Randy Kraft was a man with a murderous mind. But you would never have guessed it from meeting with him. A computer consultant with an IQ of 129, close to mine, he grew up in Southern California just south of where I used to teach, at USC. Randy, like me, was brought up the son of respectable, hardworking parents. He was the youngest in his family, and again like me he had three older sisters. He grew up in a middle-class, conservative area in a rather normal, even uneventful home life that matched my own. A smart schoolkid, he was placed in accelerated classes, just like I was. He attended Westminster High School and the prestigious Claremont Men’s College, an elite liberal-arts college, where he gained a degree in economics. Randy had a lot going for him.
You can see for yourself from Randy’s Web page, where he reminisces about his childhood, that his life was pretty much all “apple pie and Chevrolet” back in the good old ’50s and ’60s. Randy talks affectionately about his home life, replete with happy memories of bowling with his dad and preparing strawberries and whipped cream with his mother. He reflects on the excitement of witnessing with his father the pale, eerie light thrown from a Nevada nuclear test-site explosion, and his first school dance with a girl, at age thirteen. Randy ruminates on his home, set against the backdrop of strawberry fields in rural Orange County. He clearly loved helping his dad make a morning fire from garden rubbish, and he paints a multimodal, colorful scene of sounds, smells, and textures:
Today, when I look back, I can smell the distinct, sweet odor of a damp grass fire, and hear the frenetic crackle of the struggling flame, and see the ribbon of white smoke curling far into the blue morning sky. And there is Dad in his old style undershirt and baggy pants, piling more onto the fire with the pitchfork, and I’m helping him.1
It could be something you or I might write about our home lives. Except when you look back at your life there is no smell of fresh blood. You do not hear the frenetic cries of your struggling victims, echoing through the deathly dark night sky. You do not see their loosened and disordered underwear, their pants undone in a violent assault, or feel the fire flaming your passion during the heated rapes. The whitening of your victim’s face as you strangle them until they turn a pale shade of blue. The wetness of their lap as their pelvic muscles relax after death, releasing urine from their bladder.
You would not have experienced this. Randy repeatedly did. It’s a different scene from the one that Randy sketched, and one he insists he never acted in. Yet he is on death row in San Quentin, having killed an estimated sixty-four times between September 1971 and May 1983.
The very likeable Randy would socialize in the evenings with his adult and teenage victims-to-be, share beers with them, and take them cruising around in his car. Then, after drugging them with a mix of tranquilizers and beer, he would playfully torture them, rape them, and then dump their bodies out of his car—earning him the nickname “the Freeway Killer.” Some he would strangle, some he’d shoot. All were teenage boys and young adult men.2
Randy could still be killing today if not for a bit of bad luck on May 14, 1983. It was one o’clock in the morning. He’d been out having a good time. After a drink or two he was driving at a steady 45 m.p.h. in his Toyota Celica on the Interstate 5 portion of the San Diego Freeway just south of L.A. Although he wasn’t speeding, Randy’s driving was just a little bit erratic. He then made an illegal lane change that ended his killing career.
A California Highway Patrol car had been following him. It put on its lights and hailed him with its public-address system. Randy dutifully pulled over, just ahead of the police. Rather than wait for the cops to come to his car, he walked back to them with a bottle of Moosehead beer.
Kraft admitted that he’d had three to four beers that night, but said he was not drunk. The cops checked him out with a sobriety test. This was one test in his life that Randy failed. They had to charge him with driving under the influence of alcohol.
That meant having to take him in and impound his vehicle. Sergeant Michael Howard walked ahead to Randy’s car. It was only then that he became a little suspicious. There was someone slumped in the passenger seat. You have to give the California Highway Patrol some credit. They normally allow a sober passenger to drive the car back home—that way the driver would not have to pay the impound fee. Maybe this other guy could help Randy out.
Thinking the passenger was asleep, Sergeant Howard politely knocked on the window, but there was no response. That was a bit odd. He opened the door and shook the passenger. Still no response. Most peculiar—maybe he was drunk, too. He then lifted the jacket lying on the passenger’s lap, and that’s when he noticed that his pants were undone, his penis and testicles were sticking out, and there were ligature marks on his wrists.
The paramedics were brought to the scene but it was too late. The dead body belonged to Terry Gambrel, a twenty-five-year-old U.S. Marine. He had drunk the equivalent of two beers and had ingested some Ativan—but not enough to kill him. The responsibility for that lay at Randy’s door. He had strangled the Marine to death.
Randy was up the creek without a paddle. The well-mannered, meticulous, soft-spoken, hardworking computer consultant was none other than the Freeway Killer, soon to be renamed the Scorecard Killer. The nickname evolved from the fact that in the trunk of his car, lying inside his briefcase, was a long, two-columned list of coded names like “England,” “Angel,” and “Hari Kari.” This was Randy’s hit list. Like myself in my accounting days, Randy liked to keep orderly numerical lists. Some entries appeared to have been double killings because their code names were “2 in 1 Hitch” or “2 in 1 Beach”—perhaps two hitchhikers or two killings down by the beach. Many of the coded entries made a lot of sense. “Euclid” referred to the ramp where Kraft dumped the body of his victim Scott Hughes, “EDM” referred to the initials of another victim, Edward Daniel Moore, while “Jail Out” was a reference to Roland Young, whom Randy killed just hours after Young’s release from jail.
After every sexual score with these men, Randy wrote them up. According to his notes, the Scorecard Killer had murdered sixty-four young men in a twelve-year period, getting away scot-free all those years, until that fateful night when he was caught for little more than a traffic violation. A trivial mistake by an otherwise meticulously detailed murderous mind—a mind and brain that we’ll examine soon in our search for understanding of the functional neuroanatomy of violence.
Unlike Kraft, the vast majority of murderers kill only once. Such was Antonio Bustamante. A different killer with a different background, Antonio was born in Mexico and came to the United States at the age of fourteen. Like many Mexican-Americans he had a strong connection with his family. Although they were poor, Antonio grew up to be a law-abiding teenager and young adult.
But then an insidious change took place. He got caught up in drugs. He stole to support his habit. His criminal career then took off as his identity as an industrious, law-abiding immigrant ended. He became impulsive, increasingly argumentative, and got into more fights. For the next two decades he was in and out of prison. His heroin addiction meant he was constantly in need of money.
In September 1986, three years after Randy Kraft’s arrest, Bustamante burglarized a home. He did not find cash, but did uncover traveler’s checks. Things were looking good until he was surprised by the eighty-year-old occupant, who had returned from a nearby grocery store. Bustamante was six feet two inches tall and weighed in at 210 pounds. You’d think that it would not be too hard to get away from an eighty-year-old man, but Bustamante’s fight-or-flight system decided to fight instead of take flight. Bustamante beat the defenseless old man to death with his fists. According to the prosecution, blood was splattered everywhere in the apartment.
Bustamante was a messy and disorganized killer. He’d left his fingerprints everywhere at the crime scene. He hadn’t even bothered to clean himself up. When he went to cash the traveler’s checks they had blood on them. In an even more remarkable oversight, he was still wearing his bloody clothes when arrested by the police.
Two distinct types of killers: the cool, calculating Kraft, and the bungling, bullheaded Bustamante. Divergent home backgrounds. Different ethnic backgrounds. Dissimilar criminal backgrounds. Distinct modi operandi. A very disparate number of victims. If you could look inside the minds of these men, what would you see? Would the brain scan of a murderer look like yours? Where exactly in the brain would the difference be? How would the brain functioning of serial killers like Randy Kraft differ from those of less memorable but more common-variety one-off killers like Antonio Bustamante? And how do any of us—who presumably have not killed—fit into the picture?
Not that long ago, such questions were the province of pulp fiction. In Jonathan Demme’s movie Silence of the Lambs the serial killer Hannibal Lecter scolds FBI agent Clarice Starling for trying to dissect him with a paper-and-pencil questionnaire, what he termed a “blunt little tool.” But today brain-imaging technology is giving us a much sharper instrument to probe the anatomy of violence. It’s giving us tangible visual evidence that there is something wrong with how such killers’ brains function. While these studies are still coming of age and have their limitations, they not only provide a basis upon which future research may build, but also raise provocative and important questions about free will, blame, and punishment that we’ll return to in chapter 10.
But before getting to these complex ramifications, let’s look at the scientific evidence showing that murderers have a mind to crime; we can now bear witness to that fact by studying their brain functioning.
We’ve come a long, long way in our understanding of the brain. Aristotle thought the organ was a radiator to cool blood. Descartes thought it was an antenna for the spirit to communicate with the body. The phrenologist Franz Gall believed that bumps on the skull revealed an individual’s personality. Now we know that this three-pound lump of gray matter is behind everything we do—seeing, hearing, touching, moving, speaking, tasting, feeling, thinking, and of course book reading. And if all actions and behaviors stem from the brain, then why not violent behavior? Why not homicide?
Before 1994, I’d never done a brain-imaging study of murderers. Neither had anyone else. It’s not too surprising, given the difficulty of recruiting and testing a substantial number of the minuscule proportion of us who commits homicide—less than one in 20,000 in any one year in the United States.
But one reason I emigrated from England to California in 1987 was that in addition to the good weather, there were plenty of murderers who could be recruited into my research studies. Credit for recruiting the unusual sample I studied goes to my colleague Monte Buchsbaum, who was just down the road from me at the University of California in Irvine. We identified the subjects through referrals from defense attorneys. Because California has the death penalty, their clients would die unless mitigating circumstances like brain abnormalities could be documented. We were able to build up a unique and sizable research sample.
So, complete with shackles and chains, and flanked by guards, our forty-one murderers trooped into the brain-scanning facility. They looked pretty formidable, intimidating, and ominous. Yet in reality they were very cooperative. We forget that for 99.9 percent of their lives, murderers are just like me and you. That’s why they always come across as your next-door neighbor. Tragic actions in a few fleeting moments set murderers apart from the rest of us. As we shall see, their brain functioning also sets them apart.
The technique we used to scan their brains was positron-emission tomography—PET for short. It allows us to measure the metabolic activity of many different regions of the brain at the same time, including the prefrontal cortex—the very front part of the brain, which sits right above your eyes and immediately behind your forehead. We used the continuous performance task to activate or “challenge” the prefrontal cortex. The subject had to press a response button every time they saw the figure “0” flashed on a computer screen. This went on for thirty-two minutes. Believe me, it’s very boring. But the task requires sustaining attention for a long period, and the prefrontal cortex plays an important role in maintaining vigilance. It’s this part of the brain that is active in you now and that has gotten you to reach this point in the book. After the task, the murderer was taken to the PET scanner, which measured glucose metabolism occurring during the earlier task, rather than afterward in the scanner. The higher the glucose metabolism, the more that part of the brain was working during the cognitive task.
What did the study of forty-one murderers and forty-one age- and sex-matched normal controls reveal? Our key finding is illustrated in Figure 3.1, in the color-plate section, which shows the brain scan of a normal control on the left and the brain scan of a murderer on the right. It shows a horizontal slice through the brain, so you are looking down on it with a bird’s-eye view. The prefrontal region is at the top, and the occipital cortex—the back part of the brain, where vision is controlled—is at the bottom. The warm colors—red and yellow—indicate areas of high glucose metabolism while cool colors like blue and green indicate low brain functioning.
If you look at the normal control, on the left, you can see strong activation in the prefrontal cortex as well as the occipital cortex (at the bottom). The murderer, on the right, shows strong activation in the occipital cortex, just like the normal control. There’s nothing wrong with his visual system. In stark contrast to the normal control, however, the murderer shows a striking lack of activation in the prefrontal cortex. Overall, the forty-one murderers showed a significant reduction in prefrontal glucose metabolism compared with the controls.3
Why should poor prefrontal functioning predispose one to violence? What can help us to form a bridge between a bad brain and bad behavior? And what happens after impairment to the prefrontal cortex? These questions can be answered at different conceptual levels.
1. At an emotional level, reduced prefrontal functioning results in a loss of control over the evolutionarily more primitive parts of the brain, such as the limbic system, that generate raw emotions like anger and rage.4 The more sophisticated prefrontal cortex keeps a lid on these limbic emotions. Take that lid off, and the emotions will boil over.
2. At a behavioral level, we know from research on neurological patients that damage to the prefrontal cortex results in risk-taking, irresponsibility, and rule-breaking.5 It’s not far to go from these behavioral changes to violent behavior.
3. At a personality level, frontal damage has been shown to result in a whole host of personality changes. These include impulsivity, loss of self-control, and inability to modify and inhibit behavior appropriately.6 Can you imagine these types of personality traits in violent offenders?
4. At a social level, prefrontal damage results in immaturity, lack of tact, and poor social judgment.7 From here we can imagine how a lack of social skills can result in socially inappropriate behavior and poorer ability to formulate nonaggressive solutions to fractious social encounters.
5. At a cognitive level, poor frontal functioning results in a loss of intellectual flexibility and poorer problem-solving skills.8 These intellectual impairments can later result in school failure, unemployment, and economic deprivation, all factors that predispose someone to a criminal and violent way of life.
It’s not just one level of analysis but five—five reasons we might expect that poor prefrontal functioning could predispose a person to violent behavior. It’s not surprising, therefore, that poor prefrontal functioning is the best-replicated correlate of antisocial and violent behavior.9
Fact or artifact? Is there a true relationship between poor prefrontal functioning and homicide, or is it explained instead by some methodological artifact? We think fact. Group differences in brain functioning could not be explained away by group differences in age, sex, handedness, history of head injury, medications, or illegal drug use prior to scanning. Furthermore, the murderers could do the task—their performance was just as good as the controls’, possibly because the behavioral occipital cortex was more activated in the murderers than in the controls.10 The murderers likely recruited this visual brain area into action to help them perform the visual task and to compensate for their poorer prefrontal functioning. Prefrontal dysfunction in murderers is fact, and not artifact.
Our study constituted the first brain-imaging evidence to show that the brains of a large sample of murderers are functionally different from those of the general population. Nevertheless we must be cautious. Violence is enormously complex, and prefrontal dysfunction doesn’t apply to all murderers.
To illustrate this further, let’s return to Antonio and Randy and delve further into their murderous minds. Antonio Bustamante, as you will recall, was an impulsive criminal who had for years been spiraling downhill until he finally hit rock bottom in an unplanned, impulsive killing of a defenseless old man during a botched burglary. As the prosecution attorney Joseph Beard argued, it was a vicious and needless attack motivated by greed and money. He inevitably sought the death penalty.
Bustamante had been charged by the police no fewer than twenty-nine times prior to his arrest for homicide. His crimes included theft, breaking and entering, drug offenses, strong-arm robbery, and unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. His background and pattern of offending was typical of many lifelong recidivistic criminals. He was your typical thug.
With one curious exception. Looking closely at his records, I see that his offending did not start until he was nearly twenty-two. That’s simply not typical of your recidivistic violent offender, whose antisocial behavior typically starts much earlier—often in childhood and certainly by early adolescence. And yet by all accounts Bustamante was a well-behaved teenager. So what gives?
The defense team, led by Christopher Plourd, looked over his history and the circumstances of the homicide. Something seemed strange to them too. Bustamante had been very messy and disorganized in stealing and cashing the traveler’s checks. There was blood all over them. He’d left his fingerprints everywhere at the crime scene. He was still in his bloody clothes when he was arrested. Does this sound like a well-oiled, efficient killing machine to you? Probably not. Maybe this particular killing machine had a screw loose.
Plourd discovered that his client had suffered a head injury from a crowbar at the age of twenty. By all accounts Bustamante’s personality changed radically afterward, transforming him from a well-regulated individual into a recklessly impulsive and emotionally labile renegade. Believing that this history of head injury was significant, Plourd had his client’s brain scanned. It was at this point that Monte Buchsbaum, a world-leading schizophrenia expert and brain-imaging researcher, became involved. He testified at trial that Bustamante was suffering from dysfunction to the prefrontal cortex.
Antonio Bustamante was one of the forty-one murderers whose brains we had scanned, and his scan was telling. If you were sitting on the jury, what would you yourself think? Could the injury have turned Bustamante into a monster of a man unable to regulate and control his actions and emotions? Would you buy the neurological evidence that damage to the orbitofrontal cortex impairs decision-making and releases the brakes on emotion regulation, and that the brain scan provided objective evidence for this?
Take a good look at Figure 3.2, in the color-plate section and you can bear witness yourself. You can see the brain impairment to Antonio Bustamante, on the right-hand side. The orbitofrontal cortex is at the top. It’s a cool-colored green compared with the big blotch of red in the normal control on the left. Bustamante’s brain is not normal. At least, that’s what the jury believed—they spared Bustamante the death penalty.
The prosecution was flabbergasted. As prosecution attorney Joseph Beard said:
I’d never seen anything like this before. I didn’t even know what a PET scan was. One of them was labeled “Bustamante” and the other was labeled “Normal.” They were obviously different. The shapes were different, the colors were different.… I don’t think it’s an excuse. From my perspective, its hocus-pocus.… I’m not sure that they had the wherewithal to say that someone hitting him with a pipe 20 years before dramatically changed an altar-boy into a killer.11
And that hocus-pocus PET scan still hangs on the wall of Joe Beard’s office as a reminder of the brain excuse that defendants increasingly ply in capital cases. A reminder of how pretty-colored pictures of the brain can be used to sway jurors’ perspectives on innocence versus guilt—on life in prison versus the death penalty.
Yes, the causal direction of the relationship between prefrontal dysfunction and violence is certainly open to question. Imaging does not demonstrate causality. There is only an association, and many possible counter-explanations. We’ll never know what Bustamante’s brain scan looked like the day before the homicide. We’ll never know if Bustamante’s poor orbitofrontal functioning caused him—in one way or another—to morph from an altar boy into a killer who beat an old man to death.
Nevertheless, let’s try to put the pieces together just as any detective or doctor would. Antonio Bustamante was as good as gold growing up, right until early adulthood. Then, at age twenty, a crowbar from hell struck the altar boy. Medical records from that time attest that it resulted in a very significant head injury. This injury likely increased Bustamante’s impulsivity and lowered his threshold for more accidents. Not long after the crow-bar injury, he was involved in a serious automobile accident that resulted in yet more head injuries.12
For the two decades that followed, Bustamante was incessantly in trouble with the law. He also had more bar brawls, which very likely resulted in further head injuries. It’s not exactly Jekyll and Hyde, but it’s not far off. At the relatively late age of twenty-two, he clocks up the first offense in his life—just after the crowbar and automobile incidents that resulted in head injury. Bustamante suddenly switches from good to evil, tumbling into a turbulent world of drugs and crime, eventually ending up at the house of his victim—and homicide. I think the order of events is telling.
Let’s put this Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation together with the medical fact that the area of the brain most susceptible to damage from head injury is the orbitofrontal cortex. Combine this with the well-known neurological fact that damage to the orbitofrontal cortex frequently results in disinhibited, impulsive behavior, poor decision-making, and a lack of emotional control.13 Blend this with Bustamante’s PET scan, revealing reduced orbitofrontal functioning. Consider that his crime was impulsive, not planned. While it was vicious, it was also very unsophisticated. His homicide was followed by disorganized, thoughtless actions. He made no attempt to cover his tracks.
You don’t have to be a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that it was the head injury at twenty—well beyond his control—that likely caused his poor prefrontal functioning and the later impulsive, violent offending. Even the plodding Doctor Watson with his nineteenth-century medical knowledge would likely have come to the same conclusion. But is this scenario true of all killers?
In striking contrast to Antonio Bustamante we have our other killer, Randy Kraft. You’ll recall from Randy’s early life history that we see nothing extraordinary. He grew up as an all-American boy in conservative Orange County in Southern California—not exactly the greatest risk factor for violence.
Would Randy have the same prefrontal impairments that we saw in Bustamante? Think about it. The selection of the victim. Working out how to orchestrate the evening beginning with friendly drinks. Being able to booze and schmooze without losing executive control over the situation. Timing the point to strike. The escalation to drugging the victim. Ensuring that he is well bound and cannot escape. All those bodies to get rid of. All that mess to clear up. Working on murder into the early hours only to show up for work the same morning and put in a hard day’s computing.
How did he do it? You can see for yourself in Randy’s brain scan. Take a good look at Figure 3.3, in the color-plate section, and focus on the three scans in a row. On the left you have the normal control, on the right you have a single murderer, and in the middle you have Randy Kraft—labeled “Multiple Murderer.” Check out the difference between Randy’s brain and the single murderer. What stands out is that he does not have reduced frontal functioning. Instead, that part of the brain is lit up like a Christmas tree.
To me, Randy is the exception that proves the rule. Here we have a man capable of killing approximately sixty-four people in a twelve-year period without getting caught. You have to have good prefrontal functioning to pull that off. He had an excellent ability to plan, to regulate his actions, to think ahead, to consider alternative plans of action, to sustain attention, and to keep on task. It’s exactly what you need to be a successful serial killer. He’s an exception in that he differs from other killers in his brain profile. He proves the rule that a lack of frontal functioning results in a lack of ability to plan, regulate, and control one’s impulses, resulting in not just homicide but early apprehension.
Let’s look further into Randy’s mental makeup, and piece together why he succeeded in staying so successful in slaying while other killers are caught more quickly. To begin with, in stark contrast with Antonio Bustamante, who had twenty-eight arrests before his homicide, Randy Kraft had almost nothing in his criminal record before he was apprehended. It was almost as clean as a whistle, and what little there was is illuminating. Let me elaborate.
This story starts in the summer of ’66. It was the summer of Speck—the summer that Richard Speck was killing nurses in Chicago. It was also the summer of a historic first that I will never forget. It was the one and only time that England won the World Cup in soccer. I was twelve and Randy was twenty-one. He was also never to forget that time, but for a different reason. It was his first police bust.
Randy was taking a stroll at Huntington Beach just south of L.A. and propositioned a young man on the beach. Unfortunately for him the young man was an undercover police officer. Randy was charged with lewd conduct but nothing came of it, even though it was duly recorded. That’s because he was told something that many first-time offenders are told: “Just don’t do it again.”14
I suspect this was a double message for Randy. The message said: (1) watch out, the police are about, and (2) smarten up your act, and you can beat the cops. Remember that this was five years before Randy’s first known homicide. It was a scare that smartened him up in a way that his well-functioning prefrontal cortex could register. Poor frontal functioning results in poor social judgment, loss of self-control, and an inability to modify behavior appropriately. It was good frontal functioning that helped Randy to learn from his mistakes and adjust his careless behavior accordingly. Once bitten, twice shy.
And yet Randy still wanted sex. What’s a man to do? Well, one adaptive strategy is to move from adults to adolescents—lower-hanging fruit that yields easier and more satisfying pickings, and a new sensual exploration of younger flesh. Given that there was also less chance of getting caught by an undercover vice officer, this is what Randy decided to do.
There are likely many victims in the four years since that initial sting that we’ll never know about. The only one who lived to tell the tale was Joey Fancher. It was March 1970, and young Joey was just a wayward thirteen-year-old from Westminster, not far from where Randy was living in Long Beach. Joey had skipped school to race up and down the Huntington Beach boardwalk on his bicycle. There Randy clapped eyes on him. He gave Joey a cigarette, and perhaps having a sense of the kind of kid Joey was, asked him a question. Had he ever had sex with a woman? No. Would he like it? Yes! So off the two sped on Randy’s motorbike, back to his apartment under the pretext of making young Joey’s adolescent dreams of lovemaking come true.
The bike ride itself might have been a buzz for the boy as he clung on to this cool beach dude, but a bigger buzz awaited him. Once in the apartment Randy brought out the next enticement—a bit of dope. The boy felt woozy with the cannabis, so Randy—the benevolent host that he was—brought Joey just the thing that would wipe away that wooze. Four little red capsules with some Spanish sangria to wash it down. Now the boy was all Randy’s, to fulfill his wildest wishes with. Kraft forced the disoriented boy to give him oral sex. Joey resisted, but would years later tell a jury, Kraft “put his hands on my head and forced me. I couldn’t do nothing. Period. It was like I was a rag doll.”15
Joey retched with the ejaculate in his mouth. Kraft then took him to his bedroom, placed him on the mattress, and sodomized him. You’d think that after taking a break to go to the bathroom Randy might have gotten the better of his overflowing emotion and backed off just a bit. Instead, he beat the boy mercilessly and sodomized him yet again. Joey the rag doll was passing in and out of consciousness in a drug-drenched haze. He could still feel the intense pain of the anal penetration. He wept with the physical and psychological torture. He vomited from the alcohol-drug mix. Randy made one more trip to the bathroom. This time he came back out and nonchalantly told the boy he was going off to work—as simple as that. Randy just left the apartment, as cool as a cucumber.
Herein lies the tragic moment. If the correct action had been taken, Kraft would have been removed from circulation. He would never have been able to continue his pedophilic impulses. But it was not to be. Joey got out of the house, crossed Ocean Boulevard in a haze, and was almost hit by a car. He just managed to make it across the road to a bar and appeal for help. A customer called 911 and Joey was taken to a hospital to have his stomach pumped to discharge the drugs and alcohol. Two police officers then returned with Joey and his family to Randy’s apartment, where Joey had left his new shoes. There they found a hoard of seventy-six photographs, largely of men in various stages of orgasm.
You’d really think something would have happened, but it didn’t. Joey was not much different from many other sexually abused children. Too ashamed of what had happened to him, Joey could not bring himself to tell the police and parents about the wretched rag-doll rape and beating at the hands of Kraft. It was too humiliating. Plus, the police had done their inspection without a search warrant. They did not charge Randy.
For his troubles Joey ended up that night getting a beating from his grandfather—who mercilessly used a board with a nail in it—for cutting school and almost losing his new shoes. This was on top of the intense pain from his bleeding and a torn rectum that took two weeks to heal, while he kept his lips firmly sealed on the rape.
As for Randy, I can imagine him carefully contemplating at the end of that evening how close he had come to conviction for pedophilic rape and assault. His prefrontal cortex was recognizing once again that he must be much more careful. The under part of the prefrontal cortex specializes in learning from experience and fine-tuning decision-making based on past experience.16 Randy was contemplating how to proceed. Dead men tell no tales. From now on, he would leave no witnesses, and to our knowledge he made his first killing the following year.
Let’s look back at Randy’s brain in Figure 3.3 and compare it this time to the normal control. You can see more activation in the very middle—the thalamus—as well as excellent activation of the occipital cortex at the bottom and the temporal cortex at the side-middle area. You don’t see as much activation in either the normal control or the one-off killer.
But we did see this in someone else who had a brain scan very much like Randy’s. That scan is shown above Randy’s in Figure 3.3. Take a look at this one and compare it to the three you see below it. Which one would you say it most approximates? It’s not a perfect match, but it does seem more similar to Randy’s than the others. Note the plentiful prefrontal activation at the top, the bilateral thalamic activation in the very middle, the occipital activation at the bottom, and the temporal lobe activation at the sides.
What’s interesting about this brain scan is that it’s my brain scan. As you noticed earlier, it’s hard for me not to see parallels between Randy’s life and mine, and the parallels go on. We both have flat feet and we both love tennis. Randy was one of the four top seeds in the Westminster High varsity tennis team. I was not as good, but I captained the tennis team at my college at Oxford University.
Randy also had an elder sister who was a primary-school teacher, just as I did—we were both influenced by that sisterly connection. At university I very much wanted to be a primary-school teacher and I was accepted for postgraduate teacher training at Brighton. I particularly wanted to teach eight-year-olds, because during university breaks I took children on holiday for a charitable trust. I had different age groups but felt I could connect with eight-year-olds. Randy also wanted to be a primary-school teacher and spent a semester working as a teacher’s aide with third-graders aged eight and nine. Neither of us sustained our career goal. We’ve both been caught drunk in our cars in Southern California by the police, albeit under different circumstances. And we both have the same brain functioning.
Am I a serial killer? I’ve never been caught and convicted for homicide. Nor any other offense, for that matter, with the exception of smuggling moon cake from Shanghai into Melbourne in 2000, for which I was fined about $175. Might I have a brain predisposition to be a serial killer? Maybe. Does this similarity in scans demonstrate that brain imaging is not diagnostic? I’d like to believe so.
Clearly there are “normal” people like myself—and perhaps yourself—with “abnormal” brain scans. And by the same token, there are “abnormal” violent individuals who have quite normal brain functioning. We cannot use brain imaging as a high-tech tool to tell who’s normal, who’s a one-off killer, and who’s a serial killer. It’s just not that simple. Yet at the same time we are beginning to gain important clues as to which brain regions—when dysfunctional—could give rise to violence.
So there we have them. Bustamante, Kraft, and Raine. Three different individuals with different yet somewhat similar backgrounds and brains. We’ve seen that the prefrontal cortex is a key brain area that is dysfunctional in murderers. And while I’d like to emphasize that fact, the exception presented by Randy Kraft gives us pause. While we cannot read too much into one case study, such fascinating individuals do, as we’re about to see, generate interesting hypotheses for further testing.
Analyzing Randy’s brain made us reflect upon an important distinction in violence research—between “proactive” and “reactive” aggression. This distinction has been around for a long time in the work of Ken Dodge, at Duke, and Reid Meloy, in San Diego. The basic idea is that some predatory people—the proactives—use violence to get what they want in life.
Randy was proactively aggressive. He carefully planned his actions, drugging his victims, having sex with them, and then impassionately dispatching them. Like a good computer specialist, he was methodical, logical, calculating, and an able trouble-shooter of problems. Proactively aggressive kids will bully others to get their money, games, and candy. There’s a means to an end. Proactives plan ahead. They are regulated, controlled, and driven by rewards that are either external and material or internal and psychological. They are also cold-blooded and dispassionate. They’ll carefully plan the heist they have been thinking through, and they’ll not think twice about killing if need be. Quite a lot of serial killers fit this bill—like Harold Shipman, in England, who killed an estimated 284, most of them elderly women; Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, whose terror campaign was conducted with mail bombs; Peter Sutcliffe, who bumped off thirteen women in the north of England; and Ted Bundy, who carefully killed about thirty-five young women, many of them college students.
Flip the aggression coin and the other side to the Randy Krafts of the world are “reactive” aggressives. These more hot-blooded individuals lash out emotionally in the face of a provocative stimulus. Someone has insulted them and called them names. They’ve lent money and it has not been returned. They’ve been verbally threatened. So they hit back in anger.
Take Ron and Reggie Kray, two identical twins who grew up in east London and operated in the swinging ’60s, the same time that Randy Kraft was operating in Southern California. Reggie Kray’s killing of Jack “the Hat” McVitie was an example of reactive aggression. It went like this.
McVitie had said mean things about Reggie’s schizophrenic twin brother, Ron. True, Ron Kray was fond of his food, and yes, he enjoyed exploring the boundaries of his sexuality. But there are more subtle ways of expressing these facts than to call him “a fat poof,” as Jack “the Hat” did. Jack also owed the Kray twins a hundred pounds, which did not help things. Adding injury to insult, one night walking out of a Chinese restaurant, Reggie bumped into McVitie, who said, “I’ll kill you, Kray, if it’s the last fucking thing I do.”17 Now, that’s not nice.
Reggie decided that that was going to be Jack McVitie’s last supper. Later that night Reggie pushed a knife into McVitie’s face and stabbed him to death in an explosive fit of pent-up anger. Reggie would have blown Jack’s head off, but his .32 automatic jammed twice, so he had to use a knife instead. Reactive aggression is much more emotional and unregulated. So in this context, although they were both murderers, Kraft and Kray were more like apples and oranges.
Given this proactive-reactive subdivision, I decided to categorize our forty-one murderers into proactive, predatory killers and reactive, emotional killers. We scanned all sources for all the information that we could dredge up on our subjects—attorney records, preliminary-hearing transcripts, court transcripts, national and local newspaper stories, reports and interviews from psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers, and of course rap sheets. We even interviewed some of the previous prosecution and defense attorneys for more information on the killings. In the end, we classified twenty-four murderers as “reactive” killers and fifteen as “proactive” killers.18 In a number of the homicides there were elements of both proactive and reactive aggression, so they were left unclassified.19 Think of a revenge killing, for example. Someone gets really upset by an insult, and in response they set about carefully getting their own back. They are indeed reacting to a slight, but they plan their sweet revenge carefully and thoughtfully, and obtain satisfaction in doing so—a psychological gain. They are not unlike terrorists who react to a sociopolitical, ideological insult by carefully planning a counterattack.
The results of our reactive-proactive comparisons are illustrated in Figure 3.4, in the color-plate section. Here you’re looking down on the brain and the prefrontal cortex is again at the top. This time the subregion you see is called the ventral—or underneath—prefrontal cortex. The reactive, hot-blooded murderer has low prefrontal functioning in the ventral subregion. In contrast, the predatory, cold-blooded killer has just as much prefrontal activation as the normal controls. Like Randy Kraft, they’ve got the goods to make a cold, calculated kill. In contrast, the hot-blooded killers are not so hot when it comes to prefrontal regulatory activation.
We see here—even at a visual level—that homicide is nuanced. Yes, there is a cerebral basis to violence. And yes, the prefrontal cortex is one of the culprits. But even among the tiny proportion of us who kill there are differences. Our group of predatory, proactive killers features the same regulatory brain control as Randy. The brain anatomy of murder is color-coded on a reactive-proactive aggression spectrum.
Wait a bit. If these predatory killers have relatively normal prefrontal functioning, what made them killers in the first place?
Let’s plumb the depths of the murderous mind. Deeper down in the brain, well below the civilized upper crust of the prefrontal cortex, we arrive at the limbic system, site of the emotions, and the more primitive parts of our neural makeup. Here the amygdala fires up our emotions and stimulates both predatory and affective attack.20, 21 The hippocampus modulates and regulates aggression and when stimulated sets in motion predatory attack.22, 23 The thalamus is a relay station between the emotional limbic areas and the regulatory cortical areas. The midbrain when stoked up gives expression to full-blooded affective emotional aggression.24
We combined these regions to get an overall measure of subcortical activation in the reactive murderers, the proactive murderers, and the normal controls. We found that both murderer groups showed higher activation of these subcortical limbic regions than the controls, especially in the more “emotional” right hemisphere of the brain. Below the façade of the boy-next-door that many cold-blooded killers are able to portray, there’s a lot bubbling under in that deeper subcortical cauldron of brain functioning.
What exactly is going on here? We can think of these deeper limbic emotion-related brain regions as partly being responsible for deep-seated aggression and rage, which both groups of killers have in common. The difference, however, is that the cold-blooded killers have sufficient prefrontal regulatory resources to act out their aggression in a relatively careful and premeditated fashion. They feel as angry as anyone, but instead of getting mad, they get even. In contrast, while the hot-blooded killers also have a mass of angry feelings simmering away, they don’t have sufficient prefrontal resources to express their anger in a controlled and regulated fashion. Someone gets their goat, they see red, and they blow their lid. Before you know it, blood flows.
This seeming paradox of good frontal regulatory control and increased limbic activation in predatory, proactive killers can be exemplified by a number of serial killers. Take Ted Bundy, who may have killed as many as a hundred women and girls, mostly college students. His homicides were the epitome of planning. With his arm in a sling to make him look vulnerable, Bundy would politely ask a young woman to help him carry something to his car. Using his beguiling charm, good looks, and debonair manners, he would lure her to a safe place where with demonic fury he would tear into her—biting her buttocks, gnawing her nipples, and bashing her head in a sexual orgy that ended in a brutal beating and killing. Despite all the planning and forethought that carefully preceded his attacks, once that stealthy lion had stalked his prey, he unleashed with ferocious fury the ultimate attack. The emotional limbic cauldron was overflowing into an unbridled, unregulated killing.
The study I did with Monte, like all initial findings, requires replication and extension. Another study of eleven impulsive murderers also using the continuous-performance task replicated our findings of reduced prefrontal activation.25 Yet because these studies are so hard to conduct, the reality is that virtually no other research group has been able to build upon and extend our initial findings on murderers.26 For many researchers, linking the brain to homicide is a bridge too far. Nobody can cross it.
I take our instrumental proactive murderers as a model for serial killers, on whom we know very little scientifically. If I could perform brain scans on a significant group of serial killers, I might expect a brain profile similar to our proactively aggressive killers—a hotbed of seething limbic activation bubbling under the good prefrontal functioning that allows them to carefully plan their actions. Yet even within this pack of serial killers, make no mistake—there will inevitably be several shades of gray lurking in the etiological shadows.
We’ve seen that the prefrontal cortex is critical in regulating and controlling both behavior and emotion. We’ve also seen that excessive subcortical activity may fuel the heightened emotion that we see in our violent offenders. We could stop there in our mapping of the mind of the murderer. We have the essence here in a nutshell. Yet as I readily acknowledged above, the scientific reality would be that we are being overly simplistic. We get back to the complexity of homicide, psychopathy, and criminal offending, and the inevitability that any attempt to explain and understand such behavior through functional neuroanatomy—the workings of the brain—is going to be enormously complex. Here I’ll give you just a piece of the exciting neuroanatomical action that is taking place today in our probing of the murderous mind.
Moving from the front of the brain, where we have been focusing, to the relatively less explored posterior part, we’ll start with the angular gyrus—area 39 in the map created by the German anatomist Korbinian Brodmann in 1909. The angular gyrus lies in the inferior, or lower, half of the parietal lobe, above the superior temporal cortex, and in front of the visual cortex. It is consequently in a prime position in the brain, lying at the junction of three of the four major lobes—the parietal, the temporal, and the occipital cortices. It connects and integrates information from many modalities—visual, auditory, somatosensory, vestibular—in order to perform complex functions. It lies on the surface of the brain. Find the top of your ear with your fingers and move them up a couple of inches—1.5 inches behind that spot is about where the angular gyrus lies.
We imaged the angular gyrus in our murderers and found significantly lower glucose metabolism in this structure than in those of the controls. In Sweden, researchers also found reduced cerebral blood flow in this area of the brain in impulsive, violent criminals.27 Other researchers have argued for angular gyral dysfunction in violent offenders as well.28
How might dysfunction of the angular gyrus translate to violence and offending? The angular gyrus is one of the latest areas of the brain to develop, and so, not surprisingly, the abilities it governs are complex and sophisticated. Unlike the visual cortex, which comes online immediately for the newborn infant, the angular gyrus subserves functions that include reading and arithmetic, abilities that as we know do not start early in life, but develop much later in childhood. So, for example, reductions in glucose metabolism in the left angular gyrus have been associated with reduced verbal ability,29 while damage to this region in neurological patients results in problems with reading and arithmetic30—complex functions that involve integration of information across multiple domains. Writing ability is also affected in a subtle way. For example, letters may be missing or duplicated, or be widely spaced. Punctuation is off, and capital letters may be disregarded.
So if the angular gyrus is not functioning well, then a child’s reading, writing, and arithmetic are going to suffer—the three R’s that are the foundations of scholastic performance. What do we know about violent offenders? They do poorly at school. If you do poorly at school, you’ll have a problem getting a job. You won’t get as much money as you’d like. You’ll then be more likely to use violence to get what you want in life—things you cannot get because of your educational failure. The root cause may be brain-based, but the path to violence may well lie along school and occupational failure—a social/educational process.
The hippocampus and its surrounding area, the parahippocampal gyrus, is another brain region that is disturbed in offenders. The hippocampus lies just behind the amygdala and its Latin name means sea horse. We’ve touched on this area above in connection with our sample of murderers, and other researchers are also finding that offenders have functional disturbances in this brain region. One study on antisocial, conduct-disordered boys from London showed reduced function of the hippocampus during an attention task.31 In Sweden, the neuroscientist Henrik Soderstrom found reduced hippocampal functioning to be associated with higher psychopathy scores in violent offenders.32 In the United States, Kent Kiehl has argued that the parahippocampal gyrus contributes to symptoms of psychopathy.33 Researchers in Germany led by Jürgen Müller also found reduced parahippocampal functioning in adult psychopaths,34 while Daniel Amen in California found the same finding in impulsive murderers.35
We need to ask why hippocampal impairment would make an individual more likely to offend. For one thing, it makes up part of the emotional limbic system. We know in turn that psychopaths and other offenders have abnormal emotional responses. The hippocampus is also part of the neural network that forms the basis for the processing of socially relevant information, and it is involved in recognizing and appraising objects. Disruption to such a system could in part relate to the socially inappropriate behavior shown by some violent individuals, as well as the misrecognition and misappraisal of ambiguous stimuli in social situations that can result in violent encounters.36
The hippocampus is critical for learning and memory. It’s one of the first areas to go in people with Alzheimer’s disease. With my longtime colleagues Rolf and Magda Loeber in Pittsburgh I studied the ability of schoolboys to remember both verbal material and nonverbal, visuospatial material. The result? Boys who had been persistently antisocial from the age of six to sixteen as rated by their parents and teachers did more poorly on these hippocampal memory tasks than controls.37
We also know that the hippocampus plays a role in fear conditioning, and as we’ll see in a later chapter, antisocial and psychopathic individuals have a particular deficit in this form of learning. Psychopaths are fearless individuals, as are many other violent offenders. It’s worth noting that researchers from Italy and Finland have found a structural abnormality in the hippocampus of psychopaths, which plays an important role in fear conditioning and emotional responding.38
Yet there’s more to the hippocampus than memory and ability. It is a key component in the limbic circuit that regulates emotional behavior,39 and it has been implicated in aggressive, antisocial behavior in both animals and humans. In animals, it regulates aggression through its connections to deep structures in the middle of the brain, including the lateral hypothalamus and what’s called the periaqueductal gray, structures important in controlling both defensive rage attack and predatory attack.40 So a poorly functioning hippocampus will be of little help to either an offender who is beginning to fly off the handle in the first stage of an argument, or one who is seeking revenge.
Another brain area that is believed to be dysfunctional in offenders is the posterior cingulate, lying more toward the rear of the head and deep inside the middle of the brain. This region has been found to be poorly functioning in adult criminal psychopaths,41 conduct-disordered boys,42 and aggressive patients.43 Because this brain region is also important in the recall of emotional memories44 and the experiencing of emotions,45 a disturbance to this area will likely result in a disturbance in emotion, including causing anger. We also know that the posterior cingulate is involved in self-referential thinking—the ability to reflect back on oneself and understand how one’s behavior can affect others.46 So if a psychopath fails to understand how his actions can harm others, this could help explain his thoughtless, antisocial acts and his failure to accept responsibility for his actions.
Killing is one thing. Striking your wife across the face is another. The trouble with research like mine on murder is that killing is very rare. What about more common acts of serious violence like spousal abuse?
Of course, I’m not saying that spousal abuse is trivial by any means, but it’s far more common than homicide. Are spouse-abusers different from killers in brain functioning? Or can we discern similar patterns in these common-variety offenders? To help answer that question, let’s take a trip to Hong Kong.
It’s a fantastic place. I took my family there when I was on sabbatical at Hong Kong University. People were so sweet and polite. The very first morning that I took my two young boys, Andrew and Philip, to Victoria Kindergarten in the Fortress Hill area, we were stopped in the street by a young woman. She asked if she could help hold the boys’ hands. Well, why not? So off we all marched, hand in hand to preschool, where she duly said good-bye to the boys, thanked me, and vanished into thin air amid the bustling streets.
Strange, isn’t it? Maybe she was a nutcase, but I don’t think so. She was a smartly dressed professional. To her, my two-year-old tots were cute curiosities, decked out in their red school blazers, gray trousers, satchels, and mixed Asian-and-Caucasian faces. It was typical of the graciousness, courtesy, and respect for the family and children that Hong Kongers have.
Yet lurking beneath that civilized façade lies the cruel visage of domestic violence. I did a survey of 622 Hong Kong undergraduate students. They were not all rich kids by any means, but they were largely from the privileged classes. You don’t expect much to have gone on in their homes in their formative years. But I nevertheless asked them how their parents dealt with conflicts before the kids were eleven—before they could turn into troublesome teenagers. Sixty-two percent had parents who would insult or swear at them, 65 percent had parents who would do or say something just to spite them, while 48 percent were slapped or spanked.
No big deal, you’ll say, if you remember being on the receiving end of a good spanking or two as a child. Surely this happens in the best of homes. But let’s get beyond the simple stuff. Fifty-one percent went on to admit that their parents would hit them with an object. Forty percent were physically beaten. Six percent had actually been choked, while 5 percent had been deliberately burned or scalded. Seven percent had even been threatened with a knife or gun. In all cases it was their own parents perpetrating the abuse. So how often did your parents choke and burn you or put a gun to your head before you turned eleven?
Serious domestic violence was pretty rampant even in the homes of these educated, better-off undergraduates. True base rates are likely a lot higher, since people forget what really happened after ten years. Plus, you never want to admit—even to yourself—that you had parents bordering on the sadistic and inhuman. Some of these kids were having the living daylights beaten out of them—some repeatedly—behind closed doors. And these are the better-off kids. Heaven knows what was happening—and still is going on—to kids from much poorer homes in Hong Kong.
And where the kids are getting beaten, the wives are being bashed. Today it’s hard to believe, but until about 1980 spousal abuse was hidden under the carpet at home.47 A man who gave his wife a belting was not considered a criminal; such treatment was part and parcel of everyday married life. Even after the recent criminalization of spousal abuse, wife battering is still rife. The prevalence of spousal abuse each year is approximately 13 percent in the United States, with an estimated 2 million to 4 million victims a year.48 It accounts for about half of all female homicides and is a leading cause of injury to developing fetuses.49 It’s a shocking, disgraceful, criminal offense, and yet it’s all too common and frequently tolerated in some households.
Let’s face up to these spouse-abusers. If we can look beyond their eyes and into their brains, do these men also have a dysfunctional cortex? They batter women, but is that because they have battered brains?
Tatia Lee is a brilliantly creative clinical neuroscientist at Hong Kong University with a penchant for sailing into uncharted waters. She conducted some of the very first brain-imaging work on lie detection, and she was just a couple of doors down from my office during my time there in 2005. Together with her graduate student, we teamed up to test our ideas on spousal abuse. We recruited twenty-three men referred by police to social-welfare departments and psychology practices for physically abusing their wives. Our main hypothesis was that such men may overrespond to emotional stimuli, and that that may in part be a cause of their abuse. We measured their reactive and proactive aggression and also gave them two verbal and visual emotion tasks.
The verbal task is called the emotional Stroop task. The subject is first presented with the name of a color, like “blue.” They then see an emotionally negative word like “kill,” which is either printed in blue or another color, and have to judge whether the color of the word “kill” was blue or not. The same thing is done with nonemotional words, like “change.” We then measure how long it takes them to respond. People who take longer to respond to the emotional word than to the neutral word are showing a cognitive bias to negative affect stimuli—meaning that the negative emotional nature of the word has hijacked their brain’s attention and slowed down their responses.
In the visual task, the subjects viewed neutral pictures like a chair and also emotionally provocative pictures—things like a man holding up another man in a robbery with a gun to his head, or a man holding a woman from behind with a sharp knife across her throat. In both of these verbal and visual tasks we scanned their brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Our research resulted in fourfold findings.
First, spouse-abusers were strongly characterized by reactive aggression—where the individual responds aggressively in the face of provocation. In contrast, once we controlled for this, the spouse-abusers showed no proactive aggression. They were not using aggression in a planned, premeditated, manipulative fashion.
Second, in the emotional Stroop task, the spouse-abusers were slower in responding to emotional words. Negative emotional stimuli were capturing their attention much more than normal.
Third, in functional brain scans during the emotional Stroop task, our spouse-abusers showed much greater activation of the emotional amygdala to negative-emotion words, together with less activation in the regulatory prefrontal cortex.
Fourth, when batterers saw pictures of visually threatening stimuli, they showed hyper-responding in widespread brain areas covering the occipital-temporal-parietal regions. These regions are exceptionally sensitive to the recognition of objects50 and to spatial perception.51 They indicate that batterers experience greater visual arousal when exposed to threatening stimuli.
Putting these four findings together, a pernicious pattern unfolds. Spouse-abusers have a reactive aggressive personality that makes them more likely to lash out when provoked. Emotional words inordinately grab their attention. They are less able to inhibit the distracting emotional characteristics of stimuli, resulting in impaired cognitive performance. When presented with aggressive stimuli their brains overrespond at an emotional level and underrespond at a cognitive control level. Spouse-abusers are constitutionally different from other men.
These neurocognitive characteristics of batterers may partly contribute to their abusive behavior. Some researchers have documented that batterers do not listen to reason, and instead emotionally react out of all proportion to a situation.52 Excessive attentional processing to a visual stimulus like a frown or a scolding voice may distract the batterer’s attention and make him misinterpret the social interchange. It could contribute to the racing thoughts, irrational behavior, and escalating negative emotion that characterize wife-batterers.53
To my knowledge, these are the first physiological studies of any kind to show brain abnormalities in spouse-abusers when reacting to emotional stimuli, and the first to demonstrate hyperreactivity to threatening stimuli. Our findings challenge an exclusively social perspective on spousal abuse and suggest instead a neurobiological predisposition to battering. Historically, the prevailing clinical perspective has been that spousal abuse is a conscious, deliberate, and premeditated use of power to subjugate and control the female partner for selfish instrumental gain.54 An alternative hypothesis that Tatia and I suggest is that spousal abuse has a significant brain-based reactively aggressive component.55
Is this a newfangled excuse for wife-abuse? I’m not exactly saying that abusers are not to blame. And I’m not saying that all abusers are like this. But I do think we need to recognize that there’s more to domestic violence than the traditional feminist perspective cares to admit. Feminists argue that the cause of spousal abuse lies in a patriarchal society that sanctions men’s using physical power to control women. We argue instead that neurobiology nudges some men to overreact at home and that we need to consider a contribution by the brain to spousal abuse. Why? Because traditional treatment programs to treat spouse-abusers based on the feminist perspective simply do not work.56 We need to incorporate neurobiological perspectives into domestic-abuse treatment programs if we genuinely want to eradicate this completely unacceptable behavior of men toward women.
So far we have been talking about people who are characterized by the media as brutes, monsters, and villains. We have been discussing despicable deeds that include murder, child rape, and wife-battering. And you may be sitting there dispassionately reflecting on how this other half lives, and what exactly makes these mean men tick.
But what about you? What’s ticking away inside you when you perpetrate an antisocial act? Oh, so you’re not antisocial? You really think that? Well, not perhaps antisocial at the level that we have been discussing so far, but let’s turn to two arenas that will be much more familiar to your daily experience than murder and spouse-battering. You’re not perhaps so wonderful after all.
Let’s start with lying. And please do not protest your innocence any further, because as Mark Twain rightly put it, “everybody lies—every day, every hour, awake, asleep, in his dreams, in his joy, in his mourning.”57 You do lie—honestly you do. So how do we probe your antisocial mind? What instruments can we use to detect when people are telling whoppers?
“Oh, Agent Starling, you think you can dissect me with this blunt little tool?” Hannibal Lecter in the classic thriller The Silence of the Lambs had a point, and Clarice Starling, the FBI agent interviewing him, should have known better. The paper-and-pencil questionnaire tools she was using on the serial killer Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter in his prison cell have been traditionally used by forensic specialists to probe the minds of murderers. But they have been ineffective in revealing much that is fundamentally wrong with psychopaths like Lecter. After all, psychopaths have been known to tell a white lie or two about themselves, so do you really think they will tell the truth in a simple questionnaire? We need something far sharper than a blunt pencil and paper questionnaire to learn when people are fibbing.
A big fat sixty-ton magnet of the type used in MRI does not sound very sharp, but it’s not a blunt tool. When it comes to discerning truth from fiction, it’s as sharp as a razor. My academic friends Tatia Lee, at Hong Kong University, Sean Spence, at the University of Sheffield,58 and Dan Langleben, at the University of Pennsylvania, are a triumvirate of pioneering scholars who each independently stumbled onto a sublime truth about lying—the prefrontal cortex is critical.
Tatia Lee took normal individuals—just like you—and put them into a scanner. She then gave them tasks during which they had to either tell the truth or lie. Sometimes they lied about themselves, just as we do in life. So a question might be, “Were you born in Darlington?” “Yes,” I would say. “No,” you would say. We are telling the truth. And while that is happening, Tatia collects data on what the brain is doing. Then she reverses the situation. “Were you born in Darlington?” “No,” I say. “Yes,” you say. This is an autobiographic lie—similar to when you sometimes lie to your friend about whether you are free to meet up tonight or not.
In another task, subjects were given a simple memory task to complete in which a three-digit number—like 714—was quickly followed by either the same or a different set of numbers. The subject had to say whether the sets of digits were the same or different. Sometimes they were instructed to tell the truth, while at other times they had to deliberately lie and feign memory impairment—just like some people feign injury after a claimed accident to financially gain from medical insurance.
It did not matter what the task was, Tatia found that lying was consistently associated with increased activation in the prefrontal cortex as well as areas of the parietal cortex.59 At just the same time as Tatia was doing her work in Hong Kong, Sean Spence60 and Dan Langleben61 independently found essentially the same pattern of findings in England and the United States, results that span three different continents and cultures. In stark contrast, telling the truth was not associated with any increase in cortical activation.
What’s going on here? The bottom line to deceit is that this antisocial act is a complex executive function that requires a lot of frontal lobe processing. Telling the truth is actually very easy. Telling tall tales is much harder and requires much more processing resources and brain activation. Deception involves theory of mind. When I lie to you about where I was at eight p.m. on Wednesday, January 27, I need to have an understanding of what you know about me—and what you do not know. Was I really celebrating my birthday with my family? I need to have a sense of what you think is plausible, and what is not. For this “mind reading” we need to recruit a number of brain regions that form connections between the frontal cortex and subregions in the temporal and parietal lobes.
Yesterday it was paper-and-pencil tools. Today it’s becoming brain-imaging paraphernalia. By combining brain-imaging methodology with machine learning—equally new sophisticated statistical techniques—Dan Langleben and Ruben Gur, at the University of Pennsylvania, have been demonstrating accuracy rates upward of 88 percent in detecting deception. The disconcerting question is, How much longer will our lying minds remain stubbornly private to the latest investigative lie-detection tools? The current view is that lie detection based on functional imaging is not sufficiently developed for use in courts of law,62 although that could conceivably change in the future. For now, however, let’s turn to another antisocial arena that we frequently find ourselves caught up in and conflicted by—making moral decisions.
You know cannabis is illegal, but you’ve taken it anyway. You know you should not download movies from the Internet, but you persist in breaking copyright laws. And now you are reporting your taxes and wondering if you should nudge up those tax-deductible charitable contributions a hundred or two.
We’ve all had those moments of being torn between right and wrong—between heaven and hell. The devil and the angel are battling it out hell-for-leather inside our hot heads, beating out the eventual choice with hammer and tongs. You’ve wondered what on earth to do.
But you’ve never wondered what’s going on inside your brain during these moments, have you? That’s what a lot of social scientists and philosophers have been pondering for over a decade. And now we have some fairly clear-cut answers.
It goes like this. We slot you inside a brain scanner and present you with a series of moral dilemmas using visual scripts. We’ll start with what is called a “personal” moral dilemma—one that’s really up close and personal. This one could almost have been plucked from a page in the life of Phineas Gage, a railway worker whom you’ll meet in a later chapter. You’re standing on a footbridge looking down on a railway track. Below you, farther back along the track, is a runaway trolley that is about to plow into a group of five unsuspecting railway men working farther ahead on the track. Standing next to you is a rather corpulent gentleman.
Here’s the deal. If you do nothing, five innocent men are going to die right before your eyes. Alternatively, you can push the big bloke off the bridge. He’s a goner, but his big body will block the runaway trolley and save the lives of five men. What do you do?
You only have two choices. You are out there on that bridge, hearing the death rattle of the oncoming trolley and envisioning the gory carnage that will occur. No, you’re not allowed to throw yourself off the bridge instead—saint that you are. You’re just not big enough to block the trolley. Calling out to the railway workers won’t work either.
Put this book down and reflect on your decision—to do nothing or to push the man off the bridge.
It’s difficult, isn’t it? And we can push and pull our minds in different directions. Are you really going to stand idly by and let five innocent men die? Look, the obese guy is likely to die early from heart disease anyway—why not give his life a dignified and worthwhile ending by saving five innocent men?
Then again, isn’t it sort of wrong to kill? But at the same time it’s five for one—surely you cannot ignore those odds? This dilemma is damned difficult—it’s very personal and involves a high degree of conflict.
Josh Greene, an amazing philosopher and neuroscientist at Harvard, published the first study to describe what happens at a neural level during personal moral dilemmas like this.63 Compared to more “impersonal” moral dilemmas that do not bring you face-to-face with someone else, your brain shows increased activation in a circuit that comprises the medial prefrontal cortex, the angular gyrus, the posterior cingulate, and the amygdala. This makes sense, as these brain areas contribute to complex thinking, and the ability to step outside of yourself and evaluate the bigger social picture.
But let’s get back to how you actually processed the dilemma. I’m not as interested in exactly what decision you came to as I am in how you felt. Wasn’t it awkward? Didn’t you feel uncomfortable? You may have even physically squirmed in your seat a bit just as one undergraduate student did in my class earlier this week when I described this dilemma. This is where that amygdala and other limbic activation comes in, contributing to the emotional “conscience” component of moral decision-making alongside some subregions of the prefrontal cortex.
What your actual answer was is not entirely uninteresting either. About 85 percent of you felt you could not bring yourself to push that man off the bridge. About 15 percent, however, would have sacrificed him. These numbers are obtained in large-scale surveys of moral dilemmas. In contrast, if you put the same question to patients who have lesions to the ventral prefrontal cortex—people who as we’ll later see are more psychopathic than the rest of us—that “push-him-off” rate triples to about 45 percent.64
If these same patients with ventral prefrontal lesions are with other villagers hiding in a cellar from invading troops above, and if their baby starts crying, they are three times more likely to smother their baby to prevent the enemy from finding and killing everyone. This is a high-conflict dilemma. They are making a utilitarian moral decision—the greater good of the greater number.
Don’t worry too much if you chose to push the man off the bridge or smother your own baby. The seventeenth-century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who espoused utilitarianism, would have been proud of you. It does not necessarily mean you have a frontal brain lesion or that you are a psychopath—although you may have a slightly different way of thinking about life than others.
Josh Greene was not able to image the ventral prefrontal cortex back in 2001 when he conducted his groundbreaking study, due to what we call “susceptibility artifact,” but many other studies have replicated and extended Greene’s findings and shown activation of this region during moral-dilemma tasks.65, 66 The ventral prefrontal region is critical for making “appropriate” moral decisions—or at least passive decisions that result in no harm to others.
We’ll come back to morality very soon, but here I want to recap where we stand with our murderous minds. I’ve been arguing that the prefrontal cortex and limbic system are misfiring in violent offenders. We also found that our murderers had poorer functioning in the angular gyrus. We’ve seen that other studies of antisocial individuals reveal abnormalities in the posterior cingulate, the amygdala, and the hippocampus, while others document abnormal functioning in the superior temporal gyrus in violent offenders,67 psychopaths,68 and antisocial individuals.69
Let’s now compare this hit list of brain areas in antisocials to the hit list activated when normal people contemplate a moral dilemma. What are the areas most commonly activated across studies in moral tasks? They are none other than the polar/medial prefrontal cortex, the ventral prefrontal cortex, the angular gyrus, the posterior cingulate, and the amygdala.70 There is an undeniable degree of overlap.
Let me make the point visually for you. Figure 3.5, in the color-plate section, puts together these two sets of findings—the antisocial brain and the moral brain—to create a neural model of morality and antisociality. The top scan slices the brain right down the middle from front to back—you can see the nose on the left. The middle scan slices the brain head-on. The bottom slice is a bird’s-eye view looking down on the brain. Brain regions implicated in both offending and moral decision-making are colored yellow. Areas found to be abnormal only in offenders are colored in red, and areas linked only to moral-judgment tasks are colored in green.
You can see that there are substantial areas of overlap between antisocial/psychopathic behavior and making moral judgments. Brain regions common to both include the ventral prefrontal cortex, the polar/medial prefrontal areas, the amygdala, the angular gyrus, and the posterior superior temporal gyrus.
It’s not a perfect match by any means. Furthermore, while the posterior cingulate is activated during moral judgment, evidence implicating this region in antisocial behavior is sparse to date, although studies have indeed found abnormalities in the posterior cingulate in psychopaths,71 impulsively aggressive patients,72 and spouse-abusers.73 Nevertheless, there are commonalities we cannot ignore. Some parts of offenders’ brains critical for thinking morally just don’t seem to be functioning very well.
We have been learning what brain areas are activated when normal people make moral decisions. But what happens in the brains of psychopaths when given the same moral dilemmas?
Historically, psychopaths have been viewed as “morally insane.” On the outside they seem normal, and can even be very pleasant, sociable, and likeable. Ted Bundy is a classic example of a serial killer who had a charismatic personality that allowed him to lure young female victims into his deadly trap.74 Yet when it comes to having a sense of morality, there is something missing in psychopaths. Here we’ll take a closer look at what this “moral insanity” is like from a real-world case. What exactly is broken in the brains of psychopaths at the moral level?
My sister Roma was a nurse. My wife, Jianghong, is a nurse. My cousin Heather is a nurse. So allow me to pick the case of a nurse for our discussion of a breakdown in the moral brain. “Jolly” Jane Toppan cheerfully killed at least thirty-one people in Massachusetts during a six-year period, from 1895 to 1901. Like Randy Kraft, she was not caught for several years. Nicknamed “Jolly Jane” by hospital staff and patients due to her gregarious and happy demeanor, she became one of the most successful private nurses in Cambridge.
Jolly Jane liked to live life to the full. Like many serial killers, she enjoyed experimenting in her modus operandi and exploring her life-or-death power over others. Like many modern-day female offenders, she particularly took pleasure in experimenting with drugs—but in an unusual way. One of her greatest excitements in life was to see life itself slowly sucked out of the patients she cared for. She would first inject them with an overdose of morphine. She would then sit patiently with them, gazing into their eyes almost like a lover, observing the moment when their pupils contracted and their breath shortened.75 Just when they were about to sink into a coma, Jane would revive them with a jab of atropine—an alkaloid extracted from deadly nightshade. It blocks the activity of the vagus nerve. This causes the contracted pupils to dilate, the slowing heart to beat rapidly, the cooling body to sweat, and shaking spasms to overcome the patient. Eventually they would die, but not before Jane had her high from observing their eyes dilate and watching their bodies contort in a slow death.
As with Randy Kraft, the only insight we have into what else Jolly Jane would get up to during these murderous moments comes from the dramatic testimony of the one individual to survive an attack. Amelia Phinney was a thirty-six-year-old patient hospitalized with a uterine ulcer in 1887. Jolly Jane attentively floated around her like Florence Nightingale. The good nurse gave her patient a drink purportedly to help her pain—to Amelia it tasted bitter. Then Amelia felt her throat dry up, her body turn numb, and her eyes become heavy. She felt herself sinking into sleep.
At that point she became aware of something unusual—Jane was pulling back the bedsheets and getting into bed with her. Jolly Jane stroked her hair, kissed her face, and cuddled up to her. After a period of carnal embraces, Jane jumped onto her knees to peer deeply into her patient’s pupils. She then gave Amelia another drink—presumably atropine to reverse the physiological symptoms of morphine. At that critical point, Jane abruptly disengaged. Amelia was aware of Jane dashing quickly out of the room—presumably because she heard someone approaching.
So Amelia Phinney lived to tell the tale, but not immediately. To this patient, the experience was so utterly bizarre that it must surely have been a dream during her ill state. Like Joey Fancher, who only testified a long time after his attack, in the court case of Randy Kraft, Amelia kept her bizarre story to herself. It came to light fourteen years later, after Jolly Jane’s arrest, in 1901.76 As with Randy Kraft, a serial killer who could have been caught, she continued on her killing spree.
Unlike many other female serial killers, who frequently kill for monetary gain, Jane was not profiting from her murders. The killings did, however, give her what she herself termed “voluptuous delight”—a shorthand nineteenth-century term for a sexual turn-on. Today she would be called a lust serial killer—which is very unusual for a female. Yet while Jane needed her sexual turn-ons, as a nurse aren’t there other ways of getting such worldly pleasures? How could she morally justify her actions given the awful loss of innocent life?
It seemed almost motiveless malignity. It doesn’t morally make much sense. And in fact, this is essentially how Jane herself sums it all up:
When I try to picture it, I say to myself, “I have poisoned Minnie Gibbs, my dear friend. I have poisoned Mrs. Gordon. I have poisoned Mr. and Mrs. Davis.” This does not convey anything to me, and when I try to sense the condition of the children and all the consequences, I cannot realize what an awful thing it is. Why don’t I feel sorry and grieve over it? I cannot make any sense of it.77
Jane could never understand herself. Nor could those who knew her. After her arrest a deluge of letters were received attesting to the fact that she was a compassionate, dedicated, and caring professional. She could not have committed these heinous deeds. If you look at her picture, in Figure 3.6, and peer into her eyes, can’t you too see a gentle, kindhearted, motherly nurse?
Jane racked her mind for the cause of her crimes. She could gaze longingly into the eyes of her dying victims and experience her voluptuous delight while watching their agony. She knew what she was doing. She knew she was killing. Jane was utterly perplexed when at her trial in 1902 she was found not guilty by reason of insanity. To her mind, she could not possibly be insane because she knew full well what she was doing.78 She truly could not make sense of it.
But I feel I can. And I literally mean feel. Jane knew cognitively what was moral behavior and what was not. Of course she could tell right from wrong at a thinking, cognitive level. But she did not have the feeling of what is moral. She could not empathize emotionally with the human suffering that resulted from her actions. She couldn’t grieve or even feel sorry for her victims. I strongly suspect it was because she had a defective amygdala and ventral prefrontal cortex. She lacked the feeling for what is moral.
That moral feeling, centered on the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, is the emotional engine that translates the cognitive recognition that your act is immoral into behavioral inhibition. It holds you back from committing an immoral act, even though a part of you wants to move forward to gain your voluptuous pleasure. I submit that this emotional brake on immorality functions much more poorly in psychopathic individuals like Jolly Jane.
Jane could look into her victims and literally see them suffer. But what she could not see was her functional brain scan. There I believe she would have seen the faulty emotional wiring of her immoral brain that contributed to her killings. Jane died at the age of eighty-one, just before the outbreak of World War II, so of course I cannot test my theory. Yet if we look back at Jane’s history, we can at least recognize the many social and psychological trappings of a psychopathic personality.
Jane was born into a desperately poor family of Irish immigrants. Her mother died when she was only a year old, and she clearly suffered from the type of maternal deprivation and breakage of the mother-infant bonding process found in the backgrounds of psychopaths.79 Add to this a poor father who was mentally ill and could not care for his family, and a grandmother equally destitute and unable to care for the children. Jane was institutionalized until the age of five, and passed off as an Italian orphan because of the shame of being Irish. She was “adopted” into a home where she was treated as a servant girl.80 With an early environment like this, the seeds of psychopathy grow rapidly.
The young Jane duly went on to exhibit the psychopathic traits of being sociable and charming, developing the reputation of being the life and soul of the party. She evidenced pathological lying and deception, weaving fanciful stories of her father living in China, her sister marrying an English lord, and the czar of Russia offering her a nursing position. She was a stimulation-seeker who also committed acts of petty theft against other nurses and patients. She conned and manipulated her hospital superiors. Among her victims were her own stepsister and her stepsister’s husband. She was essentially superficial, with her surface joviality hiding a more disturbed, deep-seated personality disorder.
All of these characteristics are features of psychopaths,81 and psychopathy provides a fertile ground for serial killers. While Jane gave detailed confessions on thirty-one murders, she claimed before she was locked away, in 1902, “It would be safe to say that I killed at least 100 persons.”82 Unless you are like Randy Kraft, who used a scorecard to keep an accurate tally, it’s easy to lose count.
So Jane was a psychopath. But would she have the type of brain functioning that might explain her moral insanity? While we cannot scan Jolly Jane’s brain, we can scan the brains of her fellow psychopaths today and put them through the same moral dilemmas given to normal people.
This is exactly what my gifted graduate student Andrea Glenn did. We’d discovered that temp agencies are home to higher-than-normal numbers of psychopaths, a point we’ll discuss in greater detail in chapter 4. Just like Josh Greene, Andrea confronted our subjects with personal, emotional, and moral dilemmas that involved harm to other people: Should you smother your crying baby to save yourself and other townspeople hiding from terrorists who would otherwise hear the sound and kill you all? We also presented subjects with less emotional, impersonal moral dilemmas: Should you keep money you found in a lost wallet?
Andrea found that individuals with high psychopathy scores showed reduced activity in the amygdala during emotional, personal moral decision-making.83 While the amygdala, the neural seat of emotion, shows a bright glow in normal people when faced with emotion-provoking moral dilemmas, this emotional candle is barely flickering in highly psychopathic individuals.
Findings demonstrate that amygdala functioning is disrupted during moral decision-making in psychopathy and seems to be at its core. Without such amygdala activation, individuals may not think twice about conning and manipulating others. Just like Jane, they happily live out their immoral lives without feeling guilt or remorse. So when Jolly Jane manipulated others, stole their possessions, or thought about killing someone for frivolous reasons, she did not have that amygdala activation firing inside her to hold her back—no sense of shame.
Indeed, Jane’s emotions were almost dead. Like a pathological stimulation-seeker, she was so removed from her natural feelings that she had to go to very extreme lengths to register a tangible feeling of “voluptuous delight.” Consider the killing of Elizabeth, her sister-in-law. Jane confessed that she had deliberately prolonged her life so that she could witness more of her suffering: “I held her in my arms and watched with delight as she gasped her life out.”84 Cuddling and groping in bed with Elizabeth in the moments of her sister-in-law’s death was just about the only way Jolly Jane could apparently be truly happy, and experience some sense of emotion in her life.
We know the amygdala is centrally involved in responding to cues of distress in others, thus guiding individuals away from antisocial behavior,85 and we also know from work by the leading psychopathy researcher James Blair that psychopaths are less capable of recognizing negative emotions—including fear and sadness—in others’ faces. So when Jane with her malfunctioning amygdala peered with intense curiosity into her victim’s hapless eyes and felt their bodies, I think she was trying to register an emotion in the face of her victim. Was her patient experiencing fear? Was it sadness? Or perhaps it was pleasure? Jane’s emotional brain and amygdala were desperately stumbling around, trying to work it all out. That voyeuristic experience piqued her curiosity while, simultaneously, she was devoid of any natural feeling that could give her cause for moral concern at what she was doing.
Andrea Glenn found that the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate, and the angular gyrus were also dysfunctional in psychopaths during moral decision-making and were particularly associated with interpersonal features of the psychopath—superficial charm, lying and deception, egocentricity, and manipulation. These brain areas are also part of the neural circuit of moral decision-making and are involved in self-reflection, emotion perspective-taking, and integrating emotion into social thinking.86 In turn, we can certainly see that Jane’s social thinking was very disturbed. She could not take the emotional perspective of her victims. Try as hard as she might, she could not reflect and understand emotionally even her own behavior—she could not integrate emotion into social thinking. This partly explains her perplexing, psychopathic behavior. And given our brain-imaging findings on psychopaths, I suspect that Jane’s aberrant behavior can be explained by a fundamental failure in the neural circuitry of morality. That’s what I believe was egregiously wrong with Jane’s psychopathic brain.
We have seen in this chapter that the violent brain functions very differently from yours. If we had to pick the area of primary difference, it would be the prefrontal cortex. We’ve seen how impulsive, reactive aggression can result from a lack of normal regulatory and inhibitory functioning. We have witnessed this in the reactive, impulsive, hot-blooded homicide committed by Antonio Bustamante. Being more regulated and controlled, proactively aggressive murderers do not have that same degree of prefrontal dysfunction, but like their reactively aggressive counterparts they do have a mass of limbic activity bubbling over in their brains that fuels violent, aggressive outbursts follows their careful planning.
We’ve also seen that there is not one but multiple brain areas which, when dysfunctional, can predispose one to violence. It’s not just the dorsal and ventral regions of the prefrontal cortex that are dysfunctional, but also the amygdala, the hippocampus, the angular gyrus, and the temporal cortex. Yet future research will show it’s even more complicated. The antisocial brain is a patchwork of dysfunctional neural systems and we are only just on the threshold of putting together these pieces to better understand it.
We’ve seen that poor brain functioning is not restricted to rare forms of violence. We’ve witnessed a frontal-limbic imbalance in relatively common forms of violence like domestic abuse—the overactivation of the amygdala combined with under-activation of the regulatory frontal cortex. Increasingly, the scope of functional brain imaging research is seeping into our personal lives. We are detecting a network of brain areas that unite in shaping the moral decisions we make on a daily basis—brain areas that are just not functioning normally in “morally insane” psychopaths and serial killers like Jolly Jane Toppan. These individuals lack the feeling of what is moral, and that partly accounts for their inexplicably egregious behavior.
But let’s return to our point of departure. What do we really make of the horrific homicides perpetrated by Randy Kraft? We’ve seen how highly regulated and controlled this computing consultant was. Surely Randy had enough prefrontal control to keep his carnal desires in check. Randy was a heartless, cold-blooded killer—and I mean heartless almost literally. In our next stop through the body in this anatomy of violence we will leave the brain and travel to the heart of the matter—to the cardiovascular and autonomic nervous system.