by Nigel Latta
‘I always drop my daughter at school,’ he says, ‘but I make sure I drop her down the street so her friends don’t see her with me.’ He looks down at his tattoos and scars. ‘She doesn’t need her friends seeing this lot, knowing her dad is an ex-con.’
There’s something very sad but also very sweet about that.
‘How does your daughter feel about what you did?’ I ask.
He shrugs. ‘We’ve never talked about it.’
‘How come?’
He shrugs again. ‘I dunno, we just never have.’
‘You were gone for most of her life, surely that has to be something you two should talk about?’
Pat swallows then, and I can see this is deeply painful for him. In that moment sadness and regret seemed to overwhelm him. ‘I don’t know how,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m not good at that stuff.’
‘You’re better than most,’ I said. ‘You can talk about it with me. How come you can’t talk about it with her?’
He pauses again. ‘I guess…because I feel pretty shamed by it. I really let her down, you know?’
I nod. ‘True, you did. No argument from me there, but my question is what are you going to do about it now?’
‘But what do I say?’
‘You tell her about that,’ I say, pointing at his hands, which are tightly clenched over his stomach. ‘Tell her about the feeling that makes you get all knotted up like that. Tell her about that.’
He looks down at his hands. ‘There’s so much of my life I fucked up,’ he says. ‘I just want her to make good choices and not be a fuck-up like me.’
‘Whatever else you may have done in your life,’ I say, ‘you’re trying your best to be a good dad for your kids now. I don’t know what you were like when you killed that guy all those years ago; my guess would be that you probably weren’t a very nice person back then, but I see how much you care about your kids.’
‘I was all fucked up on drugs and hanging around with some bad people.’ He shakes his head. ‘I wish I could go back now and talk a bit of sense into me.’
‘Well you can’t, because that man died, but you can still be a father to your children. Lots of guys don’t. Lots of dads don’t give a damn. You’re here, and you’re trying, and for that you should let yourself feel a little bit of pride.’
He nods. ‘I guess.’
We talk a bit more about some possible strategies he could use at home to manage the kids’ behaviour, and some ways he might begin to talk to his daughter.
When he left at the end of the session he shook my hand again, much more warmly. ‘Thanks, mate,’ he said, smiling.
And he meant it.
It was only later, as I was scribbling a few notes, that I thought about what had just happened. I liked the man. Genuinely liked him. And what’s more, I’d felt some admiration for the effort he was making with his kids.
Now, I have to point out, even back then I knew when I was being conned. Some offenders, particularly the psychopaths, can be extremely engaging and charming. They can be highly skilled at manipulating others to get what they want. After a while though you can tell when that’s happening. The charm feels empty, without substance.
Pat was quite the opposite. He was just a nice bloke.
Then I looked at his list of convictions, and I thought about the fact he’d beaten a man to death in a car park one night with a piece of wood. And that’s what shook me so badly.
He was a murderer, but in many ways he was just a normal bloke. OK, a normal bloke with a string of convictions, but he was no Hannibal Lector. He could have been any dad that came to see me at any of the Family Therapy agencies I’d worked in.
The fact that a bloke so apparently ‘normal’ could kill someone was deeply troubling. I’d met offenders charged with far lesser offences who I thought were much scarier. What did that mean then, if killers could be so normal? What did that mean for the rest of us?
Perhaps it means that taking a life isn’t like the elegantly choreographed Hollywood scenes. Most of the time it’s just a clumsy, stupid, ugly act.
The truth is that killers are unremarkable people. Usually it’s a spur of the moment, unplanned, overreaction. Only a very small percentage of people who commit murder use some form of sophisticated planning and convoluted motivation. Most times people kill for simple reasons: anger, greed, stupidity, fear.
The killers whose crimes are more ‘interesting’ tend to be the ones who get all the media attention and therefore tend to represent the public conception of a murderer. In my own experience I would have to say that the murderers I have dealt with have largely been sad, pathetic characters, and sometimes, as with Pat, they have actually been likeable.
Which is probably the most frightening thing of all.
FINDING HIM
YOU DON’T FIND him in anything he says, you find him in what he’s done. This is a lesson I learned very early in the game. What the guy says to you is, at face value, meaningless. What he did is where the real truth lies. Like everybody else I held my share of stereotypes of the types of people I expected would commit particular crimes. Some of them proved fairly accurate, while some were way wide of the mark.
For example, while it’s true that some sex offenders look like dirty old men in raincoats, they’re by far the minority. I once did an assessment of a man who’d been accused of sexually abusing a number of boys in parks over several months. He turned up unshaven, with greasy black hair, dark yellow nicotine-stained fingers, and teeth that were a light shade of green. To cap it all off he was wearing a dirty old raincoat covered in a dubious assortment of stains that came down to his hairy knees.
I remember looking at this man, unable to believe a person could achieve that degree of stereotyping and not have been lynched years ago. Anyone who saw this man at a park near children would surely feel like running him over with their car.
I’m not saying the stereotypes are completely wrong; they’re just not the whole picture. Sex offenders, for example, come in all shapes, sizes and colours. Sexual offending, it turns out, is one of life’s great equal-opportunity activities. Every socioeconomic group is represented, as is every race, sexual orientation and gender. It has to be said though, that at least as far as gender goes, there is a very clear bias in that somewhere between 85—90 percent of sexual offenders are male. Women do sexually offend, but it’s much rarer.
The bottom line is that sometimes you face a very credible-looking person telling a very credible story, and you have to decide what level of risk this person poses and how to treat them. That’s the point where the ground starts to get slippery.
Often men will come with a whole pile of background paperwork including several previous psychological or psychiatric reports, probation reports and the like. The only bit of all that stuff I ever read prior to seeing the guy is his conviction list (a chronological record of all the offences he’s ever been convicted for) and the police summary of facts (a description of what he’s been charged with).
Why not read all that other stuff first? Simply because I don’t care what he’s said to anyone else and what they think of him. None of that helps me to know who he is. What I want to know is what he did, because that’s where I’ll find out who he really is underneath all the propaganda and game playing. I’ll read the other stuff later, but first I want to know what he’s done. Behaviour reflects personality far better than any report ever will.
A psychological report might say that a man convicted of burglary acknowledges what he did was wrong and is motivated to change. It might also tell me the man has completed some counselling and made some progress in understanding the likely effects of his actions on the victim. It might also say he expresses high levels of guilt and remorse. Which is all fine, but the summary of facts tells me he burgled the same house twice, and each time, in addition to taking a small amount of money, he masturbated on a piece of the female owner’s underwear before cutting it up with some scissors and leaving it on her bed. S
o the report might tell me all these positive things about the man, but I know he’s been playing games. He didn’t make any progress understanding the effect on his victim, because he knew all along. The very point of masturbating on the underwear and cutting it up was to frighten her. I also know he almost certainly has rape fantasies, and these will likely include elements of bondage and torture, probably involving knives. He will probably possess, or have access via the Internet, to a lot of violent, sadistic pornography. If he hasn’t already committed a rape, he’s certainly on a fast-track to doing so. My subsequent face-to-face assessment will probably alter my predictions about what he’ll go on to do—based on more subtle personality characteristics—but I already know a lot about him just from the summary of facts. I can also make a few reasonable guesses about his early family life, his education, his work history, his social life and his relationships with women. It’s all there in the description of his current offence.
Fingerprints and body fluids aren’t the only things criminals leave at a crime scene; they also leave traces of their personality, signs of who and what they really are. Sometimes that can help the police to catch bad guys, but at my end of the food chain it always helps when it comes to trying to stop him from doing it again.
You’ll find him in what he did, because that’s where his personality is expressed, naked and raw. That’s where he allows himself to be who he really is. That’s where he stops pretending and finally lets out the stuff he keeps hidden from the rest of the world.
Tony was sent to me by his lawyer. He’d been charged with indecent assault of his stepdaughter, and had already pleaded guilty. The sentencing hearing was coming up and his lawyer sent him to me for an assessment. Apparently he’d had an assessment with a probation officer and thought he’d been unfairly treated. Now, with all due respect to lawyers, mostly what they want is a report saying their client’s basically a good bloke and he’ll never do it again. I always tell them that there’s a 99.99 percent chance I’m going to agree with the probation officer, but they almost always want to go ahead anyway. I guess a .01 percent chance is better than nothing.
So, immediately before I see Tony I sit down and check the summary of facts, which makes for the usual harrowing read. He’d abused the child from age seven to 12, when she finally disclosed the abuse at school. The girl couldn’t remember how many times he’d done it, just that it was several times a week. She said she used to cry and ask him to stop but he would laugh and tell her to be quiet. The summary also described how on several occasions he took photographs of her when she was crying, which of course is the bit that makes the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I haven’t even met Tony, but already I know who he is, just from that one act.
When I go out and get him from the waiting room, I see he’s tall, in his late thirties, well groomed and very polite. As he shakes my hand I smell expensive aftershave and notice a large silver ring on his right hand, stylish, expensive costume stuff. And he smiles. A big friendly nice-guy smile.
‘Hi, Nigel,’ he says. ‘Glad you could see me.’
‘Come through,’ I reply, noting my instant dislike for him.
Dislike is an important clinical indicator for me, because mostly the people I dislike straight off are the ones who think they can play me. I don’t mind being lied to, it goes with the turf, but it annoys the crap out of me when people think they can schmooze their way through an assessment. Tony was a schmoozer, that much I could see right off the bat.
I do my usual introductory blurb and then ask him where the best place is to start. I know where I think the best place is to start, but I’m always curious about where the bad guy thinks it is.
‘I think my relationship with my father,’ he says, and I have to stifle a laugh.
‘OK,’ I reply, ‘tell me about that.’
So he does for a while. It’s the usual stuff: a controlling, angry, emotionally distant father. Unhappy childhood. In between his calculated snow job though, I’m picking up more about who he is. As I’m listening to him I’m filtering it all through the fact that he took pictures of his victim, not sexual per se, but photographs of her face. Photographs of her crying.
In between the transparent ‘poor me, I’m a victim’ routine he’s trying to sell me, strands begin to emerge. Emptiness. Powerlessness. Rage.
This all comes with a smile. The smile changes as he talks: sometimes charming, sometimes with just an eloquent twist of sadness, sometimes almost melancholy. It’s very convincing, which of course is why I’m not convinced by it at all.
‘Tell me about your partner,’ I finally ask him.
He shrugs. ‘Sally’s a wonderful woman,’ he says. ‘Even after all this she’s still prepared to support me.’
I don’t say anything, I just keep looking. I haven’t met Sally but I can make a few guesses about her: low self-esteem, average intelligence, very probably with a history of abuse and neglect herself. Sally would be weak, already broken by life, and easily led into the shadows.
‘We met six years ago through another woman friend of mine,’ he continues. ‘We hit it off straightaway, and I thought Kate was just wonderful.’
‘How old was she then?’
‘Six.’ His eyes practically sparkled when he talked about her.
Tony went on to describe how he’d taken an instant shine to the girl, and how ‘wonderful’ she was. I let him do that for a while.
‘When did you first start having sexual thoughts about her?’ I asked. This is the first big lie test, because I already know the answer: the first moment I saw her.
‘This may sound strange,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think I ever really did.’
Liar, liar, pants on fire. I shrugged. ‘In my game I’ve heard stranger things. Tell me what you mean.’
‘I mean, I know I sexually offended against her, but really I think what happened was that I blurred the boundaries between sex and intimacy.’
‘How do you mean?’
Now, at this point I don’t want to sound judgemental. I just want to hear what he has to say. He’s currently engaged in what amounts to psychologically ‘staging’ a crime scene. At an actual crime scene that might be where a murderer ‘stages’ things to try to make it look like a burglary gone wrong. In my consulting room it’s the same process, only more abstract. Tony is trying to throw me off the scent. He’s trying to schmooze me into believing his version of his motive: love gone wrong. What he doesn’t know is that I already understand his motive. It was all there in that one sentence in the police summary.
Tony sighed and looked contrite. ‘I really loved her, you know,’ he said. ‘I know what I did was wrong, but I think I did the male thing of confusing intimacy with sexuality. I think I loved her so much that I mixed up emotional closeness with sexual closeness. At the time what we did seemed a logical extension of my feelings for her.’
‘Wow,’ I said, like we were talking about losing his car keys, ‘bummer.’
Tony glanced up, frowning quickly and then returning to his smile. ‘I’m sorry?’
I smiled back again. ‘Bummer.’
He frowned again, uncertain how to respond. One of the quickest ways to get an offender out of his script is to act in a way that breaks conventional social mores. You don’t have to be rude; you just have to break the rules. Almost everyone finds that unsettling. With guys like Tony, if they can get all the way through a session feeling settled, then nothing of any worth has happened.
‘Can I ask you a question, Tony?’
He nodded. ‘Of course.’
‘Why do you think it is that I don’t like you?’
He smiled, then frowned, then smiled again. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘Why do you think it is that I don’t like you?’
‘I wasn’t aware that you didn’t like me.’
‘I know. That’s why I thought I should come right out and tell you.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s pretty much my policy w
hen I’m working with guys that I’ll be honest about what I think is going on. It doesn’t do you much good if I hold that stuff back. My guess is that most psychologists you’d see wouldn’t like you either, it’s just they wouldn’t actually come out and say it. I don’t work that way because I think it’s important you know what I’m thinking so you can consider what it might mean for you.’ I shrug. ‘By the same token I have no problem with you being completely up front with me. If you think I’m a prick let’s talk about that. Quite possibly I am.’
He smiled, but it was an uncomfortable smile. ‘I don’t think you’re a…a prick.’
‘Not even a little bit?’
Tony shook his head. ‘No.’
Liar, liar, pants on fire. ‘If I was you I’d think I was a prick.’
He smiled again, but this time it looked more than a shade pissy. ‘Well, Nigel, I’m open to whatever you have to say.’ Tony liked being in control.
‘Good. So why do you think I don’t like you?’
‘Well obviously because of what I’ve done. Because I’m a sex offender.’
Now it was my turn to smile. ‘I’ve been working with guys who sexually abuse kids for over a decade, Tony. You think I could do that if I didn’t like the people I work with?’
‘You like sex offenders?’
Now Tony’s saying, in his very indirect, polite, passive-aggressive way, that I’m lying.
‘Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like sexual offending. I think it’s a gutless thing to do. But I’ve liked a lot of the people I’ve worked with over the years. You can’t do this stuff for as long as I have if you don’t respect the people you work with. Otherwise why would you bother?’
