The Amazing Adventures of Phoenix Jones: And the Less Amazing Adventures of Some Other Real-Life Superheroes: An eSpecial from Riverhead Books

by Jon Ronson

  I told Bob about her skepticism and I said I shared it to an extent, but that was possibly because I’d been spending a lot of time lately with Scientologists.

  He shot me a grumpy look.

  “We’ll see how you feel by the end of the week,” he said.

  “So, anyway,” I said, “how did all this begin for you?”

  He looked at me. I could tell what was going through his mind: “I’m tired. Telling the story will take up a lot of my energy. Does this person really deserve it?”

  Then he sighed. And he began.

  In the mid-1960s, just as Elliott Barker was first conceiving his Total Encounter Capsule over in Ontario, Bob Hare was in Vancouver working as a prison psychologist. His was the maximum-

  security British Columbia Penitentiary. Nowadays it is a prison-themed bar and diner where the servers wear striped prison uniforms and dishes are named after famous inmates, but back then it was a tough facility with a brutal reputation. Like Elliott, Bob believed that the psychopaths in his care buried their madness beneath a façade of normality. But Bob was less idealistic. He was interested in detection, not cure. He’d been tricked so many times by devious psychopaths. On his very first day working at the prison, for example, the warden had told him he needed a uniform and he should give his measurements to the inmate who was the prison tailor. So Bob did, and was glad to observe how assiduously the man took them. He spent a long time getting everything just right: the feet, the inside leg. Bob felt moved by the sight. Even in this awful prison, here was a man who took pride in his work.

  But then, when the uniform arrived, Bob found that one trouser leg rode up to his calf while the other trailed along the ground. The jacket sleeves were equally askew. It couldn’t have been human error. The man was obviously trying to make him look like a clown.

  At every turn, psychopaths were making his life unpleasant. One even cut the brake cables of his car while it was in the prison’s auto repair shop. Bob could have been killed. And so he started devising tests to determine if psychopaths could somehow be rooted out.

  He put word around the prison that he was looking for psychopathic and non-psychopathic volunteers. There was no shortage. Prisoners were always looking to relieve the boredom. He strapped them up, one by one, to various EEG and sweat and blood-pressure measuring machines, and also to an electricity generator, and he explained to them that he was going to count backward from ten and when he reached one, they’d receive a very painful electric shock.

  The difference in the responses stunned Bob. The non-psychopathic volunteers (theirs were crimes of passion, usually, or crimes born from terrible poverty or abuse) steeled themselves ruefully, as if a painful electric shock was just the penance they deserved, and as the countdown continued, the monitors revealed dramatic increases in their perspiration rates. They were, Bob noted and documented, scared.

  “And what happened when you got to one?” I asked.

  “I gave them an electric shock,” Bob said. He smiled. “We used really painful electric shocks,” he said.

  “And the psychopaths?” I asked.

  “They didn’t break a sweat,” said Bob. “Nothing.”

  I looked at him.

  “Sure,” he added, “at the exact moment the unpleasant thing occurred . . .”

  “The electric shock?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Bob. “When the unpleasant thing occurred, the psychopaths gave a response . . .”

  “Like a shriek?” I asked.

  “Yes, I suppose like a shriek,” said Bob. But the tests seemed to indicate that the amygdala, the part of the brain that should have anticipated the unpleasantness and sent the requisite signals of fear over to the central nervous system, wasn’t functioning as it should.

  It was an enormous breakthrough for Bob, his first clue that the brains of psychopaths were different from regular brains. But he was even more astonished when he repeated the test. This time the psychopaths knew exactly how much pain they’d be in when he reached one, and still: nothing. No sweat. Bob learned something that Elliott Barker wouldn’t for years: psychopaths were likely to re-offend.

  “They had no memory of the pain of the electric shock even when the pain had occurred just moments before,” Bob said. “So what’s the point in threatening them with imprisonment if they break the terms of their parole? The threat has no meaning for them.”

  He did another experiment, the Startle Reflex Test, in which psychopaths and non-psychopaths were invited to look at grotesque images, like crime-scene photographs of blown-apart faces, and then when they least expected it, Bob would let off an incredibly loud noise in their ear. The non-psychopaths would leap with astonishment. The psychopaths would remain comparatively serene.

  Bob knew we tend to jump a lot higher when startled if we’re on the edge of our seats anyway. If we’re watching a scary movie and someone makes an unexpected noise, we leap in terror. But if we’re engrossed by something, a crossword puzzle, say, and someone startles us, our leap is less pronounced. From this Bob deduced that when psychopaths see grotesque images of blown-apart faces, they aren’t horrified. They’re absorbed.

  It seemed from Bob’s experiments that psychopaths see blown-apart faces the same way we journalists see mysterious packages sent in the mail, or the same way we see Broadmoor patients who might or might not have faked madness—as fascinating puzzles to be solved.

  Thrilled by his findings, Bob sent his readings to Science magazine.

  “The editor returned them unpublished,” he said. “He wrote me a letter. I’ll never forget it. He wrote: ‘Frankly we found some of the brain wave patterns depicted in your paper very odd. Those EEGs couldn’t have come from real people.’”

  Bob paused and chuckled.

  “Couldn’t have come from real people,” he repeated.

  My guess was that Science magazine behaved coolly toward Bob because they believed him to be yet another maverick psychopath researcher running rampant in a Canadian mental institution in the late 1960s. Those places were the Wild West of psychopath study back then, with lots of big ideas and practically no regulation. It was inevitable that civil rights groups would eventually force a reining in of the experiments. And sure enough, disastrously for Bob, electric shocks were outlawed in the early 1970s.

  “Even mild ones,” he told me. He seemed annoyed by the legislation even now, years later. “We could still startle them with loud noises but they couldn’t be anywhere near as loud,” he said.

  Bob was forced to change tack. How could psychopaths be rooted out in a more hands-off way? Were there patterns of behavior? Would they involuntarily use giveaway turns of phrase, imperceptible to unsuspecting civilians? He devoured Hervey Cleckley’s seminal 1941 book, The Mask of Sanity. Cleckley was a Georgia-based psychiatrist whose analysis of psychopathic behavior—how they bury their psychosis beneath a veneer of engaging normalness—had come to influence the field. Bob began quietly scrutinizing his own psychopaths, looking out for linguistic clues.

  In 1975 he organized a conference on the subject.

  “I invited the top people in the world who might have something to say about psychopaths,” he said. “We ended up with eighty-five people. We took over a hotel in a ski resort near Saint Moritz called Les Arcs.”

  It began disastrously, Bob said, with one psychiatrist standing up and dramatically announcing to the group his contention that Bob was himself a psychopath. A ripple of shock passed through the conference hall.

  Bob stood. “Why do you believe that?” he asked.

  “You’re clearly impulsive,” replied the psychiatrist. “You can’t plan ahead. You invited me to participate as a speaker in this conference only a month ago.”

  “I invited you only a month ago because the person I wanted to come couldn’t come,” Bob said.

  “Oh, you’re cold-blooded and callous,” the psychiatrist said.

  “Did he mean it?” I asked Bob now.

  “Yeah, he meant it,
” said Bob. “He was a nasty man.”

  The purpose of the Les Arcs conference was for the experts to pool their observations on the minutiae of psychopaths’ behavior, the verbal and nonverbal tics. Were there patterns? Did they involuntarily use giveaway turns of phrase? Their conclusions became the basis for his now famous twenty-point Hare PCL-R Checklist. Which was this:

  Item 1: Glibness/superficial charm

  Item 2: Grandiose sense of self-worth

  Item 3: Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom

  Item 4: Pathological lying

  Item 5: Conning/manipulative

  Item 6: Lack of remorse or guilt

  Item 7: Shallow affect

  Item 8: Callous/lack of empathy

  Item 9: Parasitic lifestyle

  Item 10: Poor behavioral controls

  Item 11: Promiscuous sexual behavior

  Item 12: Early behavior problems

  Item 13: Lack of realistic long-term goals

  Item 14: Impulsivity

  Item 15: Irresponsibility

  Item 16: Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

  Item 17: Many short-term marital relationships

  Item 18: Juvenile delinquency

  Item 19: Revocation of conditional release

  Item 20: Criminal versatility

  And first thing the next morning, we were going to learn how to use it.

  Tuesday morning. The attendees milled around in the tent that was to be ours for the next three days. Some were Bob Hare fans. When he stood in a corner telling stories about how he “packs heat, because a lot of psychopaths blame their incarcerations on me,” we gathered to listen. The tent stood next to a pretty tidal estuary. The peach silk drapes fluttered in the summer morning breeze. Bob brought up the occasion—now famous in psychopath-analyzing circles—when Peter Woodcock had explained that the reason he’d killed Dennis Kerr on his first day of freedom from Oak Ridge was because he wanted to know what it would be like to kill someone, and the interviewer had said, “But you’d already killed three people,” and Woodcock had replied, “Yes, but that was years and years and years and years ago.”

  Bob turned to me. “You see?” he said. “Short memories. Just like during that electric shock test.”

  Some of the people listening in chuckled wryly. But there were skeptics here, too. Psychiatrists and psychologists and care workers and criminal profilers and neurologists tend not to like being told what to do by so-called gurus of the movement. I could feel in the room a sense of “Impress me.”

  We took our places. Bob flicked a switch. And onto the screen came a video of an empty room. It was a drab, municipal-looking room painted in a blue so dull it was barely a color. There was a plywood desk, a chair. The only splash of cheerfulness was a bright red button on the wall. Into the room walked a man. He was good-looking, neatly dressed. He had a bit of a twinkle in his eye. He moved his chair until it was underneath the red button. It made a slight scraping noise as he pulled it across the floor.

  “Do you see what he just did?” said Bob. “He moved his chair to right below the panic button. He did it to intimidate my researcher, who’s standing behind the camera. Just a little display of control. That feeling of control is important to them.”

  And the man began to talk.

  We never learned his name, or which prison this room was situated inside. Throughout the morning we referred to him only as Case Study H. His accent was Canadian.

  It all began, quite innocently, with the researcher asking Case Study H about his school days.

  “I enjoyed the social atmosphere of school,” he replied, “enjoyed learning and seeing new things.”

  “Did you ever hurt anyone in a schoolyard fight?” the researcher asked.

  “No,” he replied. “Just schoolyard shenanigans.”

  These were critical questions, Bob later explained, because the answers might inform Item 12 of his checklist: Early Behavior Problems. Almost all psychopaths display serious behavior problems as a child, Bob said, starting around age ten to twelve, like persistent bullying, vandalism, substance abuse, arson.

  “I had a couple of incidences of fisticuffs,” said Case Study H. “Well, one time I broke this kid’s arm. It was really distasteful. I was holding him down and I put excessive pressure on his arm and it just snapped. It was not something I wanted to happen.”

  There was, we noted in our assessment sheets, something weirdly disconnected about his description of the event: “I put excessive pressure on his arm and it just snapped.” It was like he couldn’t properly place himself there.

  Item 7: Shallow Affect—An individual who seems unable to experience a normal range and depth of emotions.

  Item 8: Callous/Lack of Empathy.

  Item 10: Poor Behavioral Controls.

  I remembered a time I perforated my eardrum on a plane and for days afterward everything around me seemed faraway and hazy and impossible to connect to. Was that foggy sensation a psychopath’s continual emotional state?

  “One of my old buds from the FBI was investigating this woman, Karla Homolka,” Bob had told me earlier. “She and her husband had videotaped themselves torturing and raping and murdering these young women. The police were taking her through the house where they’d cut up the bodies, carved them up, and Karla was saying, ‘My sister would like that rug . . .’ They took her into the bathroom and Karla was saying, ‘Can I ask you something? I had a bottle of perfume here . . .’ Totally disconnected. It was stunning.”

  Bob said it’s always a nice surprise when a psychopath speaks openly about their inability to feel emotions. Most of them pretend to feel. When they see us non-psychopaths crying or scared or moved by human suffering, or whatever, they think it’s fascinating. They study us and learn how to ape us, like space creatures trying to blend in, but if we keep our eyes open, we can spot the fakery.

  “What happened to Karla Homolka in the end?” I asked him.

  “She’s out now,” he said. “They believed her little-girl act. Hair in braids. All sweet and lovely. Very convincing. She blamed it all on her husband. She did a plea bargain. They gave her twelve years.”

  Item 5: Conning/Manipulative.

  Item 4: Pathological Lying—An individual for whom lying is a characteristic part of interactions with others.

  Case Study H’s video testimony continued. Around the time he broke the kid’s arm he locked his stepmother in a closet—revenge for her trying to discipline his brother.

  Item 14: Impulsivity.

  “She was in the closet for nearly twelve hours. And then my father came home. He let her out. It was pathetic. She just sobbed.”

  One time, Bob said, one of his researchers interviewed a bank robber who told him how a cashier had soiled herself from fear as he pointed his gun at her.

  “It was pathetic,” the bank robber had told Bob’s researcher, “seeing her soil herself like that.”

  I glanced at one or two of my fellow skeptics in the crowd. We were looking a bit less skeptical now. We took notes.

  Item 6, I wrote on my pad. Lack of Remorse or Guilt.

  “How did it feel to lock your stepmother in a closet?” the interviewer asked Case Study H.

  “It felt invigorating,” he replied. “It felt good. I had some power. I was in control.”

  Item 2: Grandiose Sense of Self-Worth.

  “I became the night clerk at a local place,” he continued. “If people came in drinking, swinging around, if they wouldn’t respond to politeness, well, then I would get physical with them. I beat a couple of people pretty bad.”

  “How did you feel about that?” the interviewer asked.

  “I didn’t really have any feelings about it,” he replied.

  We attendees glanced excitedly at each other and scribbled notes. I began thinking about the people I knew who didn’t have as many feelings as they ought to have.

  “Ever injure anyone badly enough to get them into hospital?” the interviewer asked.


  “I don’t know,” he replied. “I didn’t care. It wasn’t my problem. I won the fight. No room for second place.”

  I was good at this, good at reading between the lines, at spotting the clues, the needles in the haystack. It’s what I’ve been doing for twenty years as a journalist.

  Case Study H reminded me of a blind man whose other senses had become enhanced to compensate. His enhanced qualities, compensating for the lack of guilt and fear and remorse, included the ability to skillfully manipulate—“I was able to manipulate those people that were close to me, for drugs, for money, using my friends, the more I know about them the better I am at knowing what buttons to push,” he told Bob’s researcher (Item 9: Parasitic Lifestyle)—and also an aptitude for not feeling bad about his crimes afterward.

  “It was a business.” He shrugged, recounting one robbery he committed. “They had insurance.”

  Psychopaths, Bob said, will invariably argue that their victims had no right to complain. They had insurance. Or they learned a valuable life lesson getting beaten up like that. Or it was their own fault anyway. One time Bob interviewed a man who had impulsively killed another man over a bar tab.

  “He only had himself to blame,” the killer told Bob. “Anybody could have seen I was in a rotten mood that night.”

  Item 16: Failure to Accept Responsibility for Own Actions.

  All this was building toward the moment Case Study H would detail his most awful crime. His recounting of it began quite vaguely. I didn’t quite know what he was talking about at first. There was a kid he knew. The kid hated his parents. It was a real weakness of the kid’s. Case Study H thought he could get something out of this hatred. Maybe he could provoke the kid into robbing them and then they could share the money. So he started needling the kid. All his troubles were the fault of his parents. Case Study H really knew which buttons to push to rile a boy who was already on the edge.