to the region.

Geoff and David met in the parking lot about noon on that glorious winter day, but an argument ensued. John found Geoff distraught when he encountered him on the trail between the parking lot and the rock. “Well, I’ve been a friend to Dave for twenty years, but I guess it’s over now,” Geoff told John. The two parted to climb different segments of the cliff, John setting up downriver. John clipped the midpoint of his rope to an anchor at the edge of the cliff and tossed the two free stands over the precipice. Then he hiked down the same path Geoff would have taken to the base of the cliff to tie in and begin his climb. Rounding the bend he found his friend crumpled unconscious on the ground, bleeding profusely from his head.

John Gregory wrote the first account of the fatal accident, which was posted on the Potomac Mountain Club forum on December 29, 2013.

Geoff Farrar, AKA Carderock Geoff, was seriously injured falling from the traverse near Cripple’s crack at Carderock this afternoon. He hit his head on a sharp rock and the edge of a railroad tie, sustaining head injuries including a fractured skull and jaw. NPS [National Park Service] airlifted him out from the base of the cliff to suburban hospital. He is in the ICU, his wife is coming from WVA.

Geoff died later that day at the hospital. News of the accident swept through the climbing community via Facebook and online climbing forums. Many climbers, although stunned and saddened, were not surprised to hear the tragic news. Free solo climbing is a daredevil death-defying act. A local climbing gym posted an online note about the accident, which it twisted into a crass promotional pitch to climb in its gym with padded floors because that was far safer than risking one’s life climbing outside on rock.

But the story that spread like wildfire over the Internet never made the newspapers. This was odd, considering that the popular recreational park was well known to most residents of the Washington, DC, area, and that this was a sensational accident involving the death of a local climbing legend.

The reason for the silence was a bloody claw hammer reportedly found next to the body. The autopsy showed that the injuries were inconsistent with those from a fall. Geoff’s skull and jawbone had been crushed by the hammer.

From The Washington Post: “Pictures that have surfaced of DiPaolo show long scraggly hair and rough beard. His dress style could be described as grunge, and he is known for wearing mismatched shoes.”

Several days later, police traced a call that David had placed from a pay phone at a gas station in upstate New York near his father’s home. A New York state trooper pulled David over near Glens Falls, and took him to the police station.

“I’m sorry this happened. I didn’t want it to happen. I didn’t know it was going to happen,” David DiPaolo told police in a written statement.

—

My last memory of Geoff was about a month before his death.

As I coiled my rope at the end of the day, he was shouting unsolicited beta (climbing advice) to a climber as she tackled a difficult boulder problem, telling her loudly that she was doing it all wrong. Geoff yapped away like a neighbor’s annoying barking dog. His beta was solid, but moves ideal for a six-foot man were useless to a five-foot woman. When she triumphed, he congratulated her genuinely. “I’ve never seen anyone do it that way.”

That was Geoff. He meant well. He did enliven the place and help many climbers new to the rock. He was a character. A nice guy. David was too, and although I knew him less well, I am familiar with his difficult backstory.

Tom Cecil, rock climber and owner of Seneca Rocks Mountain Guides, says about Dave: “I think he kinda looked up to me, as I think he did all climbers who were known.” Cecil had established several of the popular climbs at Seneca Rocks, making numerous first ascents there and around the world. “Kind of a hero-worship thing—I’ll bet he really admired and respected Geoff.

“I’ve always had a soft spot for that type—to a point,” he said, meaning people who’d fallen on hard times. “The last time I saw him he looked very bad. I actually considered offering him some odd jobs to try to help him out, but he was just too fucked-up-looking and -acting,” Cecil said, referring to David’s appearance and druggie manner. While shabby dress and idiosyncratic personalities are a part of the climbing scene, they are not acceptable in a professional climbing business.

Tom Cecil recalled the accident two years earlier, when Dave had dropped his partner at Seneca Rocks.

“The accident was only partially his fault. The guy he was climbing with had cut his own rope the day before [to remove a dangerously frayed portion], but he did not tell Dave. They should have tied knots, but we all make mistakes,” Cecil observed.

Another climber said of Dave, “I just thought he was sort of a burnout, that he had done too many drugs and possibly still did.”

The climber continued, “I certainly never saw him as someone who would hurt anybody else. We always had a standoffish or eerie feel about him, but only in the sense that we were judging him because of his appearance and his inability to complete a sentence.”

David DiPaolo was charged with voluntary manslaughter committed in self-defense.

David admitted to police that he and Geoff had had an argument at Carderock, and the next thing he knew Geoff was choking him. He and Geoff fell to the ground struggling. As David began to lose consciousness, he found a claw hammer on the ground and he clubbed Geoff with it until he let go. David provided a written statement insisting that Geoff had his hands around his neck during the entire struggle.

“I’m sorry this happened. I didn’t want it to happen. I didn’t know it was going to happen.”

—

The Saturday morning right after the news of Geoff’s death was published I went to Carderock. A deep sadness permeated the place. No one was there. Every crevice in that lizard-green-gray rock flashes a brief memory clip. Birthday parties with kids overcoming their fears on the rope, persevering on slick rock joyfully despite the rain. Sacred spots on the mud path at the base of climbs where friends once lay injured after falls. The psychic scars now healed like the bones that were broken.

When I first heard Geoff had died from a fall I was one of those who was not surprised. His free soloing was something I could not abide. For most people, climbing is about managing risk, not inviting it. But when we found out that his death was not from a fall, it was a different kind of emotional weight. A pall hung over the rocks on that cold silent morning in January. Whether manslaughter or murder, these two had been friends. It is a message that sinks in slowly.

A day hiker walked past and I thought how much harder this is for climbers. In all the cracks and bumps we see something others do not—hands gripping the stone now gone.

Newspapers reported that the police were investigating the possibility that Geoff suddenly attacked David during an argument and tried to strangle him to death. It is true that Geoff berated David for dropping his partner at Seneca Rocks. Geoff’s incessant nagging and badmouthing of David to other climbers and even to strangers went on unrelentingly. “You know David? He dropped his partner at Seneca!”

David dropped his partner! That critical accusation spilled out loudly and automatically as if it were a hot news bulletin. Even two years after the accident, Geoff’s boisterous monologues would boil up and scold David with disdain.

“Geoff was obnoxious,” a climbing instructor admitted soon after Geoff’s death, trying to puzzle out how this killing could have occurred.

The climber recalled seeing Geoff about a month before his death. “We had some students at the cliff [Carderock] and he came up and was just bouldering and soloing.

“He wasn’t there with anybody and he was just talking. He was talking shit. You know, he was just trash-talking. He trash-talked.”

“Do you know Dave?” Geoff had asked her, and he described Dave’s appearance.

“Yeah I know Dave,” she’d told him.

He said, “Yeah, do you know he dropped somebody?”

This, again, was nearly two years after the accident at Seneca Rocks.

She said, “And I was like, Yeah, I know he dropped somebody. Then he told me that a week before he did the same thing at Great Falls. I have no idea whether or not that’s true.”

She continued, “I just saw him as background noise—just clutter. I call it background noise because I could tune it out, but he was very much in your face.”

Did she see Geoff as a strangler? I asked her.

“No. I don’t believe that that happened. I do believe they were in a heated argument, in a yelling battle. I could see that they could get in a pretty heated verbal argument, but I don’t see Geoff strangling him, and I also don’t see this young strong Dave being helpless against Geoff.”

On the other hand, it is difficult to understand how David could bludgeon his mentor to death.

“I was very surprised to hear that he hurt somebody or that he killed somebody,” Jennie from the Kaine evac team said of Dave:

He was certainly never mean to anybody. You know, people just saw him as sort of a loser. I didn’t think he was harmful. I just thought he was a burnout, a deadbeat; he just did too many drugs. But I really never felt threatened by him or anything. He was actually very soft-spoken. He was always just looking to have a conversation. He wasn’t in your face like Geoff could be in your face. He was just into rock climbing and that was always what he would talk about—rock climbing.

I never felt threatened by him but I never sought him out either. I would see him in town and walk the other way. We never thought he would steal from us or hurt anybody, but at the same time we didn’t want to be associated with him.

I’m not surprised to hear that he ran. You know, I think he’s . . . I hope it wasn’t premeditated in any way, and I do genuinely believe that he didn’t go to Carderock thinking he was going to kill Geoff, but I could easily see him just freaking out not knowing what to do.

He really does seem like the perfect murderer just by his appearance. It is going to be hard for anybody to forgive him in any way because of his appearance and stuff [if it was a case of self-defense].

But Geoff was not violent either. “Never saw him get in [physical] disputes. I certainly never had any altercations with him,” Jennie said.

Another climber related how he was devastated after a climbing accident in which his best friend fell thirty-five feet to the ground. He was seriously injured and had to be evacuated by helicopter to the hospital. “It took me years to get over it,” he said. Although he was not at fault—the rock had fractured under his partner’s weight—the climber blamed himself. “I felt responsible,” he said. “If someone had harangued me like [Geoff] did David, I never would have gotten over it. It would have destroyed me.

“Geoff was like a dog with a bone,” he explained. “Relentless. He’d never let go. He pushed his opinions on people.”

—

On December 28, 2013, a smoldering argument between friends seems to have reached a flash point and exploded. Whatever happened that day at Carderock, this tragedy was clearly the result of someone snapping in rage. Different scenarios for what triggered the violence are consistent with what is reported to have transpired. David may have acted in self-defense as he claims and consistent with the police charge of manslaughter rather than murder. A manslaughter charge arises in this case because David’s act of self-defense did result in a person’s death, and the situation is compounded by questions as to whether such deadly violence was necessary for David to defend himself against Geoff. If this is what happened, then Geoff would have had to suddenly snap in rage and find himself with his hands clenched around his young protégé’s throat, strangling him. By all accounts Geoff was not considered violent, but he was known to provoke angry arguments routinely that could have escalated to a point where he could have conceivably snapped violently. But if that is what happened, what could have triggered such rage in Geoff?

Another scenario is that David became enraged and brutally attacked his mentor, killing him. This would be murder, not manslaughter. Some have speculated that authorities may have brought manslaughter charges against David because the high standard of proof for a murder conviction may have been difficult to meet with the evidence at hand. Remembering the brutal killings in the OJ Simpson trial, one can perhaps understand a prosecutor opting to settle for a plea bargain and having the attacker jailed for fifteen years for voluntary manslaughter rather than risk a murderer going free. OJ Simpson was found not guilty in a criminal trial where the standard of proof is high, despite incriminating DNA and mounds of physical evidence implicating him, but he was convicted of the killings in a civil trial. If the Carderock killing was a case of murder committed in rage, what could have caused David to snap and embark on a savage homicidal attack against Geoff, his lifelong mentor, using a claw hammer to kill him?

The trial has not yet taken place, so we have no verdict. It is crucial to maintain the presumption of innocence for all parties until the legal process completes its course. While we wait, let’s consider how neuroscience and the LIFEMORTS triggers might provide some understanding of this horrible and perplexing death resulting from one or two friends snapping in rage. If, as David states, he was being choked by Geoff, his violent reaction makes sense. Being throttled would trip the Life-or-limb trigger to fight for your survival. Without air filling David’s lungs or blood flowing to his brain, his own death was only minutes away.

If this is what occurred, David could be viewed as the unfortunate Lennie in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, a tale that was partly inspired by a pitchfork rage murder the author had witnessed. Lennie unintentionally killed someone and then faced a lynch mob. But to make the analogy fit, it would have been Lennie’s protector and mentor, George, who would have become the inadvertent victim, not a flirtatious woman he’d just met. If Geoff died at the hands of Dave in self-defense, what happened at Carderock is even more tragic than Steinbeck’s tale.

Even in self-defense, though, was such savage lethal force—crushing Geoff’s skull repeatedly with a hammer—necessary? It seems difficult to accept that a very fit thirty-one-year-old man could not break away from a sixty-nine-year-old without resorting to such a brutal killing. The thing to understand is how this all plays out rapidly in the brain during a violent encounter, rather than judging afterward what might have been the ideal reaction. One does not have the luxury of hindsight where precious fractions of seconds are spent in deliberation. A response in a life-and-death battle has to be instantaneous.

If the situation had reached what was indeed a life-or-death struggle, unlimited violence to kill the attacker—no matter how savagely—takes over. Survival instinct kicks in. Recalling my physiological response in Barcelona, I can vividly recall the superhuman surge of power that infused my body in a flash with adrenaline-fueled strength as I consciously fought with all my will not to pick up the hoodlum squaring off against me, hoist him over my shoulders, and hurl him into his comrades like a battering ram to send them all tumbling down the subway steps. That internal struggle was my frontal lobes calculating furiously and suppressing the deadly violence that was on the verge of being released by defense circuits deep in my brain. Once a situation explodes into a fight for survival, the body is instantly and fully committed to fight to the death if necessary to kill the attacker with any means available. This potentially deadly action is a biological imperative. It is the consequence of the harsh evolutionary logic of survival hardwired into our being. There is little or no choice when a violent battle reaches this point, because your opponent’s brain has also engaged these same automated circuits of violence with the intention to kill you to preserve his own life. Your brain “knows” that. At a level beneath the realm of conscious deliberation—this is the last-ditch equivalent of the unthinkable intercontinental “nuclear response” to threats our nation has faced, or imagined.

But this brain wiring means that nearly all violent struggles will trip the Life-or-limb trigger at some point in a violent altercation, just as Ray Young, the sixty-seven-year-old man who was convicted of knifing a stranger who he thought had cut in line at the post office, perceived. “I was defending myself . . .” Our legal system recognizes the biological imperative for self-defense by absolving a person from fault if the homicide is truly the result of necessary self-defense in an unprovoked attack. But self-defense means that the Life-or-limb trigger must be what unleashed the deadly violence, rather than becoming tripped at some point during the altercation, because the Life-or-limb trigger will always get tripped in both parties in a violent struggle. If the hammer hadn’t been lying there, as reported, within Dave’s easy reach during his struggle with Geoff, the episode might have had a very different outcome.

“What in blazes was the purpose of a claw hammer at Carderock?” one climber wondered.

Climbers once used hammers to drive pitons into cracks for protection, but pitons are almost never used anymore. A climbing hammer is much different from a hammer you would find at a hardware store, and pitons are never used at Carderock. A claw hammer might have been lying there being used “to replace wood at the base of something,” another climber speculated, discussing the homicide online.

Facts point to the Insult trigger regardless of which person instigated the deadly violence. David’s failures in life—in dropping his climbing partner and his recklessness climbing in general, in his slovenly personal appearance and dysfunctional social manner, in not achieving independence and success in life by the age of thirty-one—could all have been taken as an insult by Geoff after twenty years of mentoring him like a son. If David was a failure, then so was Geoff. Did the strain of the persistent and growing insults, of his protégé David becoming the object of his derision, a kind of pariah of the climbing community, push Geoff to rage? On that Saturday afternoon, sparked by some heated argument, did a breaking point trigger Geoff’s rage attack against Dave?

We don’t know for sure, and it just as easily could have gone the other way. There is no question that David was the object of repeated and prolonged public insults by Geoff, especially in the last two years. With the mounting tensions and apparent stresses in David’s life, it is easy to see how if the argument in the parking lot had involved a direct insult to Dave, the mounting pressure could have tripped a violent, even murderous, reaction against Geoff.

This case study of violently snapping typifies so many rage attacks, and it illuminates why they always strike us as shocking and often incomprehensible. Human beings are complex, but the essential complexities underlying most rage attacks that we read or hear about in the media are rarely if ever made public. News journalists face impossible challenges. They must gather and synthesize information into an article within hours of the event—finding original sources to interview and sorting through all the information to compose an accurate report of what occurred and why. The feverish broadcasting of news and gossip through blogs and Twitter have only exacerbated the problem, increasing pressure on reporters to work faster while increasing the clutter of false leads and rumors they must sift through that come from amateur reporting over the Internet. To this, add the severe constraints in criminal investigations where sensitive information released to the public about a suspect could sabotage an investigation or undermine a conviction. The Carderock homicide is no different. Except that in this case I unfortunately happen to have some insight to what happened from knowing the people and their background, which is never possible when hearing a news story secondhand. My hope is that by forcing us to look in detail at this tragedy, something of value can come of such senseless loss of life.

—

The few days after David DiPaolo was indicted on federal charges for voluntary manslaughter, I went to Carderock to meet with John Gregory. About five weeks had passed since Geoff’s killing, but there had been no new information in the news since David’s arrest on January 8. As the “mayor” of Carderock, John was eager to speak with me about my research into the triggers of rage. He had much to tell me that would be pertinent, he promised.

A frigid cold snap had left sheets of ice lining both banks of the green Potomac River. Snow still collected in hollows and shadows, but the temperature had spiked and climbers were out this afternoon with the winter sun. I met John on the footpath at the base of the crag. I spotted him from a distance by his neatly cropped full gray beard and mustache, his trademark cap, and his daypack slung over his shoulders.

He took me to where he’d found Geoff, head resting on a railroad tie bordering the outer edge of the trail, his body lying diagonally across the path. He molded the shape of the body with his hands in the air as he evoked the scene. John had been the first to find Geoff. He showed me a shallow hole next to the wooden tie about the size of a volleyball where there had been a rock covered in blood. The police had dug it out and taken it as evidence.

We left the chilling spot and walked back along the trail as John recounted what he had seen that Saturday afternoon.

Describing how he was first on the scene he said, “I couldn’t recognize him. I couldn’t recognize it as being human at first. It had no head, just a purple bloody mass.” Geoff’s head had swollen up massively and John didn’t realize it was him until he recognized his climbing shoes. “I recognize you as human because you have a head and a face. Geoff did not.” Geoff’s skull was crushed; his jaw broken; his eye out of its socket.

John said he realized immediately that it wasn’t a climbing accident, from where the body lay with respect to the climbing route and because the victim had no scrapes or other injuries on his legs and arms that a climber would have suffered in a fall.

“The single most important thing to know is that for both the victim and the perpetrator, the argument in the parking lot was the end of a twenty-year relationship. That changed everything. Geoff said so,” John explained.

“Saturday the twenty-eighth, about one o’clock, I’m meeting my partner here and I’m unloading my gear from the back of my Jeep in the center of the lot. Geoff pulls in and says, ‘Have you seen Dave?’ And he says, ‘Well, he practically got himself punched out yesterday,’” referring to an incident in which Dave got into an altercation with other climbers and made comments so offensive the others nearly came to blows.

Geoff had what a gambler would call a “tell.” He had little tics that he did whenever he was excited or agitated or arguing. He would start to swing his arms like this and rock back and forth on his feet. It’s the damnedest thing.

And he was starting to do that while I’m getting my pack out and telling me, “You know, Dave tried to steal a jacket, and Dave got in an argument,” and on and on and on and it didn’t seem to make much sense.

This goes on for a while and then right across the parking lot there is a silver minivan, and I didn’t realize that that was Dave.

He gets out of the car and he comes over. You know, I didn’t know he was there. He’s alone and as disheveled-looking as usual, if not more; wearing one white shoe and one black shoe; clothes that look like they have come out of a Dumpster.

An argument immediately erupted between Geoff and David. Angry insults were hurled back and forth. One man reportedly challenged the other to a fistfight, but the argument in the parking lot never boiled into anything physical, only yelling insults at each other.

Until the trial concludes we will not know who, if anyone, is criminally responsible for this homicide, but in the meantime we can try to comprehend from a neuroscience perspective alternative scenarios that could have unleashed such unthinkable violence between longtime close friends.

“I mentioned he could be antagonizing and he was. . . . God yes,” John replied to my question of whether Geoff’s penchant for arguing could have fueled the dispute. “If he’d kept his fucking mouth shut we wouldn’t be here! If he’d just kept his fucking mouth shut!” John whines with a deep emotional mixture of anger, regret, and fatalism. “Oh my God. Oh my God! You know? Did you have to do that? Did you have to do that [engage in a yelling verbal argument in the parking lot with Dave]?

“But he would confront people and sometimes provoke people,” he says, releasing his exasperation.

I mentioned to John that every time I saw Geoff he would rag on David, out of nowhere.

“Yes. Out of nowhere!” John agreed.

I asked John if Dave dropping his climbing partner had changed their relationship.

“I think so. I think so. Geoff took it personally, because he was the one who had taught David to climb.

“Geoff did mention [dropping his partner] a number of times. Other people heard him mention it. Geoff was harping on that, and that Dave did not belay very well when he was here. People were getting to the point where they just stopped letting him belay.”

On the other hand, David could provoke altercations, as apparently he did only the day before if Geoff’s accusations about David attempting to steal a jacket were accurate. Many saw Dave as a drug user, reckless climber, and someone to be avoided.

David expressed remorse in his statement to police when he was arrested. The altercation that resulted in homicide is a deep tragedy and a profound loss for everyone involved. Geoff is gone. David is in custody. Friends and family are grappling with the sudden loss and are grief-stricken. It is horrible.

“No one would have thought that what happened there [the argument in the parking lot] would trigger lethal results,” John says in disbelief.

“The first thing I did is look up [at the route from where Geoff had apparently fallen],” John said, coming back to recount his description of the tragic scene.

“When I first see it, I didn’t know it was human,” he reiterates from before. “Then I realize he is breathing very heavily, blood gurgling. I heard my partner behind me say, ‘I’ll go find a phone.’”

John went forward. “His breathing was OK—not great, but OK. He wasn’t going to expire right there. He had a lot of blood, but he was not bleeding to the point that he was going to bleed to death here. At that point I see there are legs—OK, this is a person. Then I looked down and saw his old Mariacher climbing shoes, and I said, ‘Shit! It’s Geoff.’”

John maintains his professional composure, but as he relives the trauma of finding Geoff lying there dying his nose begins to run. His metered sentences are precise, objective, and clinical, but they are punctuated by sharp sniffs to check his running nose.

“At that point I knew who it was.” He called 911 and then fire and rescue dispatchers. “This kid Jimmy comes up and says, ‘I’ll go get his vitals.’ Gives the dispatchers the pulse and respiration. They ask me, ‘Do you need the boats?’ and I said, ‘Yeah give us the boats. You are going to need a Stokes [litter], a backboard, a C collar, and oxygen.’”

The first fireman showed up with all of those things. No paramedic. Everybody looked at that injury and stepped back. They didn’t have a dressing big enough to put around it. A park policeman followed the sirens and got a helicopter. Did the most amazing extraction I’ve ever seen. They swung the cable in, attached it right over the river. That guy was hovering right above the trees. I didn’t get to see too much of it because you had to get down on the ground and literally hold on to everything you had and you were getting pummeled by all the dead tree limbs, and all of that mulch [from the trail] now flying at you at about a hundred miles per hour. I was hiding behind that big rock to get out of the wind. He pulled that thing in there and they were out of there and gone to Suburban [Hospital].

It was a very quick extraction and far as the “golden hour” goes, Geoff had everything going for him. But I remember, you know, very early on, in fact when I was dialing the phone, saying, “Shit. I hope he doesn’t live.” [He sniffs again sharply.] Because this is terrible. This is just terrible. You know, surviving this is not good. It is not the best outcome [sniffs again].

His wife calls on her way to the hospital. They’re asking her, “What are his wishes?” And they say, “Look, his brains have come out of the cracks in the sides of his skull. Things are not going to work out here.”

She said, “Well, let him go.”

[John sniffs sharply again but maintains his composure.] He died at eight o’clock that night. She arrived around nine thirty.

So, you know, that’s uh . . . [long sigh] . . . That’s about the size of it.

It’s a . . .

He looked down, digging his toes into the path. Silence completed the sentence.

At the time of this writing, the public has not yet heard this account. A trial or a conclusion to the legal proceedings through a plea bargain awaits at some future date. Even if John’s witness account comes out among climbers communicating online, it will not reach the papers or news stations. There have been half a dozen murders in the community every day since Geoff’s death. This is old news.

—

A few months after I talked with John Gregory about the violent killing, a remembrance was held for Geoff Farrar at Carderock. Billowing cumulus clouds skated on a stiff warm breeze through a blue sky as spring blossomed at Carderock. The remembrance was held in the parking lot—the same parking lot that had been the scene of the deadly dispute. Geoff’s friends and family came along with many Carderock regulars. Nothing formal had been planned. Introductions and small talk filled time as people gathered.

“Chris went to the hospital with Geoff,” his wife said, pointing out Chris and introducing different people in the small assembly of about twenty-five. Det. Glenn Luppino and his partners from the US Park Police were there to ask “anyone with any information to please come forward.” He passed around his business card.

“He worked twenty-four hours a day to track down Dave,” John Gregory said to the crowd, and gestured toward Detective Luppino.

People took turns recalling snippets of Geoff’s life and then everyone lunched on hot dogs, pork and beans, and potato salad set out on folding tables at curbside under a tree.

Whatever the reason for this homicide within our climbing family, whether legally defensible or criminal, anger and vitriol toward David wells among many of those mourning Geoff’s death.

“If I saw him now, I would kill him if I could,” someone who had climbed with David said.

“That would solve nothing,” someone quietly rebuked.

“I know.”

The case would be submitted to the grand jury that week, and many of those present were going to testify, “To seek justice.”

Suspended in the atmosphere was a heavy feeling of senselessness, emptiness, anger, and sorrow. Mostly it seemed unreal. In the end, with everyone standing around in a circle—all the characters in the drama, including the detective—it felt like a curtain call at the end of a play when the actors stand onstage and the illusion shatters. Villains and victims, they are just people.

After rejecting the manslaughter plea that was offered him, David’s public defender entered a plea of Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity. The plea incited intense disgust among many who knew David and Geoff.

—

Insult is a trigger for violence that extends through all cultures, passing back in time to our earliest ancestors. It originates from violent encounters between social animals, especially males, as they sought to establish dominance. Seen in contrast to all civilized morality and sense of decency today, snapping in violence in response to insult is not tolerated. However, the brain wiring that ignites this intense anger and the commitment to rapidly engage in violence to achieve social dominance is understandable from the perspective of where the human brain originated—in the harsh animal struggle for survival. Human beings, like other highly social creatures, cannot survive outside a social organization. One’s access to resources, which translates into survival, is determined by social dominance. So it was for humans in prehistoric times, battling for dominance over access to the basic necessities of life (food, shelter, reproduction), and so it is today with regard to the same necessities of life, although they are represented more abstractly in our highly evolved and complex society. One’s rank in society ultimately translates into resources and comfort. People will fight for social status within their group. Language is the mechanism of social interaction between humans and used in achieving social rank, making insult a personal challenge to an individual’s dominance and thus a real threat. Why else would you feel a rush of intense anger when another motorist elevates his middle finger toward you?

Reportedly the argument between Geoff and Dave in the parking lot, whatever sparked it, rapidly escalated to challenges between the two men to resolve the dispute in a fistfight. If only the parties involved, or even any bystanders, had been aware of the neuroscience of snapping and the potentially deadly implications of insult, especially when delivered on top of the weight of prolonged stresses pressing on that same LIFEMORTS trigger, Geoff and Dave might be climbing together at Carderock today. Or their twenty-year-old close friendship could have still come to an abrupt end in the parking lot but this horrible killing might never have occurred. Insights into the neuroscience of snapping are only now emerging from new research, so this new perspective is not generally known. My hope is that this will change. I hope that people will come to recognize that we all have the potential for explosive violence as a necessary brain function and that children, especially teens, will be taught in school about this dangerous aspect of our biology. Understanding the biology of snapping in rage is the first step toward controlling it and to preventing such horrors.

Intolerable Insult

Until fairly recently it was considered acceptable to respond violently to insult, to defend one’s honor in a deadly contest. The use of deadly violence in this way was even celebrated, provided that strict rules for the violent resolution were followed, just as it is with animals that butt heads for dominance.

Aaron Burr took deliberate aim and fired first. Alexander Hamilton fell mortally wounded. A dispute between political rivals—US secretary of the Treasury Hamilton, and the sitting vice president Burr—was settled by a duel early in the morning in 1804. Burr walked over to the wounded man and feigned an expression of regret. Then he left the field where the two men had agreed to settle their dispute with pistols. The rest of the day Burr conducted business as usual, tending to real-estate matters. The bullet had penetrated Hamilton’s rib, passed through his liver and diaphragm, and embedded in his second lumbar vertebra.

Mortally wounded, Hamilton was carried to the residence of a friend, William Bayard. “Let her be sent for,” one of the men present said, referring to Hamilton’s wife, “but break the news gently to her and give her hope.”

Mrs. Hamilton and six of their children arrived and were brought into the room where the dying man consoled his wife with his dying breath: “Remember, Eliza, you are a Christian.” Hamilton suffered in great agony, lingering until the next day when he died at two in the afternoon.

Throughout history, dueling has been accepted across cultures and around the world as a manner for settling disputes. The practice extends throughout Europe, South America, North America, and Asia. Mark Twain narrowly avoided a dueling contest with a rival newspaper editor. The seventh president of the United States, Andrew Jackson, fought at least two duels. President Abraham Lincoln, when he was an Illinois state legislator, met to duel with state auditor James Shields, but the two backed down at the last minute. Gunfight duels of the Wild West are legendary: Wild Bill Hickok and Davis Tutt, Doc Holliday and Mike Gordon, along with thousands of others settled their disputes and defended their honor in a formalized deadly contest intended to leave only one man standing. Duels in the seventeenth and eighteenth century in Europe were fought with swords. Regardless of the deadly weapon used, the victor in a duel was not regarded as a murderer but rather as a brave hero, respected for standing up for his honor. The winner of a duel frequently enjoyed increased status; conversely, losing or walking away from a duel decreased it.

It is difficult to accept that we humans, and especially males, are wired to use quick violence to establish dominance, but this is our biological legacy. Our brain developed the reflexes to generate an intolerable sense of anger and rage in response to insult because our brain evolved in an environment where this was vital. Our environment changed radically and very quickly, but the brain today is the same organ it was when our ancestors lived in caves.

Modern society is so unimaginably different from the world our ancestors lived in during the period when the human brain evolved that the brain’s innate capabilities for violence seem incomprehensible. To recognize the situation more clearly, imagine yourself in the wild environment our ancestors inhabited. Imagine that you awake alone in the wilderness. How are you going to find food and water, shelter, and protection from dangers? So removed are we today from the natural environment that the human brain and body evolved to inhabit, being alone in the wilderness now is cause for launching frantic search parties to rescue the individual before they die.

So, imagine you awake and now have a few hours to find something to eat. Humans don’t even have natural “clothing” to survive outdoors. How will you survive alone? The answer will differ somewhat depending on whether you are male or female. Let’s say you manage to catch a squirrel—very unlikely, but for the sake of argument we’ll say that you caught one. Forget about cooking it; you must eat it raw. Just as with other animals, nature provided you with nothing to make fire and no cooking vessels. You have no knife, fork, spoon—nothing. You must skin and gut it with your teeth and fingers. Now the wide variety of specially shaped teeth we have evolved will become evident. They are nature’s equivalent to a Swiss Army knife for survival. Your canines are for grabbing meat to tear flesh, incisors for cutting, molars for grinding and mashing. You must succeed at this every few hours to obtain enough food and water every day to survive.

In place of tooth and claw, nature has given humans incomparable intelligence to fashion tools for survival, but individual intelligence is not sufficient. It is the ability of the human brain to share individual knowledge with other members of the species through language that enables our species to flourish. Would you alone be able to invent how to make fire, to tan leather, or to make pottery? And in the centuries ahead, could every human independently invent algebra or make an iPhone? Human knowledge—as a society—grows exponentially like compound interest, building upon all the accumulated intellectual wealth of other minds in times past. Isolated from society, a big brain is like a microprocessor without a circuit board.

Now imagine in prehistoric times if you are seven months pregnant; how would you survive in nature alone? Imagine you are a male and your wife is nursing a newborn and tending a toddler; how would your roles have to differ by sex? If you were a man, your job would be to kill a woolly mammoth with a sharp stick. That takes a certain amount of fortitude, bravery, bodily strength, reflexes, and brain circuitry to enable you to approach dangers and to work with other men to bring down such dangerous prey for food. You, man or woman, need to become a part of a mutually interdependent society to survive.

These imperatives are what directed the specialization of the human brain and body. This is what made our brains what they are today. Just as we may not appreciate our Swiss Army knife dentition in a world of tender and nicely prepared cooked food, it is easy to overlook that large portions of our brain are devoted to threat detection, social interaction, and rapid physical response to danger. The imperative of cooperation for survival is what made male and female roles different and modified the brains and bodies of men and women somewhat differently for maximal success for their distinct roles in the wilderness. Human survival in the wild meant the formation and protection of family and tribe and an adherence to strict rules of conduct and social interaction. None of these imperatives have changed. Viewed from this perspective, the automated LIFEMORTS triggers of rage, which seem perplexing and disconcerting at first, are understandable as vital neural circuitry.

Insane

Do you believe in the insanity defense? It sounds so simple, even self-explanatory. But it is most definitely not.

A man on trial for murder testified that he heard voices. He imagined his girlfriend sucking his blood. He thought she was a devil. “If this devil is not dying, I would be dying,” he told the court, explaining his mind-set at the time of the grisly murder.

“If a person was not of right mind,” the man’s defense attorney, David Martella, argued in court, “they should not be held criminally responsible.” (The legal term “not criminally responsible” is commonly known as the insanity defense.)

The killer testified that he must have blacked out. All he remembers is finding himself sitting on his girlfriend’s body with a bloody knife in his hand. He does not remember stabbing her at all.

No one questions the fact that he did slay his girlfriend with a knife in her own bedroom. Barry Kin Lui says that he was sleeping on the floor in a storage room in his home. To be precise, Lui was no longer the legal owner of the property. He had transferred the deed of his house to his girlfriend a year after their relationship began. His girlfriend, Lan Mu Do, kept barging into the storage room that fateful night, flipping on the lights every half hour to argue with him. The lack of sleep and stress from constant arguing caused the sixty-three-year-old man to hallucinate, Attorney Martella explained.

He must have hallucinated that he was stabbing “a Dracula,” the defense contended in arguing that Barry Kin Lui should not be found criminally responsible for the savage killing.

No one claims the killer had a history of mental illness. Such a history, however, is not necessarily required for the insanity defense. “What matters is the person’s state of mind at the time—temporary insanity,” says University of Alaska psychologist Bruno Kappes, an expert on the insanity defense.

County prosecutors, however, said that Lui did not appear to be emerging from a blackout at the time of the murder. Hearing his mother’s bloodcurdling screams her son rushed into the bedroom and found Lui sitting on his mother.

“Call 911,” Lui told Do’s son. “I’ve killed your mother.”

This seems to prosecutors to be a rather lucid assessment of what had just transpired, and to whom.

Lui contends that he began to suffer a mental breakdown after Do blackmailed him into signing over the deed for his house to her. Lui told the jury that his girlfriend had threatened to tell authorities that in exchange for $35,000, he had entered into a fake marriage with another woman who needed a green card. The trial will determine whether Lui should be confined to a mental institution or sent to prison for murder.

Bruno Kappes has served as an expert forensic psychology witness in a wide range of court cases. According to Kappes, the insanity defense is highly ambiguous and confusing. In fact, there is no uniform insanity defense across the United States; it varies greatly among different states. The following range of insanity-defense verdicts is available in different states:

Guilty but Insane

Guilty but Mentally Ill

Acquitted by Reason of Insanity

Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity

Not Guilty by Reason of Mental Disease

Each of these verdicts is quite different. When you answered the question at the beginning of this section, which of these were you thinking of? Were you thinking that a person committing a homicide was insane if he could not distinguish right from wrong? This is the McNaughton definition of insanity, but that is not the only way the insanity defense is viewed. According to the Durham rule used in other states, the insanity defense can only be applied in cases of mental illness. Other states accept “irresistible impulse” as an insanity defense. (Would that define snapping in some instances?) The American Law Institute requires both the conditions of the McNaughton rule (knowing right from wrong) and that irresistible impulse occurs at the time of the crime.

After the Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984, the burden of proof moved to the defense to provide clear and convincing evidence supporting an insanity plea. This act was put into place in response to public outrage after John Hinckley Jr. was acquitted for the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan with an insanity defense. This change in law makes it significantly more difficult to obtain a verdict of Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity, because the government is no longer required to prove that the defendant was sane at the time of a murder beyond a reasonable doubt. Furthermore, expert witnesses for either side were now prohibited from testifying directly as to whether the defendant was legally sane or not. “Meaning, you cannot in court say that, in my opinion, the person is sane or insane,” Kappes explains from his perspective as an expert witness. “Because that’s not our language; we talk mental illness. We don’t talk about insanity—that’s a legal term.”

And because the legal definition of insanity is not fixed or uniform, mental experts are placed on the stand to speak in favor of the defense or the prosecution, but neither testimony has any ultimate legal certainty. The jurors simply listen to the opposing opinions and do what they think is best.

Four states have no insanity defense at all: Montana, Idaho, Utah, and Kansas. These same four states support the death penalty. Twenty states use the “Guilty but Mentally Ill” defense.

The insanity defense as presently defined and practiced, says Kappes, is a tragedy. No verdict or definition seems acceptable to everyone, because the insanity defense stretches between two opposing objectives: to provide justice for criminal acts, which is essential to maintain social order, but also to show compassion for the ill. The interface between psychology and the legal system has little overlap to help unite these competing objectives of justice and compassion. Psychology is motivated to provide treatment, understanding cause and effect, assisting the patient in recovery. The role of the legal system is to assign responsibility and to assist the court in making decisions regarding punishment to maintain social order.

Regardless of the various definitions for the “insanity defense,” Kappes believes that jurors, who are the ones required to make this difficult judgment, are ill equipped to do so. According to Kappes, 67 percent of jurors believe insanity is a medical term. That is not the case. Insanity is a legal definition without clinical meaning. Many argue that it makes little sense to give people who have never grappled with mental-health issues the authority to make these difficult and often life-or-death determinations.

Some have speculated that one of the Boston bombers, for example, was suffering from schizophrenia—namely the older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. This assessment is supported by little more than the public statements of an infirm old man, Don Larking, who himself suffers from traumatic brain injury, but many people who are struggling to comprehend the heartless and horrific act committed during the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, turn to insanity as the only way to reconcile the cruel crime. How could anyone commit such a vicious crime that wounded 264 innocent people, many of them grievously, and killed three, including an eight-year-old boy who was watching the race with his family when the bombers planted their explosive backpack next to him? Another person was killed later, a policeman who was ambushed and executed by the bombers during a failed escape attempt. With Tamerlan killed in the shootout with police, speculation about his possible insanity is now moot.

Speaking in his office at the University of Alaska about the younger bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a year before the trial was held, Dr. Kappes asks, “What are we going to do about this guy? Right now they are not going to go for Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity; they are going to go for Diminished Capacity, because they are going to say that his older brother influenced his behavior.”

Dr. Kappes explained that a common example of the Diminished Capacity defense is when a person commits a crime while drunk. They are not mentally ill, but they do not have full control of their actions either. This will distinguish murder from manslaughter. “Alcohol or drugs diminished their capacity to make a reasonable judgment,” he explains by example. “In this case, they are going to say that his older brother influenced his behavior, because he was a nineteen-year-old at the time. This would have diminished his ability to have planned and plotted to do this whole thing, and I think they are going to succeed on that; however, the Boston people are going to be angry. They want death.”

(A year later, when the trial was held in Boston, Dr. Kappes’s predictions would prove to be remarkably insightful. The defense did adopt the strategy of blaming the older brother for leading his younger brother astray, and the jury rejected the argument, finding Dzhokhar Tsarnaev guilty of murder on April 8, 2015. After the verdict, Michael D. Kendall, a former federal prosecutor, predicted how the jury would decide on Tsarnaev’s sentence: “The big choice for the jury is going to be which is more cruel, life without parole for a young man or the death penalty. They’ll pick whichever they think is worse.” On May 15, 2015, the jury sentenced Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death.)

The movie-theater shooter from Aurora, Colorado, James Holmes, is another prime example. Here’s the quandary: Looking at Holmes’s bizarre appearance and demeanor at the time of his arrest, any jury would likely take it as corroborating evidence that he was insane at the time of the shooting. Thus, the death penalty would not be permitted. In pre-trial negotiations Holmes’s defense offered to plead guilty provided that the death penalty was not imposed, but prosecutors, appalled by the horrific crime and armed with overwhelming evidence, refused. Now prosecutors will have to hear the insanity defense that will preclude the penalty of death they desire, and instead could result in the defendant being committed to a mental illness facility rather than sent to prison.

The fact that Holmes had been treated for mental illness prior to the crime does not necessarily prove the insanity defense. “It doesn’t matter what your prior mental issues were,” Kappes says. “What are they at the time of the crime? You may have a mental illness, but it may have nothing to do with how you behave at the time of the crime.” This is a very murky and difficult judgment for twelve untrained average citizens to make by listening to arguments in court, he says.

Both the conscious and emotional brain that we have been exploring in understanding why we snap enter into an insanity defense. In some states the belief is that the McNaughton defense of “knowing right from wrong” refers only to the cognitive level, not to the emotional level. “For example, Andrea Yates, who drowned her five kids in Texas . . . she knew cognitively that it was wrong, but emotionally she didn’t. Emotionally she believed that she was a failure and that she was hurting her kids by being an unfit mother.” Texas did not have the “volitional standard” in the law, Kappes says: “They prosecuted her on the cognitive standard that she knew it was wrong because she called the police.” A different state would have had a different set of criteria for the insanity defense applied in Yates’s crime.

Guilty but Mentally Ill, “That’s an oxymoron,” Kappes says. “If you are mentally ill, you cannot be guilty,” he cries. “You cannot!” The distinction among these different “insanity” defenses matters a great deal. “Either you are treated by the criminal-justice system or you are treated by the mental-health system.”

In his research, Kappes studied 337 people who were asked to read the facts of the Holmes murder case in Aurora, Colorado, and select the verdict and punishment.

Thirty-four people voted Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity for Holmes. The vast majority said that he was guilty. By profiling the people in the study, Kappes found that the people in these two groups were quite different in several ways. Those voting guilty already had very negative views of the Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity (NGRI) defense. They believe the insanity defense is overused. They believe that a person convicted under NGRI will spend less time in jail. They believe that the person is usually faking. They believe that the defense attorneys are hired guns only looking for acquittal.

How often is the insanity defense used in murder trials? Kappes says 76 percent of people believe that 5 percent of all trials use it. “In fact, the insanity defense is only used in one percent of murder trials.”

He also found that 85 percent of people in the study believe that “competency” in the legal sense pertains to the killer’s state of mind at the time of the crime. In reality the term relates to the individual’s present state of mind during trial. Competency is whether the individual is able to aid in their own defense in the court proceedings. “So a lot of the terms [jurors] are being asked, they don’t know—don’t even have a clue about it.”

Kappes then found that if these same people were instead given three possible verdicts, which included Guilty but Mentally Ill, there was a different outcome. When given two choices, 88 percent said Guilty and 12 percent said Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity. However, half of the people in the study selected the third choice when it was available. They did so because they mistakenly believed that individuals convicted as Guilty but Mentally Ill would get treatment. On the contrary, Kappes says, this group receives dual punishment—subject to both the criminal-justice system and the mental-health system.

“It is a misnomer. It is an attempt to relieve our frustration of what to do with these people. By giving jurors this choice, they think that they are doing something on behalf of the client, but the judge is not allowed to tell the jury what are the consequences of these various verdicts. Because if they do so before jurors make the verdict, there is the fear that that would influence the verdict that they would use. So you are being asked to give a verdict without any knowledge of the consequences of that verdict, except in the death-penalty states.”

Whether individuals in the study had a history of mental illness, currently suffered mental illness, had been convicted of a crime, or whether they were a psychology major or a criminal-justice major had no influence on whether they favored the Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity verdict. People who favored the insanity verdict did, however, share an opposition to the death penalty.

Four states have no insanity defense but do have the death penalty for murder. “If you are caught in one of these states, you don’t stand a chance if there is a psychological reason as the basis for your criminal conduct,” Kappes says. In arguments put to the Supreme Court that the death penalty in cases of mental illness is unconstitutional, the Supreme Court has determined that “The state’s right to put someone to death supersedes the individual’s right to a fair trial. The state has a right to carry out its business,” Kappes says.

“In Texas, they just put this guy to death who had an IQ of sixty-one. Yet we believe that children, minors, animals who are not cognitively capable of making rational decisions, do deserve some kind of compassion on our part.

“It has been going on like this for hundreds of years!” he exclaims. “I thought I could bring some sanity to insanity [through academic research], but a lot of this has to do with reconciling psychology and the law—mental illness versus insanity. Psychology is interested in the laws of nature. The legal system is interested in the laws of man.”

Kappes is still collecting data for this research. He brings up the most recent data on his office computer screen. “We should have five or six hundred [respondents] before long.

“We are interested in that twelve percent [who chose Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity in the Holmes case]. What makes them different?”

I argue in favor of that 12 percent viewpoint in the case of Holmes. “I just can’t see how anyone in his right mind could do what he did, walk into a movie theater and throw a bomb and start shooting, unless he was mentally ill,” I say.

“I can. When you take someone who was supposedly brilliant, doing well, a four-point-oh grade average and so on, and then I think in this case he missed a very important exam. He had a break from what was his lifeline. What was his identity. If you are a neuroscientist [as Holmes was studying to be] and that is your identity and you are planning on being successful in this area and you have been rewarded and recognized for your achievements, and then all of a sudden you are failing. And you may be failing for reasons having to do with something biological in your own being that is preventing you from cognitively functioning as you did before [but are not mentally ill]. And you can’t understand why this is happening to you because there is a cognitive deficit going on. And then you lose everything. And you may be going to a psychiatrist, as he was, and talking about his aggressive impulses and so on.”

(I later interviewed faculty members, neuroscientists, at UC Irvine and the University of Colorado who had taught Holmes, and both said that Holmes was a bright student and aloof, but they never imagined that he could commit mass murder.)

Kappes continues his line of inquiry. “We had the same thing happen with the Texas Tower Massacre—the guy who shot all those people at the University of Texas who had a brain tumor and so forth [but had no mental illness]. So there is some biological basis for aggression and violence. We know that,” Kappes says, explaining how someone who is not insane could nevertheless deliberately murder innocent people.

I push him on this. The scenario he just proposed sounds exactly like what would be caused by the Insult trigger of rage, but Holmes looked and acted so bizarre immediately after his arrest, and what he did was so senseless. Becoming enraged because of personal losses or threats to one’s identity could cause someone to snap in a murderous rage, but it is difficult to imagine that it could cause a normal person to do what he did—walk into a movie theater and start to shoot everyone. Possibly, I suggest, the same violent actions could be committed by a sane person in some other circumstance. Admittedly, this is difficult to imagine, but to explore the point, I concoct a scenario of taking revenge on an enemy watching a movie during a war. But could a sane person ever justify what Holmes did?

“Now, you are thinking that justification would be the key to insanity or not,” Kappes counters.

“Sergeant Bales, who snapped—is he insane?” I ask, pointing out that he did not enter a plea of insanity or diminished capacity due to PTSD or drugs, for example, in his defense. His attorney argued that Bales had simply “snapped.” But that explains nothing. “From a psychological perspective, when someone snaps, what does that mean?” I ask.

“You lose contact with reality. This happens a lot with PTSD; it’s called the shattered self,” he explains. His point is that this response is different from being insane under any of the legal definitions.

“I’m having a hard time with this,” I say, taking the role of devil’s advocate. “Anytime you take a gun and shoot your girlfriend through a bathroom door, that has to be a break with reality.”

“Yeah, but it is always a question of his mental state at the time of the crime,” Kappes says. “It is called a psychological autopsy, meaning that you have to go back in time to see what was happening. What were the circumstances? You have to try to map out all of the conditions that were happening at the time to put yourself in that person’s shoes. It is not always as simple as it seems.” He likens the process to the forensic analysis of a crime scene, tracing the angle of bullets shot through the door and sifting through other evidence to reconstruct what occurred. “What were the elements that led up to the person’s state of mind at the time of the crime?

“Admittedly, it is very difficult, because you are making assumptions. Can you ever be in somebody else’s brain? Did you know what they were thinking? And more importantly, knowing whether it is right or wrong is not sufficient! It is an important element, but it is [not] or should not be the only variable that determines culpability. Culpability has to also be decided by motivation—by emotional factors, not just cognitive factors and behavioral factors.”

I ask about the Norway shooter, Anders Behring Breivik. He was not insane in the sense that he knew what he was doing. He planned to do what he did for a very long time and he carried out his plan, and his worst fear was that the court would judge him insane, but such thinking is delusional.

Kappes cites another similar example—the Unabomber. “He also did not want to be judged insane. I would say the Unabomber was insane, because of his state of mind and consciousness. He was schizophrenic anyway,” he says. “He already had a history [of mental illness].

“Most of these people do not, as you say, just snap. Now, I can understand the snapping occurring for PTSD and often tied to brain injury. Often [people who snap and serial murderers, for example,] have that element of child[hood] sexual abuse or some early aggression. That manifests itself in a sense of anger. When the prefrontal cortex is damaged by injury, then it releases one’s volitional control. People who have been abused don’t necessarily become violent or serial murderers, but when you combine the two [past abuse and a sudden traumatic event or injury to frontal-lobe function], it makes it more likely that they are able to engage in serial murders. Brain injury can occur from a lot of different things—drug use, among others.

“So it is complex. And you have to go state by state [to apply the specific law to the psychological factors]. So, even if you and I were to decide, ‘Oh! Here’s what it is once and for all,’ each state is going to have their own definition of what insanity is.

“I get so frustrated. I can’t believe so many times in court that they are not willing to listen to science.” For example, he cites the science showing how unreliable human memory, and thus eyewitness testimony, is. “But then, I can understand them. They look at us and say, ‘You guys can’t even define insanity for us.’

“In psychology you have to have a high tolerance for ambiguity and appreciate that there are different ways of looking at things; there’s not just one way—it is not like gravity.”

I asked him about Carderock: “Would you say Dave was insane?”

He told me that he would have to see evidence of diminished capacity, but on the contrary, “I think anyone is capable of it [doing what Dave is accused of doing].

“You have to look at the person’s psyche for a longer period than that one act. You usually can find the circumstances that led up to it. I think we all believe in cause and effect. That things just don’t happen out of the blue. If you look at them, you will start to see early examples of anger issues that he had with a girlfriend, or other things. Unfortunately, we don’t act on those issues. There is evidence early on of certain behaviors that don’t rise to the level of attention that would say, ‘We need to do something.’”

It should be obvious, but to make it explicitly clear, Kappes is not rendering a professional or personal judgment on the Carderock crime or any other crime. He has not been presented with all the facts, and rendering judgment is not the purpose of our discussion. In talking with an expert about the complex issue involved in human psychology and the insanity defense, snippets of various crimes are brought up as mere examples to help illuminate critical aspects of the various definitions of insanity.

(To update events a year after my interview with Dr. Kappes, the trial of James Holmes for the Aurora, Colorado, mass murder has now begun. The testimony thus far of many psychiatrists who evaluated Holmes’s psychiatric condition is that Holmes was not insane at the time of the shooting. Holmes’s notebooks showing detailed planning of the massacre are cited as damning evidence that Holmes was fully aware of what he was doing. These psychiatrists argue that Holmes may have suffered psychiatric illness but that he was not criminally insane at the time of the murders. As this trial is still under way, a final verdict has not been reached. That Holmes committed the murders is not in question. He has admitted to the Aurora theater massacre, but presumption of innocence must be maintained until the trial is completed. Arguments in court thus far, however, conclude that the horrendous mayhem and cold-blooded slaughter of innocents in the Aurora movie theater was not an act of insanity—it was an act of rage.)

—

For a week the jury heard testimony from psychologists to decide whether Barry Kin Lui suffered from a mental disorder the night that he brutally murdered his girlfriend with a knife. Their decision would determine whether he would serve his sentence in a state mental institution or in prison. In May 2014, the jury drove a stake through the heart of Lui’s “Dracula” defense, and sent him to prison for thirty years.

One of Kappes’s last comments as our conversation in his office came to an end still rings in my head: “I think anyone is capable of it.”

A Crying Baby

Squeezing her hand over the toddler’s nose and mouth, she smothered him to death because he would not stop crying. Twenty-two-year-old Jessica Fraraccio pleaded guilty in a Virginia courtroom to felony murder of twenty-three-month-old Elijah Nealey in the summer of 2012. No one in their right mind could conceive of committing such a horrible act, but babies are tragically killed or left severely brain damaged by shaken-baby syndrome inflicted by a parent, family member, or caretaker frustrated by a child’s incessant crying. Dismissing those who act with depraved minds, how can we comprehend such sad stories as this one?

Jessica Fraraccio was well known to the Nealeys when they hired the young woman as a babysitter for their son, Elijah, and his two sisters in their Northern Virginia middle-class home. The Nealeys knew Jessica’s parents well. Jessica was a devout Catholic who was studying child development in the hope of owning her own day-care business someday.

Friends and family testified in court that Fraraccio was a kind and giving person. According to a newspaper article in The Washington Post, “She is incapable of wishing evil; in high school she wouldn’t even gossip about the girls everyone ‘hated,’ one friend wrote in a letter to the court.”

“We never would have dreamt of this,” Mike Nealey said of the young woman they thought they knew. “I don’t know how to process it,” he said after hearing her shocking and remorseful admission.

The young woman faces the prospect of fifty years in prison, and the Nealeys are living with horrendous grief over the murder of their son, who would have had his second birthday the following month, September 2012. Nothing can excuse such a horrible crime, but to reduce the chances of another child suffering a similar fate, it is necessary to seek an understanding of what went wrong.

Babies and toddlers are especially vulnerable to brain damage caused by fierce shaking because of their comparatively large heads and weak supporting neck muscles. The violent whiplash caused by shaking a baby smashes the infant’s brain against the internal walls of their skull, inflicting severe trauma. According to a recent study, 18 to 25 percent of babies who are hospitalized after being shaken in frustration will die. And 80 percent of children who survive are left with significant lifelong brain injuries.

The trigger is crying. It seems paradoxical that crying could trigger someone to murder a child on impulse. How could evolution give us that?

An infant’s first act in life is to cry. This stimulates concern and provokes an urgent caregiving response in those who hear it. Neuroimaging shows that infant crying stimulates brain activity in areas involved in parenting behavior, empathy, attention, and stress. Mothers are more sensitive to the cries of their own infants than to the crying of unfamiliar infants, and neuroimaging illuminates this behavioral preference in the level of activity evoked in the mother’s brain.

The impulsive murders of crying infants are often as bewildering to the perpetrators, who are frequently otherwise devoted parents, as it is baffling to others who struggle to comprehend the horror. The perpetrators of shaken-baby syndrome are most likely to be males related to the child. This is followed in frequency by boyfriends or stepfathers; then mothers; and at a lesser frequency by temporary caregivers. The helpless victims are much more likely to be male than female. These statistics must provide clues to understanding how the unthinkable can happen.

The leading hypothesis for the greater number of victims who are boys is cultural. Males should not cry, but females are allowed to. Thus incessant crying in a female child is more tolerated.

Adult men are more aggressive and stronger than women, so their violent actions are more powerful and deadly. Crying does evoke different responses in the male and female brain, though. Neuroimaging shows that infant hunger cries strongly interrupt “mind wandering circuits” (the dorsal medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate) in women, whereas men tend to carry on with less interruption in thought. Women in general show greater response to crying and laughter in the brain regions that process empathy than do men. Cognitive control by the left auditory cerebral cortex actively inhibits activity in the right amygdala in response to laughing or crying, and this reduces stress and anxiety.

Rather than dismissing a violent response to a baby’s cries as psychotic behavior, Ronald Barr, professor of Pediatrics at the University of British Columbia, concludes that shaken-baby syndrome is a tragic failure of an otherwise normal, common interaction between infants and caregivers. According to this analysis, crying is an ambiguous signal. It can provoke positive, supportive, survival-promoting caregiver responses as well as negative, destructive, survival-endangering caregiver responses.

The onset of crying provokes a caregiving response, but if the caregiver is capable and provides “good care,” the baby should cease crying. If instead the crying cannot be stopped, the caregiver may unconsciously interpret the crying as an indicator that they are not capable caregivers. Thus, rather than triggering a biological response to satisfy the needs of the infant—hunger or the need to change a diaper, for example—crying now signals personal criticism. These opposite responses to crying are not deliberate, conscious thoughts generated in the cerebral cortex; they arise in the unconscious emotional brain.

This explanation is only a hypothesis, but the statistics indicating that family members close to the child have a greater probability of violently shaking their baby than do outside caregivers seem consistent with this interpretation. The cries that will not stop are a hidden and unconscious personal insult in the mind of someone who cares. If this suggested explanation is true, such tragedies are cruel ironies. This analysis might account for the paradox of how someone who is apparently devoted and caring could respond to the incessant cries of an infant with rage instead of love.

Our Environment

A small gray bird lay on its side with feet curled, looking like a stuffed museum specimen but resting on dried leaves blanketing the ground. I felt the urge to stroke its satin feathers, but resisted, knowing they would be cold. It was resting on the ground beneath a plate-glass window, which instantly explained my initial shock and answered my urgent question about what had killed it.

It is astonishing how birds can fly with ease through thick forests at several times the speed we can move about in our world. Soaring on wing, how do they effortlessly avoid collisions with a deadly thicket of branches and twigs in their path? The sharp eyesight and quick reflexive maneuvering of birds in flight are astonishing. Humans can scarcely tromp through a thicket without pokes and scratches from twigs and branches, but birds sail through the canopy of forest trees effortlessly and at such speeds they are but a streak to our eyes as they thread through their aerial obstacles.

But the quick instinctive reflex to dart through the center of a clear path between branches fails them in an environment that has suddenly changed. Their lifesaving intricate behaviors, honed over the tens of thousands of years of evolution that created intricate neural networks in their brain to accommodate such natural dangers, are rendered not only useless but deadly in a world that did not exist when their brain evolved.

And so it is with humans and their LIFEMORTS triggers. This is the story of evolution. It is the same theme in the score of life repeated endlessly in infinite variety. The dynamics that drive evolution in a constantly changing world affect all creatures—even the mightiest, as dinosaur bones encased in rock now attest. An entire branch of the evolutionary tree of life perished in a sudden environmental change, the Ice Age. The sparrow and the plate-glass window and the human being and the automobile, both are a clash between the environment of the past that sculpted brain and body and the modern world that confronts individuals with strange new conditions and threats.

The vast majority of us will never commit a sudden act of violence; nevertheless, the neural circuitry of snapping in rage is very relevant to everyone. Nearly everyone snaps in anger and does something destructive or says hurtful things while enraged that they immediately regret. These familiar bursts of anger often have regrettable and long-lasting consequences. Snapping can cause strife within families, among coworkers, and in everyday interactions with other people. Everyone desires to be in control of their emotions and to become a better person by understanding and controlling the rage circuit we share biologically with beasts. Understanding this circuitry will equip anyone to better control the preprogrammed snapping response in themselves, and just might save a prized golf club from getting wrapped around a tree!

When you suddenly feel an explosive rush of anger rise inside you, ask yourself why. Rather than trying to “put a lid on it,” ask yourself why you are suddenly provoked to rage by this situation. Many things can (and should) make a person angry, but is the sudden situation pressing on you one of the LIFEMORTS triggers? If it is, then you will understand that the sudden release of the emotion we call “anger” and the powerful physiological response it launches in your body is the ancient survival instinct that prepares you to fight. Is this a situation in which a physical fight with someone is appropriate? Humans no longer live in the natural world. They have created their own environment, and they have the ability to comprehend it, to change it, and to adjust to it.

The modern world is still filled with dangers and threats. Sometimes these triggers of sudden violence backfire with tragic consequences, but most often it is the opposite. These automated defensive brain circuits have a positive, lifesaving role in everyday life.