The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

by Jon Ronson

  David Shayler as Delores.

  Some months passed, during which time I solved the Being or Nothingness mystery, met the Scientologists and Tony in Broadmoor, attempted to prove (with mixed results) Bob Hare’s theory that psychopaths rule the world, and became uncomfortably conscious of the fact that being a psychopath-spotter had turned me somewhat power-crazed. Actually, I now realized, I had been a somewhat power-crazed madness-spotter for twenty years. It is what we journalists do. It was why I had taken to being a psychopath-spotter with such aplomb. I was good at spotting the diamonds of craziness amid the gloom of normality because it’s what I’ve done for a living for twenty years. There can be something quite psychopathic about journalism, about psychology, about the art of madness-spotting. After I’d met Charlotte Scott, I consoled myself with the idea that this kind of thing happened only in entertainment–reality TV circles, and I was above it, but the David Shayler story demonstrated that this wasn’t true. Political journalism is no different. I was writing a book about the madness industry and only just realizing that I was a part of the industry.

  My mind kept returning to the conundrum of why David’s hologram theory had proved such a hit with the media yet his Messiah claims went essentially ignored. Why was one the right sort of madness and the other the wrong sort of madness? What was the formula? What did that formula say about us, the journalists and the audience?

  I e-mailed him. Could I pay him one last visit? He replied straightaway:Jon

  Got your e-mail. Sure thing.

  Phone isn’t working at the moment. And I’m in Devon. Come and see me and ask whatever you like.

  David

  It really looked like he’d landed on his feet. It was a lovely cottage in a tiny hamlet. The views from the hot tub on the back porch stretched out across Dartmoor. The cottage had a home cinema and a sauna. David—who was dressed as a man, in a white sweater and leather trousers—looked healthy and happy.

  “I live entirely without money,” he said as he made me coffee, “but I have a fairly good quality of life. I am looked after by God.”

  But as soon became clear, he hadn’t landed on his feet at all. He was staying in this cottage for only a few months, and the truth was, he was destitute. The good nights were when he slept under a tarpaulin in an eco village in Kew, West London. The bad nights were when he slept rough in a town park in some place like Guildford.

  The most stable time, he said, was about a year earlier, when he briefly found a new girlfriend, his first since Annie Machon had left him.

  “I gave this talk at a retreat and this woman came up to me and said she was the Bride of Christ. I checked it out with God and it turned out that she was an incarnation of one of the Gods and so I started going out with her.” David paused. “It turned out to be quite a peculiar relationship.”

  “You surprise me,” I said.

  “We ended up having a spectacular argument,” he said. “She had this group around her that worshipped her. I asked the group for permission to dress as Delores, and they said it was fine, but when I did, they all turned on me. They started snarling at me, accused me of all sorts of things, like being a tart, weird, perverted, not showing my girlfriend respect. They wouldn’t let me leave. And then they threw me out.”

  We went up to the attic room, where David had been sleeping these past weeks under a Thomas the Tank Engine duvet. A pile of CCHR DVDs—films produced by Brian’s anti-psychiatry branch of the Church of Scientology—sat next to his computer, with titles like Making a Killing: The Untold Story of Psychotropic Drugging. David said the Scientologists may be nuts but the DVDs really helped open his eyes.

  For a moment the sight of Thomas the Tank Engine made me feel desperately sad, childhood being a halcyon, untroubled time before madness sets in. But actually, diagnoses of mental disorders in children have mushroomed lately to epidemic levels. For instance: when I was a child, fewer than one in two thousand children was diagnosed with autism. Now the figure was greater than one in one hundred. When I was driving to the Coxsackie Correctional Facility in upstate New York to meet Toto Constant, I passed a billboard that read EVERY 20 SECONDS A CHILD IS DIAGNOSED WITH AUTISM. The same was true for Childhood Bipolar Disorder. There used to be no diagnoses at all. Now there was an epidemic in America.

  I asked David if the sharp decline in media interest had taken him by surprise. He nodded.

  “According to the Bible,” he said, “I was supposed to spend three days in hell after my crucifixion. Well: I was crucified in September 2007. . . .”

  “When you came out as Jesus?” I asked.

  “Right,” said David. “Biblical units are notoriously bad, and I think when it said three days in hell, it actually meant three years in hell.”

  “Tell me about the three years in hell,” I said.

  “I’m still in them,” David said.

  “What do you mean by hell?” I asked.

  “Hell is to be a teacher,” David said, “to have a message you want to get out, but nobody takes a blind bit of notice of you because you say you’re Jesus Christ, because God’s telling you to say it.” He paused. “God’s testing me. He knows I can do that stuff on stage and on the radio and TV. It’s part of my test to not be allowed to do what I think I do well. To teach me humility, and so on.” David nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “God’s testing me. And the test is whether I can continue to believe I’m Christ in the face of the opposition of six billion human beings.”

  “When was the last time you talked to God?” I asked.

  “We had a short conversation just before you came,” he replied. There was a Hebrew book on the table. “God told me to open the book for inspiration. I got the page for speaking the right words.”

  I picked up the book. It opened randomly to a double page filled with boxes, each containing a few Hebrew letters.

  “It’s a table of the seventy-two names of God,” David said. “Look at this . . .”

  He pointed haphazardly at a few.

  “That translates as David Shayler the Fish,” he said.

  He pointed haphazardly at a few more.

  “That translates as David Shayler Righteous Chav,” he said.

  “David Shayler Righteous Chav?” I said.

  “God laughed his head off when He pointed that out to me,” he said. “It was the first time God and I had ever laughed together.”

  I looked down at the table of the seventy-two boxes. “Surely you’re finding a pattern where there are no patterns,” I said.

  “Finding patterns is how intelligence works,” David snapped back. “It’s how research works. It’s how journalism works. The search for patterns. Don’t you see? That’s what YOU do!”

  Our conversation turned once again to David’s unhappiness at no longer being a popular talk show guest. He said he found it inexplicable and a real pity.

  “A lot of people are scared they’re going mad these days,” he said, “and it’s comforting for them to hear someone like me on the radio, someone who has the same ‘crazy’ beliefs they have, about 9/11 and 7/7, but sounds happy, and not mad. I challenge anyone to come and see me and leave believing I sound mad.”

  On the drive back to London from Devon it hit me: David was right. A lot of people are scared they’re going mad. Late at night, after a few drinks, they admit it. One or two of my friends swear they don’t mind. One woman I know says she secretly wills a nervous breakdown on so she can get admitted to a psychiatric hospital, away from the tensions of modern life, where she’ll be able to have long lie-ins and be looked after by nurses.

  But most of my friends do mind, they say. It scares them. They just want to be normal. I’m one of them, forever unpleasurably convinced my wife is dead because I can’t reach her on the phone, letting out involuntary yelps on claustrophobic Ryanair flights, becoming debilitatingly anxious that psychopaths might want to kill me. And we spend our evenings watching Wife Swap and Come Dine with Me and Supernanny and the early rounds of X Fact
or and Big Brother. TV is just troubled people being booed these days.

  There’s a load of films being made where filmmakers go to a council estate and 90 percent of the people there are functional—getting their kids ready for school, paying their taxes, working. And 10 percent are dysfunctional—and they go, “That’s what we’re going to make a film about.”

  —ACTOR EDDIE MARSAN, INTERVIEWED BY JONATHAN ROMNEY IN The Independent, MAY 2, 2010

  Practically every prime-time program is populated by people who are just the right sort of mad, and I now knew what the formula was. The right sort of mad are people who are a bit madder than we fear we’re becoming, and in a recognizable way. We might be anxious but we aren’t as anxious as they are. We might be paranoid but we aren’t as paranoid as they are. We are entertained by them, and comforted that we’re not as mad as they are.

  David Shayler’s tragedy is that his madness has spiraled into something too outlandish, too out-of-the-ball-park, and consequently useless. We don’t want obvious exploitation. We want smoke-and-mirrors exploitation.

  But we weren’t only in the business of madness, we were also in the business of conformity. I remembered Mary Barnes, the woman in the basement at R. D. Laing’s Kingsley Hall who was forever smearing herself in her own shit. Eventually she began smearing paints on canvas instead and became a celebrated artist. London society back in the 1960s and 1970s revered the way her paintings offered a profound glimpse into the insane mind. But Charlotte Scott, and all the other journalists, me included, weren’t scouring the planet for people who possessed the right sort of madness for television so we could revere them. When we served up the crazy people, we were showing the public what they shouldn’t be like. Maybe it was the trying so hard to be normal that was making everyone so afraid they were going crazy.

  A few days after I returned from Devon, I got a call from Bob Hare.

  9.

  AIMING A BIT HIGH

  Bob was spending a Saturday night at Heathrow—a stopover between Sweden and Vancouver; he spends his life crisscrossing the planet teaching people how to use his PCL-R Checklist—and did I want to meet at his hotel for a drink?

  When I arrived, there was no sign of him in the foyer. The queue for the front desk was long, a lot of tired, unhappy-looking business travelers checking in late. I couldn’t see the house phone. Then I had a brainwave. The concierge’s desk was unoccupied. His phone was sitting there. I could dial zero, go straight through to the front desk (callers to hotel front desks invariably get to jump the queue: we, as a people, seem more enticed by mysterious callers than we are by actual people standing in front of us) and ask to be put through to Bob’s room.

  But I got only as far as picking up the phone before I saw the concierge marching fast toward me.

  “Put down my phone!” he barked.

  “Just give me a second!” I cheerfully mouthed.

  He grabbed the phone from my hand and slammed it down.

  Bob appeared. I made a big, suave show in front of the concierge of greeting him.

  “Bob!” I said.

  We were two courteous business travelers meeting for important reasons in a hotel late in the evening. I made sure the concierge saw that.

  “Will we go to the third-floor executive bar?” Bob said.

  “Yes,” I said, shooting the concierge a glance. “The executive bar.”

  We walked across the lobby together.

  “You’ll never believe what just happened,” I said in a startled whisper.

  “What?” said Bob.

  “The concierge just manhandled me.”

  “In what way?”

  “I was using his phone to try and call you, and when he saw me, he grabbed it out of my hand and slammed it down,” I said. “It was totally uncalled for and actually quite shocking. Why would he want to do that?”

  “Well, he’s one,” said Bob.

  I looked at Bob.

  “A psychopath?” I said.

  I narrowed my eyes and glanced over at the concierge. He was helping someone into the elevator with her bags.

  “Is he?” I said.

  “A lot of psychopaths become gatekeepers,” said Bob, “concierges, security guards, masters of their own domains.”

  “He did seem to have a lack of empathy,” I said. “And poor behavioral controls.”

  “You should put that in your book,” said Bob.

  “I will,” I said.

  Then I peered at Bob again.

  “Was that a bit trigger-happy?” I thought. “Maybe the guy has just had a long, bad day. Maybe he’s been ordered by his bosses not to let guests use his phone. Why did neither Bob nor I think about that?”

  We got the elevator to the executive floor.

  It was nearly midnight. We drank whiskey on the rocks. Other business travelers—those with the key card to the executive bar—typed away on laptops, stared out into the night. I was a little drunk.

  “It’s quite a power you bestow upon people,” I said. “The power to spot psychopaths.” Bob shrugged. “But what if you’ve created armies of people who’ve gone power mad,” I said, “who spot psychopaths where there are none, Witchfinder Generals of the psychopath-spotting world?”

  There was a silence.

  “I do worry about the PCL-R being misused,” Bob said. He let out a sigh, stirred the ice around in his drink.

  “Who misuses it?” I asked.

  “Over here you have your DSPD program,” he said.

  “That’s where my friend Tony is,” I said. “The DSPD unit at Broadmoor.”

  “If thirty is the cutoff point, who gives the score?” Bob said. “Who administers that? Actually, there’s a lot of diligence in the UK. But in the U.S. we have the Sexually Violent Predator Civil Commitment stuff. They can apply to have sexual offenders ‘civilly committed.’ That means forever. . . .”

  Bob was referring to mental hospitals like the one at Coalinga, a vast, pretty, 1.2-million-square-foot facility in central California. The place has 320 acres of manicured lawns and gyms and baseball fields and music and art rooms. Fifteen hundred of California’s 100,000 pedophiles are housed there, in comfort, almost certainly until the day they die (only thirteen have been released since the place opened in 2005). These 1,500 men were told on the day of their release from jail that they’d been deemed reoffending certainties and were being sent to Coalinga instead of being freed.

  “PCL-R plays a role in that,” said Bob. “I tried to train some of the people who administer it. They were sitting around, twiddling their thumbs, rolling their eyes, doodling, cutting their fingernails—these were people who were going to use it.”

  A Coalinga psychiatrist, Michael Freer, told the Los Angeles Times in 2007 that more than a third of Coalinga “individuals” (as the inmates there are called) had been misdiagnosed as violent predators and would in fact pose no threat to the public if released. “They did their time, and suddenly they are picked up again and shipped off to a state hospital for essentially an indeterminate period of time,” Freer said. “To get out they have to demonstrate that they are no longer a risk, which can be a very high standard. So, yeah, they do have grounds to be very upset.”

  In the executive bar, Bob Hare continued. He told me of an alarming world of globe-trotting experts, forensic psychologists, criminal profilers, traveling the planet armed with nothing much more than a Certificate of Attendance, just like the one I had. These people might have influence inside parole hearings, death penalty hearings, serial-killer incident rooms, and on and on. I think he saw his checklist as something pure—innocent as only science can be—but the humans who administered it as masses of weird prejudices and crazy predispositions.

  When I left Bob that night, I made the decision to seek out the man responsible for what must surely be the most ill-fated psychopath hunt in recent history. His name was Paul Britton. Although he had at one time been a renowned criminal profiler, he’d been a lot less conspicuous, even quite reclusi
ve, these past years, ever since he became mired in his profession’s most notorious incident.

  I spent the next few days leaving messages for him everywhere, although I didn’t hold out hope. And then, late in the evening, my telephone rang. It came up as “Blocked.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the voice. “My name’s Paul Britton. I’m aware you’ve been trying to . . . sorry . . .” He sounded hesitant, self-effacing.

  “Will you talk to me about your criminal profiling days?” I asked.

  I heard him sigh at the memory. “Spending your life literally in the entrails of some poor soul who has been butchered is no way to pass your time,” he said.

  (Actually Paul Britton rarely, if ever, spent time literally in someone’s entrails: criminal profilers don’t visit crime scenes. The entrails he came into contact with would have been in police photographs, and in his imagination, when he attempted to visualize whichever psychopathic sex murderer he was profiling.)

  “Will you talk to me about those days anyway?” I asked.

  “There’s a new Premier Inn next to Leicester railway station,” he said. “I can meet you on Thursday at eleven a.m.”

  Paul Britton arrived at the Premier Inn wearing a long black coat reminiscent of the kind of dramatic clothing that Fitz—the brilliant fictional criminal profiler from the TV series Cracker—would wear. But I was probably making that connection because it has always been assumed that Fitz was based on him. We ordered coffee and found a table.

  I started carefully by asking him about Bob Hare’s Checklist—“He’s done a marvelous job,” Britton said. “It really is a valuable tool”—and then the conversation dried for a moment and he shifted in his chair and said, “I don’t know if I should tell you a little bit about how it all began for me? Is that okay? Sorry! You need to stop me trundling off if I’m being redundant. I won’t be remotely offended by that. But may I . . . ?”