All about evil and its manifestations, by Katherine Ramsland — A Look At Evil’s Face — Crime Library
“Evil is best understood as privation, as the absence of an appreciation for the goodness of the world and for the full humanity of all the creatures in the world.” Andrew Delbanco
(AP)
To know evil, you have only to stand on the road in Jasper, Texas, where on June 7, 1998, three white men offered a ride to a 49-year-old black man, James Byrd Jr., who was on his way home from an anniversary party. Instead of taking him where he wanted to go, they beat, kicked, and tortured him merely for the color of his skin, and then spray-painted his face black before chaining him by the ankles to the back of their truck. As they sped down an isolated logging road, dragging him for nearly three miles, he tried keeping his head up, but his skin ripped off, his bones broke, and his elbows were shattered to the bone. When his head hit a culvert, it was ripped off, along with his right arm. What was left of his torso was dumped in front of a church for its black congregation to find. In TNT’s documentary, The Faces of Fear, Dr. Molefi Kete Asante of Temple University points out multiple circles still evident on the road, drawn there to mark 75 separate places where Byrd’s body parts were found. “On this road,” Asante says quietly, “I am confronted with the immensity of the cruelty that can exist in the human heart.”
To know evil, you have only to see the skeletal remains of the World Trade Center’s twin towers in Manhattan, where two hijacked American planes ended the lives of thousands, and recall the words of Osama bin Laden: “We don’t differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians. They are all targets in this fatwa.” Many workers just getting their morning coffee jumped from smoking windows to their deaths or waited in full awareness as the massive buildings collapsed on them.
The problem of evil is ancient. It might even be archetypalso much a part of us that we’ll never eradicate it. Andrew Delbanco tells us in his book, The Death of Satan, that Americans have lost their sense of evil, and he discusses how we have become more tolerant of the many forms of evil in our midst. It’s increasingly visible, yet we have lost a vocabulary for talking about it, and our explanations for it have never been weaker. The unending cases of hatred, brutality, and wanton callousness make it clear that there are people who intend great harm and we must be alert. Forensic practitioners are attempting to devise a way to define it more clearly in court, so that legal consequences can be precisely determined.
Some people have no trouble naming an act evil. Others prefer not to use that term; rather they interpret “evil” as a symptom of imbalance or dysfunction. Philosophers, theologians, psychologists, and even biologists have all grappled with the notion of the irredeemable person, and even talk show hosts wonder who is more reprehensible: the serial killer or those who hawk serial killer trading cards. Can we really determine how the malignant personality forms? Many theorists have tried, yet their “answers” have not eradicated malfeasance from our midst. Perhaps we don’t want it gone; perhaps it feeds a hunger that we fail to acknowledge. It may be that our focus on {Pulp Fiction} sociopaths and mothers who drown their children diverts our attention from the dividends of our own fascinationthat stories about people who perpetrate heinous crimes provide a degree of arousal that we miss in our safety-conscious culture.
Given the great diversity of evil acts and the many attempts to simplify it into some clear theory of violence, we’ll look at the subject from three angles.
- The most obvious evil: acts of hatred, thrill-kills, and child murder
- Reframing: how the evil-doer sees it
- The psychology of evil
While there are many forms of evil, from murderous psychopaths who repeat their crimes with escalating brutality to thrill killers who want to see how it feels to take a life, perhaps no evil is quite as chilling as hatred-inspired acts sanctified by an ideology. One day a group of the most powerful bureaucrats in Nazi Germany met to coldly harvest one of the most hideous agendas against others that has ever been known in the history of humankind.
The setting was the luxurious Wannsee House in a stylish neighborhood just outside Berlin. Expensive china adorned the linen-covered tables and liveried servants waited to serve the finest wine to the arriving guests. In the kitchen, a chef prepared an exquisite buffet lunch. Everything had to be perfect.
One by one, the cars and limousines pulled up and let out their VIPs. One by one, the men came into the great hall to give up their coats to butlers, attempting to anticipate what was in store.
(CORBIS)
It was a cold winter morning, January 20, 1942. The chief of the Third Reich’s security services, Reinhard Heydrich, had called the conference. 15 of the highest-ranking technocrats were to discuss “the Final Solution,” including Adolph Eichmann, Friedrich Krizinger, and Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart. While the plan to disenfranchise the Jews throughout Europe was already underway, with exterminations carried out in various places, it was time for greater efficiency. There were so many to be rid ofstill 11 millionand it needed to be done more quickly.
The meeting took place around a conference table next to the room where an elegant lunch was to be served. It was brief, lasting just over an hour. There was to be no record of certain things that were said but in fact one person kept his notes, and it was from those notes that the world learned about the cold, rational argument, met with general enthusiasm around the conference table, that resulted in the extermination of millions of people.
Heydrich worked to erase the general substance of the meeting by rewriting the notes in neutral language, but once decoded, the gist was clear: These men were there to approve the use of death camps, gas chambers, and crematoriums. To this point, the shootings and gas vans used by mobile killing squads had proven inefficient and were stressful to those carrying out orders. The solution was to utilize more “work camps,” where people would die from “natural causes.”
Speaking with one another in “amtssprache”office talk meant to make others do what they’re supposed to dothey acted as if they were merely part of a large machine at work and they were simply there to ensure that it continued to run. No one was responsible for its initiation, only for its maintenance and increased speed. They had a job to do and they were to do it without question. The final solution was to be managed with precision and economy. It was company policy. Orders. The law.
Later during his trial in Israel, Adolph Eichmann, who had prepared Heydrich’s speech that day, was asked about the Wannsee conference. He said that the reason for it was Heydrich’s attempt to extend his scope of influence by imprinting his will on the others. To help him accomplish this goal, Eichmann was to make a general survey of the “operations” thus far on the question of Jewish “emigration,” with specific attention paid to the difficulties. To step up the operations, these difficulties had to be resolved.
testimony concerning the Wannsee con-
ference
(CORBIS)
The suggestion was to stop allowing Jews to just leave, which only increased the ranks of the enemy, and to send many more Jews “east”meaning to the concentration camps. There the able-bodied men were to be forced into a program known as “Vernichtung durch Arbeit,” or “extermination via work.” They would simply die from attrition but first make whatever contribution they could manage. Others who could not work were simply killed. Heydrich proposed a specific means of “liquidation” and offered a prepared report on how many people they could expect to “remove” in a specified amount of time. They now had a clear agenda and each man there had his part to play.
(CORBIS)
Eichmann described an atmosphere of agreement and enthusiasm. All parties present wanted to participate, even those men who were generally hesitant and reserved. When asked whether it was difficult for him to participate in sending so many people to their deaths, Eichmann responded, “To tell you the truth, it was easy. Our language made it easy.”
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(CORBIS)
In part, Hitler’s program was aided by superstitious beliefs that evolved into an obsession with the occult. The Ahnenerbe, an arm of the SS commissioned in the mid-1930s to research the ancestral heritage of the Aryan race, roamed far and wide to find proof that only one race was meant to rule the world and that the Nazi vision of purification and world domination was supported by mythic forces. They were to provide scientific documentation that would unite their ancient past with their destiny. Heinrich Himmler saw the men in his army as the reincarnation of Teutonic knights and kings, in particular the knights of King Arthur’s round table. He designed Wewelsburg Castle to be their Camelot, but Peter Levendra in The Unholy Alliance dubbed it that Satanic Vatican.
(CORBIS)
In the quest to establish a new world order, Himmler sent his men out to find the Holy Grail and bring it back to the castlenow viewed as the center of the world. The Holy Grail was the chalice from which Christ drank wine during the Last Supper. Supposedly Joseph of Arimathea confiscated it and then used it to collect blood from Christ’s wound as he hung on the cross. Joseph then took the cup to England to hide it in a secret placeAvalonand it became the ambition of King Arthur’s knights to find it and make it the center of their enterprise.
On one floor of Wewelsburg Castle was a dark mosaic star that marked this center and over which occult rituals were performed by 12 Nazi officers to channel the spirits of the deceased kings. Whenever one of these officers died, his ashes were buried in the floor as a saintly relic.
With the idea that blessings from Christ himself enveloped them, the Nazis felt justified to go on a massive killing spree against those who “contaminated” them. Theirs was a holy mission and nothing they could do in its service was wrong. What the world in retrospect deemed as one of the greatest evils perpetrated by human beings was viewed by those involved as divine path that could not be denied. Killing those they deemed inferior was necessary to achieve the ultimate glory of the purification of the planet.
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(CORBIS)
horrific vision, most notably Auschwitz’s Angel of Death, Josef Mengele. A leader in the Nazi biomedical vision, he thrived on experiments with genetic abnormalities. Arriving in Auschwitz on May 30, 1943, he took charge of the “selections” process. He’d show up at the prisoner transports looking quite elegant and at a glance would decide each person’s destiny. He sent anyone with an imperfection to the gas chamber and singled others out for work or for his nefarious experiments.
Mengele enjoyed his powerful position. To uphold the Nazi ideal of racial purification was his driving motivation. Yet no one quite knew what to expect from him. Even as he separated families and killed with impunity, he might step into the role of concerned physician or whimsically allow some people to live.
In his desire to improve the efficiency of the camp as a killing machine, he taught other doctors how to give phenol injections to a long line of prisoners, quickly ending their lives. He also shot people, and by some reports he tossed live babies into the crematoria. Throughout all of this, he kept a detached, efficient demeanor and viewed himself as a “scientist.”
(CORBIS)
Mengele’s great passion was his research on twins. They were weighed, measured, and compared in every way. Some he would kill for pathological examinations, dissecting a few and keeping parts preserved. Others he might operate on without anesthesia, removing limbs or sexual organs. If one twin died during these experiments, the other was no longer of use, so he or she was simply gassed.
Yet even as he targeted them for mutilation or death, he’d play with them and show great affection. He even gave them a ride in his car on their way to the gas chamber. Afterward, he might walk around with their heads or pin their eyes to a bulletin board.
While the evil perpetrated by men under Hitler’s regime might be “justified” within an ideology, there’s no doubt that the license to maim and kill was a delightful opportunity to some like Mengele. Let’s look at how some people find the notion of harming another person titillating.
Richard Loeb (CORBIS)
The year was 1924. The place was Chicago. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loebboth 19, brilliant beyond imagining, educated and wealthywere close friends. Loeb worshipped power and Leopold worshipped Loeb. They had a sexual relationship, although Loeb appeared to participate only as a means of controlling Leopold and making him participate in crime.
According to Professor Douglas Linder of the University of Missouri, Leopold was enamored of the idea espoused by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that superior men have no moral boundaries. Nietzsche proposed the idea of the Ubermensch who made and lived by his own rules. Leopold persuaded Loeb easily enough that they were among those exceptional beings and all they needed to do was prove it by performing the perfect crime. (This idea was hardly original to them. Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevski had already proposed it in Crime and Punishment, through a character named Raskolnikov, who coldly murdered two women just to prove he could do it without moral repercussions.) They started with cheating friends at cards, shoplifting and burglary, says Hal Higdon, author of The Crime of the Century: The Leopold and Loeb Case. These acts thrilled them, but when their petty crimes received no attention in the press, they spent six months meticulously planning for something much more spectacular: They would kidnap and murder a young boy.
On May 21, they went out to select their victim. As claimed in Born Killers produced for The History Channel, at first they considered Loeb’s younger brother, but then thought that if the victim were related to them, they’d quickly come under suspicion. Thus they decided to troll the area around the exclusive boy’s school that Leopold had once attended, since many of the students there knew them and wouldn’t hesitate to accept a ride. The plan was to grab one, kill him, and then get money from his parents.
They believed they had devised the perfect crime and were so obsessed with what it would prove about them that they rehearsed it down to the letter. They had repeatedly gone to the area to watch the boys, learning their routines and routes. To them it mattered little whom they grabbed. It had only to be someone they could quickly overwhelm and whose disappearance would generate publicity. Little did they know that this crimethe first known thrill killing in Americawould generate international publicity and stump criminologists for decades to come.
As they watched, 14-year-old Bobby Franks walked toward them. They offered him a ride and since he knew them, he climbed into the car. Within a block, one of them hit him with a chisel, and then smothered him by shoving a rag into his mouth. Afterward they drove some distance away so they could strip him and pour acid on his face and genitals to prevent people from identifying him. Then they ate dinner in the car while they waited for darkness. Finally they tossed the mutilated body naked in a culvert where Leopold often went bird watching, and then returned home to place a call and write a ransom note for $10,000 to the victim’s parents.
It seemed impossible to them that anyone could link this crime to them. They doubted that anyone would even find the body. With the blindness of narcissistic arrogance, they continued with their plan.
However, the perfect crime is generally never as perfect as it seems. The body was found the next day and identified as the missing Bobby Franks. Nearby in some grass, investigators found a pair of glasses. These were no ordinary spectacles. They had a set of unique hinges that were easily traced.
scene where Bobby Franks’
body was found (CORIBS)
After a pair of extremely unusual eyeglasses was found near Bobby Franks’ body and was traced to Leopold, he was arrested and questioned for hours. The explanation was simple; he maintained that he’d been in that area birding. While he was being questioned, suspicion fell on Loeb as well and he was brought in, too. Yet neither broke and there was insufficient evidence to charge them with anything. They were free to go.
However, that was not the end of the investigation. Just as in Crime and Punishment where a persistent detective finally pressured the guilty Raskolnikov into a confession, something similar was not far away for this killing team. Leopold stayed quiet but Loeb began to talk to friends and reporters, offering theories about the crime and even suggesting that if he were a killer, Bobby Franks was the perfect victimhe deserved it.
The police continued to look into their backgrounds, aware that whoever wrote the ransom note was educated, and eventually they found samples of Leopold’s typing that matched the ransom note. They did not find the portable typewriter in his possession, but when they caught the men in a lie, it wasn’t long before first one and then the other began to confess. They quickly set about accusing each other.
As they coldly provided details, they revealed that the murder had been committed to entertain two bored intellectuals. “It was just an experiment,” Leopold said. “It is as easy to justify as an entomologist in impaling a beetle on a pin.” They simply wanted to test their ability to plan and carry out a crime without being caught. Neither expressed remorse or thought that what they had done was reprehensible.
The press reported this kidnap/murder as unique in the annals of American crime. There had been no particular motive other than to see if they could get away with it. The like had never been seen.
At trial, various alienists, as psychiatrists were called at that time, were brought in to “explain” their degenerate behavior, and even Sigmund Freud was offered an undisclosed sum to provide an analysis (he declined), but the judge was unimpressed. Yet he was also loathe to sentence such young men to die, so he gave them life imprisonment. Loeb died in prison after being fatally stabbed, but Leopold was paroled after 33 years and he lived out the rest of his years in Puerto Rico.
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While the uniqueness of this type of crime might have been true in 1924, it’s no longer true today, and the thrill killers are getting younger and younger. In 1993, for example, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, both age 10, casually took two-year-old James Bulger out of a shopping center in Liverpool, England. They were just looking for something to do, so they decided to see if they could get away with a kidnapping.
At some point, they stepped up the action by splashing James with blue paint, pelting him with bricks, and hitting him with an iron bar. They later confessed that they had laid him down on the railroad tracks, but they declined to admit to what forensics evidence indicated-that they kicked him in the head and groin, and removed his pants and underwear for the express purpose of sexual fondling. There was some speculation that they had pushed batteries into his anus. Horrifyingly, they both said that they’d continued the attack because “he just kept getting up.”
Expert testimony from psychiatrists affirmed that these boys were not insane; they had understood the nature of their crime and knew it was wrong. Thus, their state of mind at the time of the crime was not psychotic. In essence, they acted with adult consciousness. The pathologist confirmed that the wounds showed brutal intent.
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On April 19, 1997, Thomas Koskovich, 18, and Jayson Vreeland, 17, ordered a pizza from a Dunkin’ Donuts in Franklin, New Jersey. They called several places until they found one that would deliver. They asked for two cheese pizzas to be delivered to an address that was actually an abandoned house. Then they went there to wait for their prey.
Jeremy Giordano, 22, and Giorgio Gallara, 24, went out to make the delivery. As they approached the house, Koskovich and Vreeland came up to the car. Gallara, sitting with the pizzas on the passenger side, rolled down his window to ask for the money. Koskovich pulled out a .45 caliber pistol and shot seven times. Giordano was killed when one bullet severed his spinal cord, while Gallara received bullets in the face, arm, and shoulder. The bullet to the back of his head that killed him came from Vreeland’s gun.
The killers then searched the bodies for money and then they hugged over the excitement of what they’d done. “I love you, man,” Vreeland reportedly said. When they couldn’t steal the delivery car, they then went back to their car, changed clothes, and went to church because Vreeland felt remorsewhich he later denied to police.
A former girlfriend turned them in because when she heard about the murders, she recalled Koskovich telling her that he had planned to do something like it. He’d wanted to join the Mafia or become a Navy Seal, and he believed that killing someone would help him to achieve his goals. There was also an element, according to the first prosecution team, that he just wanted to do it to see what it felt like. In his confession, he claims that he said excitedly to Vreeland, “I can’t believe we did that!”
Many people think that killing just for a lark is the essence of evil, but some crimes between parent and child might rival these.
The most lethal threat to children is the father or mother who destroys them for self-serving purposes. The archetype of this scenario is the god Saturn, who consumed all of his offspring to ensure that they would never get in his way.
(CORBIS)
Andrea Pia Yates, 36, lived in Houston, Texas, and had five children. On June 20, 2001, she killed them all. One by one, she drowned three of her sons, ages 2, 3, and 5, in the bathtub and then placed them on a bed and covered them with a sheet. Next was six-month-old Mary, the youngest. While Yates was involved in this horrendous deed, her eldest son Noah, 7, happened to wander in to see what was going on. He ran from the bathroom but Yates chased him down, dragged him back to the tub, and drowned him right next to Mary. She left him there floating in the tub, where police who were called to the home found him.
This was no sudden act; Yates admitted that she’d been considering it for several months. The children, she believed, were not developing normally and she was a bad mother. Autopsies indicated from recent bruises that the four boys had struggled. Yates was charged with knowingly and intentionally causing the deaths of the children with a deadly weapon.
At her hearing, her psychologist, Dr. Gerald Harris, claimed that she wanted to be executed so that she and Satan would be destroyed. While she pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, her competency even to be tried came under question. She claimed that Satan was coming to her in prison and conversing with her.
Mothers are responsible for most child abuse in America that ends in death. The Third National Incidence of Child Abuse and Neglect report numbers as high as 78%. Often they claim to be victims of a range of disorders from postpartum depression to post traumatic stress to outright psychosis, and they’re supported by a wealth of mental health agencies and social groups. Some go so far as to say that society is responsible. Yates had voiced her depressive symptoms, according to Cheryl Mayer, who promotes understanding of such incidents. No one took notice of the potential for danger. It was up to the doctors involved to know about the many cases like this and to take steps to supervise the depression. When they didn’t, they were culpable, not Yates. “Women sometimes experience serious hormonal shifts which can lead to radical mood swings,” said Dr. Tina Tessina to Time. “There is often a very serious disconnect between what women feel after they’ve given birth (depressed, tired, in pain) and what women are told they’re supposed to feel as new mothers (elated, joyful, selfless).” According to her, it could have been building for a long time without being obvious, while Dallas psychologist Ann Dunnewold indicated that such depressions can evolve into hallucinatory psychosis.
That means that five children are dead and no one is clearly responsible. Yet not all mothers who kill can blame hormonal mood shifts.
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On October 17, 1994, Tom Findlay wrote a letter to Susan Smith to tell her that he was not interested in continuing their relationship because he did not want to be responsible for another man’s children. He pointed out other problems as well, but Smith fixated on that single item: If only she had no children, he would be with her.
(AP)
Still in a daze a week later on October 25, she picked up her two sons and drove around in her Mazda Protégé for over an hour. She ended up at John D. Long Lake outside Union, South Carolina, and parked on the gravel boat ramp. Michael, 3, and Alex, age fourteen months, were asleep in the back. Smith put the car into neutral and felt it start to roll toward the water.
According to her, she could no longer bear her life and she wanted her sons to go to Heaven, but others believe that she simply couldn’t bear the thought of being abandoned by the man she loveda married man. She’d already lost her father and her husband. She had no choice but to end it.
But then she put on the brake and got out of the car. She wanted to die but had to kill her sons first, to be sure they were dead. She hesitated and then reached into the car to release the emergency brake. The Mazda, lights still on, rolled forward into the water. Alex and Michael were securely strapped in. It would all be over in moments.
Smith watched as the car floated and filled with water. Finally it went under and she ran to a nearby house, screaming that a black man had accosted her at a traffic light and taken her car with her sons inside. She played the hysterical mother, fooling the woman in the house and soon deceiving the entire nation as she televised a plea to get her sons back. Her shocked and estranged husband, David, stood by her side.
Yet her story didn’t add up to investigators and her voluntary lie detector test results were confused. It appeared that she knew where her sons were and knew that they were dead. Dives were made into the lake, with no results, only because they had miscalculated where the car might be. No one imagined that Smith had simply allowed it to roll in slowly.
Finally she confessed: she had killed both of her children, and nine days after the fact, they were found in the upside down car, still strapped in and hanging from the seat. One diver saw a small hand against the window glass.
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Yet Smith was not the first mother to do something so heinous to her own children. Nearly a decade earlier, on May 19, 1983, Diane Downs drove into an emergency room in Springfield, Oregon, claiming that a shaggy-haired stranger had reached into her car and shot her three children. Eight-year-old Cheryl died from her wounds, but the doctors managed to save seven-year-old Christie and three-year-old Danny.
Not only did Downs stoically accept that her children were so seriously injured, but when told that Danny would live, she was reported to have said, “Do you mean the bullet missed his heart? Gee whiz!” Then when Downs went in to see Christie, the nurses noted the child’s extreme fear in her mother’s presence.
A look into Downs’ past showed patterns of rocky relationships with men and a lover who recently had left her. Problems with her story, including a wound in her arm that appeared to be self-inflicted, finally yielded the truth: To make her life easier, she had decided to be rid of her children. It was she herself who had shot them and Christie shakily testified to this at Downs’ murder trial.
Forensic psychologist Dr. Barbara Kirwin has examined several cases in which a mother has killed her childoften an infant. She has seen experts attempt to develop an insanity defense, and has often been unconvinced. In the case of Stephanie Wernick, which she documents in The Mad, the Bad, and the Innocent, she was convinced the girl was a manipulator who was used to getting her way and could not tolerate inconvenience. The baby had been an “inconvenience” and she’d found a way to be rid of it. Yet she’d also played the right role for the defense to come up with temporary insanity. “Although she would be histrionically tearful at times,” Kirwin reported, “she never once expressed regret for her actions or grief for the deceased infant.” Kirwin’s final evaluation was that the girl was a budding psychopath, concerned only for her own life. What she did was not “normal,” but that did not make her mentally ill or insane. “She did something truly evil. What do we make of that?” Psychologists can barely even name an act evil, let alone devise the tools to deal with it, and this is partly why evil gets mitigated down to a less heinous act and allowed to go unpunished.
And it’s not just mothers who do these things.
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In St. Charles, Missouri, in February 1992, Brian Stewart, 31, performed an act that still defies belief. In order to avoid paying $267 per month for child support, he got access to his infant son and because he was a medical worker, was able to inject the boy with HIV-infected blood. The boy had many illnesses over the next six years, went deaf, and was eventually found to have AIDS. His mother recalled that Stewart had told her that the boy wouldn’t live very long, so she reported this to the police.
Stewart was charged and eventually convicted of first-degree assault. While there may be no legal language to talk about evil, the judge did not hesitate to resort to theology. “I believe that when God finally calls you,” he said, “you’re going to burn in hell from here to eternity.” In 1999, Stewart was sentenced to life in prison.
Then there was the situation with Kenneth and Adelle Dudley, both carnival workers. They were arrested in Lawrenceville, Kentucky in 1961 for killing their seven-year-old daughter through malnutrition, exposure, and neglect. Under questioning, it came out that this couple once had ten children, and they’d allowed six of them to starve to death in the same manner. As each child died, they had dumped the bodies in lakes or abandoned mines in various places around the South.
Dr. Jonathan Pincus, chief of neurology at the Veteran’s Administration Hospital in Washington, DC, takes on the rather cumbersome issue of what makes people violent, and he comes up with variations on a triad: brain damage, abuse, and mental illnessnotably paranoid thoughts. In Base Instincts, he says, “The same complex of factors underlies the act of homicide.” Having examined over 150 murderers from Ted Bundy to prostitute killer Joel Rifkin, Pincus believes that these factors are at work in most fatal violence.
The trial for “pizza killer” Thomas Koskovich appears to support at least two parts of this formula. A social worker provided testimony that Koskovich’s family was plagued by domestic violence, substance abuse, and suicide attempts. She expressed the opinion that Koskovich had been raised in a home without structure and was subjected to emotional neglect when his parents left him to be raised by his grandparents. Another expert testified that Koskovich was mentally ill, had a tenuous grasp on reality, and was a developing paranoid schizophrenic. Whether he also had brain damage was never mentioned.
Pincus aligns with Dorothy Otnow Lewis, author of Guilty by Reason of Insanity: both believe that the role of brain damage and abuse are key factors. However, there are problems with the approach as Pincus describes it. He discusses the case of Louis Culpepper, in prison for sexual molestation of a six-year-old girl. When Pincus found evidence of brain damage from an accident and a history of being sexually abused by relatives that inspired developing sexual fantasies about children, he hypothesized that the brain damage had removed Culpepper’s inhibitions and allowed him to behave in ways he would not otherwise have done.
Pincus then rethought other cases he’d examined and used his ideas to evaluate additional cases into which he was called. The problem with this approach, however, is that it relies on a logical fallacy called “begging the question.” From a small sample (one), he formulates assumptions that structure an approach that guides him to see only the evidence he wants to see. In other words, he sets up the theory and looks for evidence to support it. What happens is that he can miss other significant factors as well as heighten the emphasis on factors that might actually be minor. In fact, his explanations seem relevant to impulsive offenders but not to the type of person who coldly plans and executes a murder or some other form of overt cruelty.
(CORBIS)
To see the problems in context, let’s look at a case that Dorothy Lewis evaluated. She was the defense’s expert witness in the case of serial killer Arthur Shawcross from Rochester, New York. In the late 1980s, he killed at least 11 women, most of them prostitutes, and had returned to some of the bodies to mutilate them. He eviscerated one down the front and removed the vagina of another.
Lewis examined him and concluded from hypnosis sessions and from Shawcross’s recollections that he had been severely traumatized as a child and suffered from incomplete temporal lobe seizures that blocked his memory. (His sister denied many of the things he claimed were true.) Lewis was of the opinion that those seizures only occurred when he was alone with prostitutes at night (although she later changed this theory to call these episodes dissociative). Despite having fully confessed to each murder and providing details only the killer would know, including leading investigators to the bodies of two of his victims, Dr. Lewis said that his memory was impaired at the time of the crimes and he couldn’t have known what he was doing. She also said that he’d cut out the vagina from one victim and eaten it, so that proved that he had a disordermostly based on what Shawcross had told her rather than on physical evidence or corroborating records. (And it must be remembered that Shawcross hoped to win an insanity ruling.)
However, at no time did Lewis seem to be aware of the possibility that a psychopath was exploiting her and play-acting a role. Most forensic psychologists know about malingering and the manipulative psychopath. While Lewis claimed that an MRI had shown a small, fluid-filled cyst at the base of his right temporal lobe, she was unable to prove that this had had any effect on his behavior. Indeed, he’d been paroled from prison after 15 years because he’d been completely nonviolent while incarcerated. Yet he was there for killing and mutilating two children. How can it be that a brain lesion and psychological disorder cause him to kill in a dissociated state only when he’s with children or prostitutes?
Another problem with the approach that Pincus and Lewis adopt is that they are studying only incarcerated individuals. For example, they both write about a study they did on 14 death-row inmates who had committed murder before the age of 18. They found their complex of three factors in all of them. Yet it could be the case that violent people with this triad of factors in their background are more impulsive and thus more prone to being arrested. Since these psychologists have not studied unapprehended killers or calculating people like Leopold and Loeb (who were not abused, brain damaged or mentally ill), it’s possible, even likely, that other factors are at play in violence, and that the factors they name are not always present.
They also appear to neglect the influence of sociological factors. For perspective, and keeping in mind that not all violence would necessarily be viewed as outright evil, let’s review the types of theories about the causes of violence.
- Sociological
Most theories that are considered sociological tend to fix the causes of crime on some social or cultural force or circumstance, which is independent of individuals but nevertheless affects them. The idea is that the individual is a member of group that is affected by the force or circumstance in such a way as to be more likely to commit a crime. For example, poverty, the lack of opportunity to enhance status, or the feeling of powerlessness due to membership in a stigmatized social class can contribute to a criminal act. So can media attention to certain crimes such as school shootings. - Biological
These theories stress some factor arising from the body as the cause of crime. Perhaps the person had a genetic predisposition to do this and happened to be living in circumstances that triggered it. Maybe certain crimes like rape are ancestrally based, more functional for primitive population expansion but now considered a violation. There are also theories that have cited chromosomal abnormalities, body type determinants, and biochemical factors. While it is true that if certain personality types, such as psychopathy, are hard-wired in the brain, and if psychopathy is highly correlated with crime and recidivism, then it may be the case that biology plays a part. - Psychological
These theories look at personality factors to try to determine if certain personality types or traits are more likely to be generative of crime. They include psychoanalytic, behavioral, and trait theories. Many psychologists have written books on the “criminal personality type.” Once again, however, there is no evidence that certain traits actually cause someone to commit a crime. - Social psychology
These theories attempt to study individuals in an environment, for example, a young black male in a neighborhood that pressures people to join gangs. Criminality is said to be learned through social interactions and exposure to certain role models. Some people believe that human nature is inherently prone toward anarchy and has to be restrained by social institutions and socialization in families. Others believe that people learn to be violent because it appears to offer a short-term reward or to be the only way out of a situation. - Mixed Theories
Most mental health professionals accept that there may be a complex organization of factors that lead to crime. It’s difficult to ignore the neurological studies, but it’s also difficult not to notice how certain situations that simply provide opportunity seem to inspire violence. Additionally, there’s no doubt that some people with character disorders such as psychopathy are more prone to acting out aggressively. Thus, a mixed theory, while not as tidy, may be more accurate.
There appear to be a multiplicity of potential factors involved in evil behavior, and no single factor is either necessary or sufficient in itself to cause it. To better understand the nature of evil, we’ll look at a broader range of evil acts in Part II, specifically from the perspective of those who devised and committed them.
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