Daniel W. Schwartz, M.D.
“I didn’t plan a rape that night, although I was in that state of mind.” Thus Robert Frederick Carr begins his story, introducing at once the central paradox of his personality.
He is telling us that his crimes were usually premeditated, that this night was an exception because he was going to rape without having planned it. Indeed, as we learn more about him, we see that most of his rapes were quite carefully schemed in advance. He had rope at hand in his car to bind his victims, a knife to subdue them, a jar of Vaseline for anal intercourse. He disconnected the passenger-side door handle to prevent escape, and then he went out cruising. The weapons he employed when he committed a rape and murder were not chance objects that happened to be available to him; they were there for a purpose as surely as the props placed onstage for a play will be used before the curtain comes down. Clearly, this was not a man “provoked” to rape by the sight of an attractive woman—or boy, for that matter, for two of his rape-murder victims were pre-teenage boys. It does not seem he raped on impulse, for he often was planning his next rape while feeling no active urge.
Yet Carr is telling the truth about himself when he talks about “that state of mind.” “For somebody like me, there comes a time when he is going to rape,” he says, as though it were all automatic, beyond his power to control. At times, in fact, he seems to have been genuinely frightened by this force within himself. He worried about what he might do next: “Maybe I would kill my own son, or my wife, or somebody else.” He considered turning himself in “the next time the impulse hit me.” He talks of a “passion” for rape that even rape itself does not relieve.
How can these two contradictory accounts both be true? Can an act be both impulsive and premeditated? Does it make sense to say that an act is the product of an uncontrollable passion when the groundwork for that act is carefully laid during relatively rational moments free of passion?
The answer to these questions is yes, for if one thing is apparent from Robert Carr’s generally perceptive recounting of his terrifying career as a rapist-murderer, it is that a repetitive rapist such as himself almost purposefully allows himself to be overwhelmed by the dark passions over which he has no control. It is a bizarre mixture of action and passivity, for “passion,” as the etymology of the word tells us, is a form of passivity, a being carried away.
A psychiatrist who examined Carr after his arrest speaks of Carr’s need to control every situation. And certainly Carr had an awesome ability to control and manipulate his victims, whom he held as prisoners for days, brainwashing them so skillfully that they became virtually willing partners in their own captivity. But this is only half the picture. Carr himself recognizes that, just as he needed to be in control of every situation, so he could not function without the illusion that control and responsibility had passed to others. “If I was going to kill a victim,” he explains, “I’d deliberately tell him things, things that would make me have to kill him.” Even when he confessed to the police, he had to force himself to do it by taking control out of his own hands. When his lawyer advised him to put off showing the police where he had buried the bodies of his victims, Carr answered, “Go to hell. I got to show them where the bodies are before I chicken out.” “I was backing myself into a corner, knowing what I was doing, so I couldn’t change my mind,” he writes. He was well aware of his difficulty in carrying through on any resolve, whether it be a resolve to rape, to murder or to confess.
Like many rapists, Carr appears to have felt relieved at being caught, a sentiment that had little or nothing to do with feelings of remorse. Prior to his arrest, he was under an internal compulsion to perform successfully at an ever-increasing frequency, each rape only escalating his need to prove something to himself about his own potency. Once in custody, he could stop without having to admit failure, for if he no longer raped women, it was through no fault of his own.
What can psychiatry tell us about this puzzling active-passive compulsion? Orthodox psychiatry has little to say about repetitive rape. The official nomenclature lists seven sexual deviations—fetishism, pedophilia, transvestism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, sadism and masochism—but does not include rape on the list. Some psychiatrists argue that rape cannot be a deviation because the sexual goal is coitus. Other psychiatrists argue that to label such a condition as a sexual deviation would absolve the rapist of criminal responsibility. This is an unfounded fear, for psychiatric illness has never been the automatic key to acquittal by reason of insanity. Regardless of psychiatric testimony, the community, in the form of the jury, has always decided what behavior it will or will not tolerate, and rape has proved to be the least likely of all crimes to lead to an insanity acquittal.
The truly important question here is why a man becomes a rapist. It is precisely because of psychiatry’s relative ignorance on this subject that the remarkable first-person account Carr provides is such an immensely valuable document. He takes us far into the wilderness of the rapist’s mind, for he is almost shockingly knowledgeable about himself. He tells us more than enough to expose the fallacy behind the assumption that rape is not a deviation because there is no deflection of the normal sexual goal. A rapist such as Carr is not a man for whom sex happens to take the form of violence; on the contrary, for him, violence takes the form of sex.
Today, many educated laymen have dabbled enough in abnormal psychology to understand the rapist as a person who cannot find sufficient gratification with a consenting partner. The rapist is said to be in conflict between an idealized picture of Woman (inevitably, his mother) as a sexually pure creature and his awareness that women do in fact have sexual intercourse. Early in childhood, he reconciles this conflict by concluding that decent women do not consent to sex, a thesis that logically makes his father a rapist in fact, if not in law. From here, the theory goes, it is an easy step for the unconscious mind to embrace rape as the idealized form of sexual contact once such a child grows to adulthood and incorporates the values of his father as he imagines his father to be.
Now, we can recognize at once that Robert Carr’s narrative dispels any stereotype picture of the rapist as a man incapable of sex with a consenting woman. In his marriage to Joanne and his affair with Kathy, as well as in his casual sexual encounters, he gives no hint of an inability to achieve or maintain erection or to reach climax. It is, of course, possible he is concealing something from us here; Carr is not my patient, and I am aware of the pitfalls of diagnosing a man one knows only through the written record. Yet in this case I doubt we are being misled. His only complaint about his sexual relations with his wife and his mistress is that, after he had raped, sex with them seemed “blah”—a complaint so mild that we are almost forced to take it at face value.
Further, Carr repeatedly tells us how difficult it was for him to reach orgasm during rape. Time and again, he fails to climax. “Rape brings great pleasure in the beginning,” he explains. “But as time progresses, it’s less and less—until finally, it brings no pleasure. And it’s very hard, nearly…impossible to reach climax.” Carr then gives us a very important insight into what lies behind the impulse to rape. It is not a desire for sexual gratification but a need to inflict pain, suffering and even death upon his victims. In a startlingly revealing moment Carr says: “I kept asking myself, Why do I do this? Why am I going out raping people? After it’s over, the passion is still there. It’s like being thirsty and trying to eat to quench a thirst. It’s just two different things. The only time the passion was ever relieved was after I killed somebody.” Once again he is right about himself: it is two different things. Once he has become a killer, sex can no longer quench his thirst for murder. It is not sex but violence, the violence of murder, that is now the goal of Carr’s passion.
This is not to say that the roots of Carr’s problems are not sexual. Undoubtedly they are, for they are interwoven with his twisted sense of himself as a man. Witness his anguish about disclosing his proclivity for anal sex with young boys, in contrast to his willingness to confess himself a multiple murderer. “I didn’t want to be arrested for child molesting and homosexual acts,” he writes. “I still had a lot of pride.” There is a profound confusion here, a confusion growing out of a grossly distorted sexual identity and a resulting inability to relate to others except in the starkest terms of dominance and submission, guilt and forgiveness. Time and again, in each of his rapes, in each of his murders, we see Carr acting out the age-old rituals of the child bowing to parental domination, of playing the bad child so that he can win the punishment he equates with love. The characters in this little psychodrama exchange masks almost at random, so that at one moment Carr is the parent, a moment later the child.
No one who reads Carr’s story will ever forget his implacable insistence on dominating his victims: ritualistically making them crouch on the floor of the car as though physically reducing them to the stature of small children, cruelly manipulating rewards and punishment to force them to submit to his will. At times, however, he is not the cruel, domineering parent but rather a distorted version of the kindly nurturing parent, as in his grotesquely comic warnings about the dangers of hitchhiking, delivered, as he says, with all sincerity. “Haven’t your mothers and fathers told you not to get in cars with people?” he asked Mark and Todd. “Well, why were you out there hitchhiking?” “I hope this taught you a lesson,” he told Susan, whom he didn’t kill. “Please don’t hitchhike anymore.” We see Carr again as the “good parent” in his pathetic insistence that the children he brutalized and killed in some sense thrived under his care. “When [Tammy’s] mother reads this she’ll realize that Tammy wasn’t sad all the time with me,” he writes, asserting a macabre claim for credit as an adequate foster parent. “Every victim grew a lot during their time with me,” he boasts.
Yet to see Carr’s violence as only a depraved parody of parental domination, as the product of a ravaging and vengeful superego, is to miss the point. Repeatedly, compulsively, he drove his victims to the point of resistance. Immediately he then became the child, begging their forgiveness for having been bad. Note the switch in roles: “I’d tell her I was going to kill her and make her beg me not to, make her beg me to stop. Then I’d apologize.” Each of his murders had these moments when Carr pleaded for the forgiveness of his victim. This dual pattern reached its most striking articulation in his relationship with the detectives who were his captors. On the one hand, he manipulated them as skillfully as he manipulated his victims, in this case by giving and withholding information about his crimes. But we cannot fail to notice, on the other hand, his intense liking for and desire to please these strong and friendly police officers, who listened to him, were impressed with him and even “overfed” him.
The mind of Robert Frederick Carr III is a riotous set of variations on the single theme of domination and submission, of the exercise of power and the cringing before it. His story takes the violent form it does because violence is the ultimate form of power, just as the power to take life is the ultimate form of violence. Indeed, it is significant that he killed his victims not when their powers of resistance posed a threat to him but when their submissiveness became complete. Tammy was not murdered until she reached a psychotic state of catatonic withdrawal. Mark’s death was foreshadowed by his growing passivity: “He minded good. You could tell him to do something and he’d do just that, a beautiful kid.” When Terri surrendered to sobbing, Carr notes, “I was slipping into the same state of mind as when I killed Mark and Tammy.” The very completeness of their submission seemed to require as its answer the completeness of his power over them, which inevitably took the form of murder.
One cannot help but ask what medicine and the law can do to change a repetitive rapist like Robert Carr. Does psychiatry, for example, have any effective treatment? Not really. Because of their poor ability to relate to people, rapists usually cannot establish the kind of intense relationship in therapy that would allow them to get at their problems and work them through. Like most other kinds of professional criminals, rapists are not cured, nor do they reform; they retire. They may “outgrow” the psychological pressures to act in a sexually violent way. Until that happens, the only recourse is confinement.
But although we cannot do much for Carr, his extraordinarily candid account of himself sheds a light that may help both the psychiatric community and the criminal justice system see a bit more clearly. His story underlines the fact that our legal system fundamentally misunderstands the nature of rape. When our laws treat sexual assault, they emphasize the sexual element as a way of giving rape a special status, distinct from other forms of bodily mayhem. Certainly rape deserves to be treated as a uniquely brutal, degrading and humiliating form of assault, but the practical effect of seeing it as a violent form of sex rather than as a sexual form of violence has been to make it one of the most difficult of all crimes to prosecute. The case of Robert Carr indicates that the feminists who have been insisting for years that an assault is an assault may well be closer to the mark. It also bears on a question the answer to which is crucial to a real diminution of crime as a social problem: What is the difference between the mind of a person for whom mere fantasy is sufficient and the mind of a person who must act? Carr: Five Years of Rape and Murder, although it does not provide the complete answer, greatly advances our quest for understanding.