Sometimes they claim to experience strong emotions but are unable to describe the subtleties of various affective states. For example, they equate love with sexual arousal, sadness with frustration, and anger with irritability. “I believe in emotions: hate, anger, lust, and greed,” said Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker.’12
Remarks like the following from Diane Downs, who shot her three small children, should cause people to ponder their sheer inappropriateness and to wonder at the quality of the underlying feelings. Years after her conviction, Downs still insists that her children, and she herself, were actually shot by a “bushy-haired stranger.” About surviving the shooting herself (she sustained an injury to her arm, which the jury concluded was self-inflicted), Downs responded:
Everybody says, “You sure are lucky!” Well, I don’t feel very lucky. I couldn’t tie my damned shoes for about two months! It is very painful, it is still painful, I have a steel plate in my arm—I will for a year and a half. The scar is going to be there forever. I’m going to remember that night for the rest of my life whether I want to or not. I don’t think I was very lucky. I think my kids were lucky. If I had been shot the way they were, we all would have died.13
The apparent lack of normal affect and emotional depth led psychologists J. H. Johns and H. C. Quay to say that the psychopath “knows the words but not the music.”14 For example, in a rambling book about hate, violence, and rationalizations for his behavior, Jack Abbott made this revealing comment: “There are emotions—a whole spectrum of them—that I know only through words, through reading and in my immature imagination. I can imagine I feel these emotions (know, therefore, what they are), but I do not. At age thirty-seven I am barely a precocious child. My passions are those of a boy.”15
Many clinicians have commented that the emotions of psychopaths are so shallow as to be little more than proto-emotions: primitive responses to immediate needs. (I’ll discuss the most recent research findings on this topic in later chapters.) For example, one of our psychopathic subjects, a twenty-eight-year-old “enforcer” for a loan shark, had this to say about his job: “Say I have to heavy someone who won’t pay up. First I make myself angry.” When asked if this anger was different from the way he feels when someone insults him or tries to take advantage of him, he replied, “No. It’s all the same. It’s programmed, all worked out. I could get angry right now. It’s easy to turn on and off.”
Another psychopath in our research said that he did not really understand what others meant by “fear.” However, “When I rob a bank,” he said, “I notice that the teller shakes or becomes tongue-tied. One barfed all over the money. She must have been pretty messed up inside, but I don’t know why. If someone pointed a gun at me I guess I’d be afraid, but I wouldn’t throw up.” When asked to describe how he would feel in such a situation, his reply contained no reference to bodily sensations. He said things such as, “I’d give you the money”; “I’d think of ways to get the drop on you”; “I’d try and get my ass out of there.” When asked how he would feel, not what he would think or do, he seemed perplexed. Asked if he ever felt his heart pound or his stomach churn, he replied, “Of course! I’m not a robot. I really get pumped up when I have sex or when I get into a fight.”
Laboratory experiments using biomedical recorders have shown that psychopaths lack the physiological responses normally associated with fear.16 The significance of this finding is that, for most people, the fear produced by threats of pain or punishment is an unpleasant emotion and a powerful motivator of behavior. Fear keeps us from doing some things—“Do it and you’ll be sorry”—but it also makes us do other things—“Do it or you’ll be sorry.” In each case, it is emotional awareness of the consequences that impels us to take a particular course of action. Not so with psychopaths; they merrily plunge on, perhaps knowing what might happen but not really caring.
“HIS SOCIAL STATUS notwithstanding, he is truly one of the most dangerous sociopaths I have ever seen,” said the Superior Court Judge after sentencing respected 37-year-old San Jose attorney Norman Russell Sjonborg for the brutal slaying of one of his clients from whom he had embezzled money. His third wife, Terry, who initially had provided him with an alibi for the crime, said that when she first met him, “He seemed like a nice guy, soft-spoken and exceedingly charming.” But she also noted, “From the start Russell spoke about this emotional void, an inability to feel things like everyone else; to know when to cry, when to feel joy.” Terry also commented that he “ted a kind of paint-by-numbers emotional life,” and that “he read self-help psychology books to learn the appropriate emotional responses to everyday events.”
As their marriage began to break down Russell tried to convince his wife that she was going mad. “I would go into [counseling] sessions a basket case,” she said, “and Russell would sit there calm and gracious and rational, and he’d turn to the therapist and say, ‘See what I have to put up with?’ and I’d shout and scream and say, ‘It’s not me. He’s the crazy one!’ But the counselor bought Russell’s act and said we could never make progress as a couple if I blamed everything on my husband.”
Later Russell worked out several scenarios for handling his problems with his wife and wrote them down on a piece of paper: “Do nothing”; “File for Paternity/Conciliation Court”; “Take girls w/o killing”; “Take girls Killing 4”; “Kill Girls and Justin.” His probation officer commented that the list revealed “the mind of a man who could contemplate killing his own children with the detachment of someone considering various auto-insurance policies. It is the laundry list of a man without a soul.”
Referring to Russell’s murder of Phyllis Wilde, his wife said, “I saw him just hours after he had bludgeoned [her] to death. There was nothing in his behavior to betray him.... No fear, no remorse, nothing.”
In a statement to the Judge, Terry pleaded, “Please see the animal inside him; do not see the socially acceptable persona that he creates on the outside.” She expressed her fear that he would eventually track her down. “I know what will happen. He’ll be a model prisoner, endear himself to the other prisoners and the people in charge. Eventually he’ll be transferred to a minimum-security facility. And then he’ll escape.” [From an article by Rider McDowell in the January 26, 1992, edition of Image]
For most of us, fear and apprehension are associated with a variety of unpleasant bodily sensations, such as sweating of the hands, a “pounding” heart, dry mouth, muscle tenseness or weakness, trembles, and “butterflies” in the stomach. Indeed, we often describe fear in terms of the bodily sensations that accompany them: “I was so terrified my heart leapt into my throat”; “I tried to speak but my mouth went dry”; and so forth.
These bodily sensations do not form part of what psychopaths experience as fear. For them, fear—like most other emotions—is incomplete, shallow, largely cognitive in nature, and without the physiological turmoil or “coloring” that most of us find distinctly unpleasant and wish to avoid or reduce.
Chapter 4
The Profile:
Lifestyle
The total pattern of the psychopath’s personality differentiates him from the normal criminal. His aggression is more intense, his impulsivity more pronounced, his emotional reactions more shallow. His guiltlessness, however, is the critical distinguishing trait. The normal criminal has an internalized, albeit warped, set of values. If he violates these standards he feels guilt.
—McCord and McCord. The Psychopath: An Essay on the Criminal Mind1
In chapter 3 I described the way psychopaths think and feel about themselves and others—the emotional/interpersonal symptoms noted in my Psychopathy Checklist. But this is only one facet of the syndrome. The other facet, described in this chapter, and comprised of the remaining symptoms in the Psychopathy Checklist, is a chronically unstable and aimless lifestyle marked by casual and flagrant violations of social norms and expectations. Together, these two facets—one depicting feelings and relationships, the other social
deviance—provide a comprehensive picture of the psychopathic personality.
IMPULSIVE
Psychopaths are unlikely to spend much time weighing the pros and cons of a course of action or considering the possible consequences. “I did it because I felt like it,” is a common response.
Texas murderer Gary Gilmore gained national attention for legally pursuing his own execution—and for succeeding: In 1977 he was the first person executed in the United States in ten years. In response to the question, “If you hadn’t been caught that night, do you think there would have been a third or fourth murder?” Gilmore answered, “Until I got caught or shot to death by the police or something like that. I wasn’t thinkin’, I wasn’t plannin’, I was just doiri. It was a damned shame for those two guys. I’m just saying that murder vents rage. Rage is not reason. The murders were without reason. Don’t try to understand murder by using reason.” [italics mine]2
More than displays of temper, impulsive acts often result from an aim that plays a central role in most of the psychopath’s behavior: to achieve immediate satisfaction, pleasure, or relief. “The psychopath is like an infant, absorbed in his own needs, vehemently demanding satiation,” wrote psychologists William and Joan McCord.3 At an early age most children have already begun to postpone pleasure, compromising with restrictions in the environment. A parent can generally use a promise to put off satisfying a two-year-old’s desires, at least temporarily, but psychopaths never seem to learn this lesson—they do not modify their desires; they ignore the needs of others.
So, family members, employers, and co-workers typically find themselves standing around asking themselves what happened—jobs are quit, relationships broken off, plans changed, houses ransacked, people hurt, often for what appears little more than a whim. As the husband of a psychopath I studied put it: “She got up and left the table, and that was the last I saw of her for two months.”
One of our subjects, who scored high on the Psychopathy Checklist, said that while walking to a party he decided to buy a case of beer, but realized that he had left his wallet at home six or seven blocks away. Not wanting to walk back, he picked up a heavy piece of wood and robbed the nearest gas station, seriously injuring the attendant.
Psychopaths tend to live day-to-day and to change their plans frequently. They give little serious thought to the future and worry about it even less. Nor do they generally show much concern about how little they have done with their lives. “Look, I’m a drifter, a nomad—I hate being pinned down,” is a typical remark.
One man we interviewed used an analogy to explain why he “lived for the moment.” “We’re always being told to drive defensively, to mentally plan escape routes in case of an emergency, to look well ahead of the car just in front of us. But hey, it’s the car just in front of us that’s the real danger, and if we always look too far ahead we’ll hit it. If I always think about tomorrow I won’t be able to live today.”
POOR BEHAVIOR CONTROLS
Besides being impulsive—doing things on the spur of the moment—psychopaths are highly reactive to perceived insults or slights. Most of us have powerful inhibitory controls over our behavior; even if we would like to respond aggressively we are usually able to “keep the lid on.” In psychopaths, these inhibitory controls are weak, and the slightest provocation is sufficient to overcome them. As a result, psychopaths are short-tempered or hot-headed and tend to respond to frustration, failure, discipline, and criticism with sudden violence, threats, and verbal abuse. They take offense easily and become angry and aggressive over trivialities, and often in a context that appears inappropriate to others. But their outbursts, extreme as they may be, are generally short-lived, and they quickly resume acting as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened.
Carl, an inmate, made a call to his wife from the prison pay phone and learned that she wouldn’t be able to visit him that weekend and bring him the cigarettes and food he’d requested because she hadn’t been able to find anyone to watch their children. “You fucking bitch,” he yelled into the phone. “I’ll kill you, you whore.” He added a convincing touch to the threat by punching the wall and bloodying his knuckles. Immediately after hanging up, though, he began to laugh and joke with some of his fellow inmates, and seemed genuinely perplexed when a guard, who had heard part of the telephone conversation, charged him with verbal abuse and threatening behavior.
An inmate in line for dinner was accidentally bumped by another inmate, whom he proceeded to beat senseless. The attacker then stepped back into his place in line as if nothing had happened. Despite the fact that he faced solitary confinement as punishment for the infraction, his only comment when asked to explain himself was, “I was pissed off. He stepped into my space. I did what I had to do.”
In a classic case of “displacement,” one of our subjects had an argument with a very large bouncer at a local pub, lost his temper, and punched a bystander. The victim fell backward, struck his head on the edge of a table, and died two days later. “I saw red and this guy was laughing at me.” He blamed the victim for making him mad and accused the hospital of negligence for letting the victim die.
Although psychopaths have a “hair trigger” and readily initiate aggressive displays, their ensuing behavior is not out of control. On the contrary, when psychopaths “blow their stack” it is as if they are having a temper tantrum; they know exactly what they are doing. Their aggressive displays are “cold”; they lack the intense emotional arousal experienced by others when they lose their temper. For example, when asked if he ever lost control when he got mad, an inmate who scored high on the Psychopathy Checklist replied, “No. I keep myself in control. Like, I decide how much I want to hurt the guy.”
It’s not unusual for psychopaths to inflict serious physical or emotional damage on others, sometimes routinely, and yet refuse to acknowledge that they have a problem controlling their tempers. In most cases, they see their aggressive displays as natural responses to provocation.
NEED FOR EXCITEMENT
Psychopaths have an ongoing and excessive need for excitement—they long to live in the fast lane or “on the edge,” where the action is. In many cases the action involves breaking the rules.
In The Mask of Sanity (p. 208) Hervey Cleckley describes a psychopathic psychiatrist who never broke the law to any significant extent, but who was unable to tolerate the self-containment required by professional life and went on periodic binges. During these weekend outbursts he would shatter his image as a professional care giver by degrading, insulting, and even physically threatening any woman who found herself in his company.
Some psychopaths use a wide variety of drugs as part of their general search for something new and exciting, and they often move from place to place and job to job searching for a fresh buzz. One adolescent we interviewed had a novel way of keeping his juices flowing: Somehow, weekend after weekend, he persuaded his buddies to play “chicken” with a freight train on a bridge over a river. The group would stand on the bridge facing the train, and the first to jump would have to buy beer for the rest. Our subject, a highly persuasive, machine-gun conversationalist, never once had to buy the beer.
Many psychopaths describe “doing crime” for excitement or thrills. When asked if she ever did crazy or dangerous things just for fun, one of our female subjects replied, “Yeah, lots of things. But what I find most exciting is walking through airports with drugs. Christ! What a high!”
A male psychopath said he enjoyed his job as an “enforcer” for a drug dealer because of “the adrenaline rush. When I’m not on the job I’ll go into a bar and walk up to someone and blow smoke in his face, and we’ll go outside and fight, and usually he ends up liking me and we’ll go back in and have a drink or something.”
The television documentary Diabolical Minds contained an interesting segment on G. Daniel Walker, a criminal with a long record of fraud, robbery, rape, and murder, and a penchant for bringing lawsuits against everyone in sight.4 Interviewed by
former FBI agent Robert Ressler, Walker offered this comment: “There is a certain excitement when you have escaped from a major penitentiary and you know the red lights are behind you and you know the sirens are going. There is a certain excitement that you just... it’s better than sex. Oh, it’s exciting.”
The flip side of this yearning for excitement is an inability to tolerate routine or monotony. Psychopaths are easily bored. You are not likely to find them engaged in occupations or activities that are dull, repetitive, or that require intense concentration over long periods. I can imagine that psychopaths might function reasonably well as air-traffic controllers, but only while things are hectic and fast paced. During slow periods they would likely goof off or go to sleep, assuming that they even showed up for work.
ARE PSYCHOPATHS PARTICULARLY well suited for dangerous professions? David Cox, a former student of mine and now a psychology professor at Simon Fraser University, doesn’t think so. He studied British bomb-disposal experts in Northern Ireland, beginning the research with the expectation that because psychopaths are “cool under fire” and have a strong need for excitement they would excel at the job. But he found that the soldiers who performed the exacting and dangerous task of defusing or dismantling IRA bombs referred to psychopaths as “cowboys,” unreliable and impulsive individuals who lacked the perfectionism and attention to detail needed to stay alive on the job. Most were filtered out during training, and those who slipped through didn’t last long.
It is just as unlikely that psychopaths would make good spies, terrorists, or mobsters, simply because their impulsiveness, concern only for the moment, and lack of allegiance to people or causes make them unpredictable, careless, and undependable—likely to be “loose cannons.”
LACK OF RESPONSIBILITY
Without Conscience Page 7
