All about evil, part 3 Depraved Indifference by Katherine Ramsland — The Ultimate Role Model — Crime Library
The year was 1888 and Londoners flocked to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, playing on the West End. stage. But real life events as bloody and dramatic as those of fiction were starting on the other side of town. In the seedy area populated by poor immigrants and desperate prostitutes known as Whitechapel in London’s East End, someone began to attack prostitutes with an intense barbarity.
The first victim was Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, an alcoholic and the 45-year-old mother of five. Just after 1 a.m. on Friday, August 31, Polly went out into the street to earn the four pence she needed for a bed for the night. A friend saw her at 2:30 a.m., and an hour later, she was found murdered. Her skirt was pulled up to her waist, her legs were parted, and severe cuts into her abdomen and throat appeared to have been made by a long-bladed knife. In fact, her head was nearly severed from her body. Whoever had killed her had first controlled her by grabbing her around the neck and had come at her quite suddenly in a blitz-style attack. To investigators unfamiliar with sexually compulsive violence, there appeared to be no motive. (Former FBI profiler John Douglas indicates in his book The Cases that Haunt Us that the sexual nature of this attack is clear to the experienced eye.)
The next victim was Annie Chapman, discovered on the morning of September 8. Her dress was pulled up over her head, her stomach was ripped open, and her intestines had been pulled out and draped over her left shoulder. Her legs were drawn up, knees bent as if posed, and spread outward. Her throat was cut, too, with what appeared to have been a sharp surgical type of knife with a narrow blade and it looked as if the killer had tried to separate her neck bones. Since there was no sign of a struggle, it appeared that once again she’d been quickly subdued. It also appeared that small items like coins and an envelope had been arranged around her as if in some sort of ritual, and a closer inspection showed that the bladder, half of the vagina, and the uterus had been removed and taken away.
A note that arrived on September 29 raised hopes of a communication and possibly a lead. Signed, “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper,” the author claimed that he was “down on whores” and would continue to kill. Yet in retrospect, as the Biography video, “Phantom of Death” points out, most experts (called Ripperologists) believe this message was the work of a tabloid journalist trying to drum up further sensation. Nevertheless, the moniker stuck.
The night after the note, two more women were fatally attacked.. The ripper slashed the throat of Elizabeth Stride, 45, only a few minutes before she was found, but then disemboweled Catherine Eddowes less than an hour afterward. Some believe that he was interrupted in his night’s work with Stride and managed to finish with Eddowes, although she, too, was quickly found. The killer was growing bolder . With Eddowes, the intestines had been pulled out and placed over the right shoulder, the uterus and one kidney had been cut out and taken, and the face was oddly mutilated. Two upside down Vs had been cut into her cheeks, pointing toward the eyes, her eyelids were nicked, and the tip of her nose was cut off. And, of course, her throat was slashed.
Then came a letter “from Hell” to the head of the Whitechapel vigilante organization, with a grisly trophy: half of a kidney that turned out to be afflicted with Bright’s diseasea disorder from which Eddowes had suffered. The note’s author indicated that he’d fried and eaten the other half. It was believed that his note was definitely from the killer and he even offered to send “the bloody knife” in due time. He closed with the taunt, “Catch me if you can.”
The police realized they were dealing with a killer who was driven by some kind of rage, who attacked at random, and who seemed to be unstoppable. They were stymied. In October they stepped up patrols, particularly on the 8th and the 30th in case those dates had signficance to the killer. But there no more murders that month.
Any hope that the killer had ceased his rampage were dashed when police arrived at the room of Mary Kelly, 24, the final victim. The room was splattered with blood. She apparently had invited a man into her room and closed the curtains in preparation. At some point the killer pulled the sheet over her head and stabbed her through it. He slashed open her throat and then ripped open her lower torso, pulled out her intestines, and skinned her chest and legs. Police found a severed breast on the table next to her, decorated with the tips of her nose and ears in the mocking rendition of a face. Her abdomen had been emptied and its contents spread all over the bed and thrown around the room. Her heart, too, had been removed and was missing, and flesh had been cut from her legs and buttocks clear to the bone. Doctors estimated that his frenzy had gone on for around two hours.
To many Londoners, this killer was the devil himself. He’d savaged five women with an unmatched frenzy, attacked in darkness, eluded police, disappeared as by magic, and even sent a note “from Hell.” He was evil incarnate, and some say he ushered in the age of the serial killer, many of whom surpassed him in number but none more brutal. Yet some certainly have tried, and they, too, adopted the demonic cloak.
In the summer of 1984, a 79-year-old woman was slain in her home in Glassell Park, California, near Los Angeles. Her throat was slashed and she was stabbed several times after the fatal wound was inflicted.
Two more murders with similarities occurred over the next eight months and then two young girls were abducted, raped, and dropped off in another location, alive. No one linked these crimes until later.
Then police got a lead. A man entered a condominium in the Rosemead suburb, shooting the two female occupants. One died from a shot to the head but the other survived and managed to offer a few details: bulging eyes, a long face, curly hair, and disgusting teeth. He was also dressed in black, and that same night he shot another woman in the streets.
The murders and rapes continued, targeting females from the young to the elderly, and also several men. Vincent Zazzara was attacked in his home and killed, while his wife was shot and then stabbed to death. The assailant removed her eyelids, carved out her eyes and took them with him.
In May 1985, two elderly sisters were bludgeoned, one fatally. Their attacker left Satanic symbols in the form of a pentagram on the thigh of the one who died. He also used lipstick to draw pentagrams on the walls .
Then the killer escalated, killing one person after another over a span of several weeks. Sometimes it was a single female, sometimes a couple. In one home, he shot an elderly man and then raped his invalid wife. In another instance, he raped a woman next to her dead husband and made her swear allegiance to Satan. Then he added a machete and an Uzi submachine gun to his arsenal. He also went north to San Francisco and shot a couple there.
The man became known as the Night Stalker for his penchant for climbing into unlocked windows, by August of that year he was credited with some 14 murders.
Richard Ramirez
(CORBIS)
Then he killed a man, raped his fiancé and escaped in a stolen car. When he later abandoned the car, police managed to get a fingerprint. A database turned up the name of Richard Ramirez, who’d been arrested numerous times for traffic and drug violations. As they started to investigate, they discovered that Ramirez was a known Satanist whose favorite song was “Night Prowler.” Philip Carlo documents Ramirez’s long-term affair with darkness in The Night Stalker. There was little doubt that he was a killing machine, full of rage against society, and according to Corey Mitchell in Hollywood Death Scenes, he took Satanism seriously. “The further down he slipped, the more he believed that he was a minion of Satan sent to Los Angeles to commit the Dark One’s dirty work.”
Ramirez’s picture was widely publicized and when he tried to steal a car on August 30, he was beaten and held by a group of citizens who recognized him. It was the police who saved his life, although he later told his guard, “I love watching people die.” He was ultimately charged with thirteen murders and thirty other criminal counts, including rape and burglary.
At a preliminary hearing, Ramirez praised Satan and flashed a pentagram that he’d had tattooed onto the palm of his handthe same hand that had betrayed him with a fingerprint. When he was convicted, his lawyers warned him that he could get the death sentence. He didn’t care. “I’ll be in hell, then,” he said, “with Satan.” He was sentenced to death and he is now on California’s death row. Among his female admirers are avowed Satanists who want him to join them in their religion.
Just as Ramirez became enamored of a symbol of evil in his youth, so also did two of the most notorious school killers.
yearbook photos
Dylan Klebold, 17, and Eric Harris, 18, had a plan. What would have been Adolph Hitler’s 110th birthday was coming up and, according to journalist Joe Conason, it appeared that the friends wanted to commemorate it. Obsessed with violent video games, a fascistic youth subculture, and paramilitary techniques, they spent a year collecting an arsenal of semiautomatic guns and homemade bombs with which to perpetrate a crime that the nation would never forget. They were alienated and they wanted society to pay.
Members of “the Trenchcoat Mafia,” dubbed for their habit of wearing black trench coats, the boys had long been bullied by classmates. They didn’t much care for that, although they adopted an indifferent attitude. Little did anyone know what was in store. Having no particular reason to live, they decided to kill themselves, take out as many of their hated classmates as they could, and blow up the school.
The day before their rampage, they sent an email to the local police department declaring their plan of revenge. They blamed parents and teachers for turning their children into intolerant sheep and announced their own suicide.
Klebold (CORBIS)
At 11:30 a.m. on April 20, 1999, they hid weapons and bombs beneath their long coats and then ran through the school, yelling and shooting. When they reached the library, they cornered and killed their largest number of victims before turning their guns on themselves. Some survivors said the shooters specifically targeted a black football player and some outspoken Christians. It all happened quickly, but with devastating impact that gripped the nation as the drama unfolded on television. After police got into the building, they counted 34 casualties. Fifteen people died in the melee, including the shooters.
(CORBIS)
Then Harris’s diary turned up, which confirmed the elaborate plan. For over a year they had worked at it, drawing maps, collecting weapons, and devising a system of silent hand signals for coordinating their moves. Behind closed doors in their parents’ homes, they had spoken of death and of their lone-wolf brand of heroism. The simple fact that emerged is that they were angry, bitter kids who had access to guns, who identified with a twisted dictator, and who were inspired by images of grandiose violence. For them, what the culture viewed as evil was a means of disturbing the social order and thrusting a thorn into the nation’s side that wasn’t going to go away.
Yet it’s not just a human role model that influences evil. Some people look to the larger-than-life images of mythology to fuel their aggression.
Evil is often associated with Satan and what creature is more evil than a vampirea soulless predator who feeds off the resources of others to benefit itself? While most of the “vampire subculture” these days involves a benign form of role-playing, some people have been inspired by the rapacious image to kill. To their minds, the vampire mythos provides a framework that allows – even encourages – certain types of violent behavior.
Let’s take a look at some of these vampire killers:
(Dennis Bathory-Kitsz)
Legend has it that Erzebet Bathory, a Hungarian countess born in 1560, bathed in the blood of virgins to restore her beauty. Whether or not this was really her motive, she certainly used her status to bring about murder and mayhem to untold numbers.
Intelligent and educated, Erzebet experienced seizures and rages that were sometimes out of control. She grew up, married, and learned to manage the affairs of a castle, in particular how to sadistically discipline the peasants who worked the land. For example, her husband taught her how to spread honey over a naked woman and leave her out for the bugs. After he died in 1604, Erzebet moved to Vienna and stepped up her cruel and arbitrary beatings of the lower-class girls. With the lack of accountability afforded to nobility, she continued unabated, assisted by several other women. She might stick pins into sensitive body parts, cut off someone’s fingers or beat her about the face until her victim was so misshapen as to be unrecognizable. In the winter, women were dragged outside, wet down with water, and left to freeze to death. When Erzebet was ill, she had girls brought to her bed so that she could bite off their noses or other pieces of their faces and shoulders.
Eventually she turned her bloodthirst against young noblewomen, and after she killed one in 1609 and unsuccessfully tried to stage it as a suicide, she raised the suspicions of the authorities. An inquiry was begun.
In 1610, she was finally arrested and tried. A register found in her home indicated that she’d victimized 650 people. She was imprisoned for life in her own castle, where she died three years later. Only after her death did rumors spring up about how she had actually bathed in the blood of her young victims, making her even more a mythic figure.
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Kürten (CORBIS)
Just before his execution in 1931 for 13 confessed murders, the man known as the Monster of Dusseldorf said that if he could hear his blood bubbling forth from his neck stump as he died, he’d die a happy man.
A necrophile, rapist, and killer, Peter Kürten targeted almost any vulnerable person. He got his start when a neighbor taught him how to torture animals, and he learned to stab them to death while he was raping them, which cemented his sexual drive with bloodlust. Then when he was nine, he instigated an “accident” that killed two of his friends. Throughout his life he was jailed for various crimes from theft to non-fatal strangulation, but he upped the stakes in 1929 when he attacked 23 separate people. He stabbed one woman 24 times, bludgeoned others with a hammer or an axe, and he also went after a 5-year-old girl with a knife and sent an arrogant letter directing police to her remains.
When arrested after a failed rape, he confessed to a litany of bizarre crimes. He explained that he’d committed numerous assaults and 13 murders, drinking the blood from some of his victims. He’d once bitten the head off a swan, he stated, and ejaculated as he drank its blood. He claimed he was insane and that his role model was Jack the Ripper.
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On Thanksgiving Day, 1996, 16-year-old Roderick Ferrell led a pack of kids from Kentucky to Eustis, Florida, where he bludgeoned to death the elderly parents of a former girlfriend. He swung a crowbar at a sleeping Richard Wendorf, and then stabbed Ruth Wendorf in the head when she walked into the room. He burned a ‘V’ into the flesh of his first victim and then got the others to flee the scene with him.
They were soon caught in Louisiana. Initially, Ferrell told reporters from the Orlando Sentinel that a rival vampire clan had done the killings. Then he claimed that he’d been part of a Satanic cult run by his grandfather. What turned out to be true was that Ferrell had gotten involved with a fantasy role-playing game called Vampire: The Masquerade and, to make things edgier, had formed something called The Vampire Clan. According to one member, Ferrell was obsessed with “opening the gates of Hell,” which he said would happen if he killed a large number of people and consumed their souls.
Of his vampirism, Ferrell had said that he had no soul and was possessed. He had devised vampire rituals that gave him an adrenaline rush. He liked to threaten others and make them believe that his vampire nature made him all-powerful. In fact, he claimed that vampires really existed, he was one of the “rare ones,” and could do anything he pleased. Even upon his arrest, he told the officers that he was a powerful immortal and they would be unable to hold him.
He was wrong. At his trial, he was sentenced to die and now awaits execution on Florida’s death row.
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mugshot
Richard Trenton Chase had a thing for blood. In the late ’70s, he was known as “The Vampire of Sacramento.” He began by killing a woman, cutting out her entrails and stuffing her mouth with dog feces. Walking through the unlocked door of a house, he encountered 22-year-old Teresa Wallin, who was three months pregnant. He shot her twice and then knelt over her prostrate body, firing another bullet into her temple. His next move was to drag her into the bedroom, leaving a trail of blood behind. He then got a knife from the kitchen and an empty yogurt container. With that he drank her blood and then smeared his face in it. When he was done, he left.
Terry’s husband, David, found her. She lay just inside the door, on her back, her clothing in disarray that suggested assault. Her left nipple was carved off, her torso cut open below the sternum, and her spleen and intestines pulled out. Chase had stabbed her repeatedly in the lung, liver, diaphragm, and left breast. He also had cut out her kidneys and severed her pancreas in two. He placed the kidneys together back inside her.
Not long afterward, Evelyn Miroth, 38, received the same treatment. Chase also shot a male friend who was visiting her, and her 6-year-old son, Jason, but a subsequent investigation revealed that her infant nephew was missing from his crib. It later turned out that Chase had drunk Evelyn’s blood and had mutilated the baby’s body in the bathroom, opening the head and spilling pieces of the brain into the tub. A knock on the door must have interrupted him and he had fled with the baby’s body. As police looked for him, he took the baby to his home and severed its head. Then he removed several organs and consumed them.
The police closed in and grabbed him as he was leaving his apartment with a box full of bloody newspapers and rags. Inside they discovered evidence that he seemed to be planning more than 40 more killings that year.
In prison, he told another inmate that he needed the blood of his victims because of blood poisoning, and he’d grown tired of hunting for animals. He also admitted to one of the dozen psychiatrists who examined him that he was disturbed about killing his victims and was afraid they would come for him. He had never felt compelled to kill. He simply thought the blood would help him.
Since it was clear that he had intended to murder his victims and knew it was wrong, he was convicted of six counts of first-degree murder. Chase was sentenced to die, but was found dead in his cell in 1980 after swallowing an overdose of antidepressants. In his case, his vampirism was the result of delusions that provoked him to kill, but there had still been some degree of choice in the matter. At least, as the jury saw it.
Even with these examples, it’s not the case that the vampire image has caused people to become violent, but rather that it has provided a way for them to organize their self-impressions and to justify their acts. They have a frame. They are “safe” from the consequences.
as Hannibal
Lecter (AP)
Why are evil figures so fascinating to us? Why do audiences cheer when Hannibal Lecter cleverly escapes by chewing off someone’s face? Even Osama bin Laden exudes a charisma that keeps us watching even when we despise ourselves for doing so.
One answer is that evildoers support our cultural myths and somehow complete parts of ourselves while offering the illusion that they are separate from us. We then exploit that illusion to create frames in which we can act out a scenario of conquering the monsterwithout having to explore our own capacity for evil.
To explain this, psychologist Michael Apter offers a theory. Once something is labeled dangerous, he says, it exerts a magical attraction. That in turn produces arousal, which makes us feel alive. However, it may also make us anxious, so we develop “protective frames.” That is, we use stories about the evildoer and mentally create a buffer of safety: The monster rises up and we have the weapons to bring him down. Now we can experience the arousal of excitement without being overwhelmed by anxiety. Within the frame, we welcome risk and we’ll go to the edge to experience the exhilaration. We can actually enjoy danger and allow ourselves close.
Men Do What Good
Men Dream
Yet some people take this further. They seek out the excitement of danger just to stimulate themselves and may transform the protective frame into a reality. Psychopaths, for example, appear to be born with a need for greater stimulation than the average person and they will often act out their fantasies of harm. The fact that antisocial activities escalate, says psychiatrist Robert Simon in Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream, indicates that they do fulfill a need for stimulation. So the larger-than-life deeds of the psychopath or thrill-seeker feed images into the protective frames of people in search of the same stimulation. There’s a kinship that one acts out and the other enjoys.
Nature
It’s only natural, says naturalist Lyall Watson, author of Dark Nature. He believes that evil is inherent within the natural order and that the behavior we see in serial killers, sadists, and genocidal dictators reflects certain natural principles. It’s not that these people are monsters set apart from ordinary people, it is that they manifest something in the system gone awry. In other words, nature is tentatively balanced at best and when anything within the status quo challenges the equilibrium, what might be considered good in some contexts can become bad, or evil.
Watson believes that evil is commonplace and widespread, not uniquely manifested in the oddball person. It’s also not confined to the human species. He himself has observed cruelty in animal behavior with finely honed predatory skills and even the killing of offspring. Starting with the notion that evil involves overstepping bounds or going beyond due measure, Watson thinks that at the heart of evil are influences that destroy the integrity of the whole. Thus if “good” is defined as whatever encourages that integrity, then whatever pulls it apart is evil.
Living systems constantly change. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, systems tend to run down, grow disorganized, and eventually disintegrate altogether. Entropy, or disorder, devolves into chaos, which spells death for the system. Systems attempt to protect themselves, but capricious forces are part of change. They help to redefine the system for growth, but may also act as a black hole that sucks up a universe and then recreates it.
Goodor integritycoexists with this capriciousness and both forces can influence the system. Some things contribute to the order and cohesion of life and some things subtract from it.
Evil, then, can be equated with a morbid condition, such as a pathogen, that enters or exploits some aspect of the system to knock it off balance. Watson sees three primary ways for this to occur:
- Something good is removed from a context where it works and is placed in one where it doesn’t work, so it then becomes destructive.
- Too much or too little of a good thing becomes disruptive.
- Elements of the system cannot relate in a coherent manner
These elements provide the biological frame through which to understand how we can view evil as a force within a system, he says. People like Hitler, Ted Bundy, and bin Laden are pathogens that arise from within the system, contributing to its disintegration. They represent one of the three principles of natural disorder listed above. Perhaps the instinct for survival, which is good in one context, becomes exaggerated into a virulent self-centeredness that diminishes the importance of others.
Along these lines, in Speaking with the Devil, psychiatrist Carl Goldberg uses a multi-step theory to explain the deformed personality from which evil emanates. To his mind, the devil represents “individuals who have transformed themselves into beings capable of extreme brutality and atrocity.” It’s a developmental sequence that involves:
- shame and humiliation during childhood that impairs self-esteem
- protecting their own “defects” by developing contempt for others
- adopting belief systems that allow them to rationalize and justify their actions
- losing empathic bonds with others
- acquiring a habit of treating others without respect
- learning to enjoy the infliction of cruelty
- losing the ability to be self-aware
- magical thinking’I can make it happen if I can imagine it thus’
People who go through this process can then create a frame through which they can inflict deliberate cruelty on others without seeing how they themselves have regressed as moral beings. They can identify with monstrous acts and behave in the same manner. It’s a series of logical steps from point A to point Z that evolve in the direction of antisocial destruction rather than social integrity and repair.
Yet even with a theory intact, we still need a better language for dealing with evil in certain practical contexts, such as the courts. To be able to determine sentencing – how long an evildoer, whether sick or just bad, should be locked away from society – they need to determine just how depraved an act of brutality might be. That’s where another psychologist is attempting to make a contribution. Let’s take a look.
In 1995, Steve Fortin pleaded guilty to a savage attack on a female state trooper in Maine. When she stopped to help him and found him drunk, he reacted by breaking her nose, biting her on the left breast and chin, strangling her into unconsciousness, and raping her. Just then her backup arrived and Fortin ran. The other trooper gave chase and caught him. He got 20 years, but that was not the end of his story. New Jersey officials investigating an unsolved case from the previous year heard about the attack in Maine and noted similarities. In Avenel, N.J., Melissa Padilla, a mother of four, had been beaten, robbed, bitten on the left breast and chin, raped, and then strangled. Investigators soon discovered that Fortin had lived in the area at the time of Padilla’s brutal murder, had run from abusing his girlfriend at a restaurant near the crime scene, and had committed other violent acts. He was indicted in New Jersey, tried and convicted, and a different jury reviewed evidence for the penalty phase. The defense prepared a psychiatric case for mitigating circumstances, but then took it off the table. Why?
“They didn’t want us to come in and testify,” says Dr. Michael Welner, forensic psychiatrist and founder of The Forensic Panel, a peer-reviewed national practice based in New York. He was satisfied with the ultimate verdict: In January 2001, based on factors that clearly aggravated the brutality of the murder, Fortin received the death penalty. What made Welner’s approach so intimidating to the defense? It’s likely that his emphasis on behavioral standards, careful corroboration of facts and history, the actual criminal acts, and forensic evidence had something to do with it, as well as his input on what aggravating factors really mean in a capital case.
He ought to know. He’s spearheading a nationwide effort to get consensus for the courts from legal, theological, and mental health professionals on the concept of evil or wickedness, in an instrument he calls The Depravity Scale. It may be that some people are just born bad, but when it comes to how the courts deal with the “aggravating factors” or “special circumstances” of certain acts like murder, there’s no clear standard by which to judge them. Called cruel, wanton, vile, cold-blooded, outrageous, or monstrous, the actions in question get blurred into subjective imprecision.
“From my own experience consulting as a forensic psychiatrist to both prosecutors and defense attorneys,” Welner says, “I see these terms being thrown around in capital and other criminal, even civil and family court cases, and I recognize how difficult it is for a judge or jury – let alone a forensic mental health professional – to try to define them in any consistent and non-arbitrary way. The more I’ve learned about how these terms are applied and how significant they become during sentencing – for the death penalty, for example – the more I’ve come to appreciate that what is considered ‘heinous,” ‘atrocious,’ and ‘cruel’ in Oklahoma may be different from what those terms mean in Florida. And a jury in a rural part of Florida may see them differently than a jury in an urban area.”
He hopes to change that. “We need consistency, and in particular consistency that reflects the best that forensics has to offer. From my own vantage point of working within the cases, juries and judges don’t see near as much as they should be seeing when it comes to forensic evidence about what a person’s intent was, what a person actually did, and what a person’s attitude was about what he did. Even from a mental health standpoint, there’s far more effort devoted to the question of who a person is or why that person did something rather than just look at what the person did.”
While “who” and “why” are important, it’s time to better assess “what.”
On the Depravity Scale, Welner uses what he learned from an examination of 100 recent court cases involving aggravating factors to provide an itemized list of actions, attitudes, and indicators of intent that can help in evaluating the heinousness of a crime. With emphasis on the capacity of the offender to make a deliberate choice, he asks professionals to rate these factors in terms of degree of depravity. For example, did the offender intend to cause emotional trauma or physical disfigurement? Was the attack prolonged? Does the offender blame the victim or indicate some satisfaction with the crime?
“We’ve had over 2,300 completed responses so far,” he says, “and we’d like more. We realize that the frame of reference of ‘what is depraved’ depends on so many factors, or variables. Due to the number of variables we’re controlling for in this research, we really need a sizeable sample from all sectors and communities. With that we’ll eventually have a validated scale that the courts can review. The courts will see that it reflects a consensus from defense attorneys and prosecutors across the country on what the legal term ‘depravity’ should mean.”
This is all part of Welner’s goal to maintain accountability among participants. “We believe in getting a lot of evidence before the court, so that decisions are fact-based as opposed to emotion-driven and manipulated by theatrics. That’s the way this depravity question is pretty much decided now.”
He’s also willing to look at cases for the defense, because where there really are mitigating factors or where aggravating factors are exaggerated within some political climate that can hinder justice. Prosecutors will often exploit the vagueness of terms like “wicked,” so getting real standards in place means a more narrow application of the death penalty. At the trial for the Matthew Shepherd gay-bashing murder in Wyoming, for example, Welner’s team agreed to evaluate the defendant, Aaron McKinney, and look at the circumstances of the fatal encounter, as well psychiatrically investigate McKinney’s background . “We were retained before sentencing with a question about which mitigating circumstances might a jury take into account as they were considering whether to impose the death penalty. As a result of the findings that we were prepared to present, it never even went to a sentencing phase. The defense and prosecution came to an agreement and gave him life. That was noteworthy because the resolution happened amidst a climate of media frenzy, with wild distortions about homosexual panic and what needs to be done about bias crimes. What we presented had enough substance that no one even felt the need to go to court to contest it.”
Nevertheless, Welner does believe there’s evil in the world. “I have no problem with the word being used,” he admits. “If you look in the literature, there’s a startling lack of effort to try to flesh out what evil is and I think it’s our responsibility as behavioral scientists to try to understand it. This issue gets neglected because therapeutic professions like psychiatry inherently must focus on the good in order to be therapeutic. Another reason for this neglect is because to wade in and wrestle with it means to confront it in ourselves, and that’s a painful prospect even for the most stable of us. When I first began exploring this, I never enjoyed it and I appreciated walking away from it. The more I studied it, the more it affected even my dreams. It’s an unpalatable exercise.”
Yes, it’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it, and getting a better handle on how to define evil in these cases will make an important contribution to justice. Those who wish to participate in the research validating The Depravity Scale can find it at www.depravityscale.org.
Having presented numerous theories and examples of evil, let’s try to sum it up.
There’s no end to the number of ways we can portray evil acts among human beings in this world. From genocide to torture to racism to sadism, some people just develop a badness that inspires them to act out. They may start as ordinary children or they may have a mental illness, personality disorder, or even a brain lesion that will influence their paths. Often we want to think of them as “different” so we can reassure ourselves that they’re monsters and that such monstrosity would never arise out of normal people.
Yet it does.
There appears to be no single satisfactory explanation covering the full range of evil acts. While there’s research to support theories about brain damage, brain disorders, environmental stimulants, abuse, and poor role models, it appears that the development of an evil person relies on a unique combination of events. Two people may both be exposed to a violent parent or have dissociative seizures, but if only one commits evil deeds, those factors are not directly causative.
(AP)
Those who study evil believe we all have the capacity for it, but only some of us actually act on it, and that’s usually a matter of choice. Despite the fact that psychiatrist Daniel Amen proved with brain scans that there were problems in the brains of 250 violent felons that diminished their ability to make judgments and increased their fixation on dark fantasies, people like Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy clearly did make judgments. Despite having strong fantasies, they tried to avoid the consequences of breaking the law, indicating that their depravity involved sufficient intentional self-awareness that they were able to control it under certain circumstances. It’s not about only brain or moods or disorders.
(CORBIS)
Maybe Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children, did suffer post-partum psychosis from severe depression, but can we say the same about the young woman at a dance who gave birth, trashed her newborn, and then went back to the dance? One explanation will not suffice, not even where there are shared similarities.
The fact is, new forms of evil are being thrust upon us, the likes of which have never been seen. When Osama bin Laden’s crew of suicidal pilots allegedly trained for years to die and then used our own passenger jets against us, it was more than an act of war. It was the ultimate form of trickery and contempt for our society. The masterminds later sat around over dinner and laughed about their success, praising Allah for being so good to them.
And yet even after that tragedy, U.S. citizens still sought entertainment that involved the evil side of human nature. We were horrified by what had happened to us but we didn’t shun depictions of evil. So perhaps we’re influenced by a subtle cultural factor that’s similar to but less overt than what we’ve noted in so-called “cultures of evil.”
People who grow up in societies where violence is made mundane and where entertainment routinely dehumanizes will become inured to many vile acts, and as long as they’re willing to pay to see or read about these acts, the commercial media is going to feed them. Note how popular the HBO series The Sopranos has become, and look at the persistent violence, lack of respect for moral order, and inconsistency of character it depicts in nearly every episode. Family values? Tony Soprano’s family is inwardly falling apart, and yet awards committees uphold the show as quality entertainment.
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It’s not that we actively seek out true evil. We simply have psychological mechanisms that allow us to get close to it. Day after day, the media highlights the evil acts of criminals, but fails to balance this with equal time for the acts of good and beneficent people. Thus, people who worship media-created celebrities will be more excited by the evil ones. That, too, creates a flourishing subculture of evil-worshippers, some members of which go on to commit acts of atrocity in the name of one of their heroes, as we saw at Columbine. Even convicted Hillside Strangler, Ken Bianchi, persuaded a female worshipper to go out and attempt to kill someone. Fortunately, she failed but not from want of doing so.
It seems that evil is not simply a mental illness, although some who commit evil have a personality or mood disorder.
Evil is not simply hard-wired, although some who commit evil are born psychopaths.
Evil is not simply a brain disorder, although some who do evil have a disordered brain.
Evil is not simply genetic, although some evildoers are related to each other.
Evil is not just a path to self-empowerment or self-enrichment, though some evildoers seek such benefits.
Evil is not just the manifestation of an extreme ideology, though some evil is done within that framework.
What evil appears to be is a developmental process. It evolves through a reciprocal interaction of choice, circumstances, and the manner in which an individual processes symbols of evil that are overtly or covertly affirmed within a culture, coupled with the way that person spins fantasies permeated with deep-rooted needs. There’s no doubt that evil is a pathology, but there’s also no doubt that entire cultures can participate in the dehumanizing process that inspires evil acts and have little awareness of that fact. Even if we find a way to reduce or stop the evil that one type of person commits, if evil arises from nature or culture, then there will always be those who develop in ways we don’t yet understand and who may shock us with novel behavior.
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