by Jon Ronson
“The more he told me about himself, the more leverage I had for manipulation,” he told Bob’s researcher. “I just kept fueling the fire; the more fuel I added to the fire, the bigger payoff for me. I was the puppet master pulling the strings.”
Eventually the kid became wound so tight he got a baseball bat, jumped into his car, with Case Study H in tow, and drove to his parents’ house. When they arrived, “I sort of gave him that mocking look,” Case Study H said. “‘Show me.’ And he showed me. He went into the master bedroom equipped with a baseball bat and I sort of shrugged it off. And then the beatings started. It was endless. It seemed to last an eternity. He came back into the hall brandishing a baseball bat covered in blood. I came face-to-face with one of the victims. He didn’t look real. He just didn’t look real. He was looking right at me. It was just a vacant expression. There were three people in the house. One person died. The other two were severely injured.”
This was what happened when a psychopath got control of the emotions of a troubled, thuggish kid.
Bob’s researcher asked him if he could go back in time and change things from his life, what would he change?
“I have often pondered that,” Case Study H replied. “But then all that I have learned would be lost.” He paused. “The hotter the fire when forging a sword, the tighter the bond on the blade,” he said.
“Is there anything else you want to say?” said Bob’s researcher.
“No,” he replied. “That’s it.”
“Okay, thanks,” said Bob’s researcher.
The video ended. We broke for lunch.
And so passed the three days. And as they did, my skepticism drained away entirely and I became a Bob Hare devotee, bowled over by his discoveries. I think the other skeptics felt the same. He was very convincing. I was attaining a new power, like a secret weapon, the kind of power that heroes of TV dramas about brilliant criminal profilers display—the power to identify a psychopath merely by spotting certain turns of phrase, certain sentence constructions, certain ways of being. I felt like a different person, a hardliner, not confused or out of my depth as I had been when I’d been hanging around with Tony and the Scientologists. Instead I was contemptuous of those naive people who allowed themselves to be taken in by slick-tongued psychopaths, contemptuous of, for instance, Norman Mailer.
In 1977, Mailer—who was working on The Executioner’s Song, about the recently executed convicted murderer Gary Gilmore—began corresponding with a tough Utah prisoner, a bank robber and murderer named Jack Henry Abbott. Mailer came to admire Abbott’s writing, and then to champion him when he was up for parole in 1981. “I love Jack Abbott for surviving and for having learned to write as well as he does,” Mailer wrote the Utah Board of Corrections.
“Mr. Abbott has the makings of a powerful and important American writer,” Mailer went on, promising that if the board paroled Abbott he’d give him a job as a researcher for $150 a week. Surprised, and somewhat dazzled, the Board of Corrections agreed. Jack Abbott was free. And he headed straight for literary New York.
This was no surprise. New York City was where his champions were. But even so, Bob said, psychopaths tend to gravitate toward the bright lights. You’ll find lots of them in New York and London and Los Angeles. The psychologist David Cooke, of the Glasgow Centre for the Study of Violence, was once asked in Parliament if psychopaths caused particular problems in Scottish prisons.
“Not really,” he replied. “They’re all in London prisons.”
It wasn’t, he told them, a throwaway line. He had spent months assessing Scottish-born prisoners for psychopathy, and the majority of those who scored high were in London, having committed their crimes there. Psychopaths get bored easily. They need excitement. They migrate to the big cities.
Item 3: Need for Stimulation/Proneness to Boredom.
They also tend to suffer from self-delusions about their long-term prospects. They think if they move to London or New York or L.A., they’ll make it big, as a movie star, or a great athlete, or whatever. One time one of Bob’s researchers asked a grossly overweight prison psychopath what he hoped to do when he got out, and he replied that he planned to be a professional gymnast.
Item 13: Lack of Realistic Long-Term Goals.
(Unless the guy had been joking, of course.)
Jack Abbott thought he’d be the toast of literary New York. And, as it turned out, he was. He and Mailer appeared together on Good Morning America. He was photographed by the great New York portraitist, and wife of Kurt Vonnegut, Jill Krementz. The New York Times expressed gratitude to Mailer for helping get Abbott out on parole. He signed with the powerhouse agent Scott Meredith and was guest of honor at a celebratory dinner at a Greenwich Village restaurant, where Mailer, the editorial directors of Random House, Scott Meredith, and others toasted him with champagne.
And then, six weeks after getting out of prison, at 5:30 a.m. on July 18, 1981, Abbott stopped at a twenty-four-hour Manhattan restaurant, the Binibon. He had with him (according to reports the next day) two “attractive, well-educated young women he had met at a party.”
Item 11: Promiscuous Sexual Behavior.
Although, in fairness, Item 11 may not have applied to that threesome. It is impossible to know if they all were intending to have sex. Because everything was about to be altered. Everything was about to get worse.
Behind the counter at the Binibon was a twenty-two-year-old aspiring actor named Richard Adan. Abbott asked to use the toilet. Adan said it was for employees only. Abbott said, “Let’s go outside and settle this like men,” and so they did, and Abbott got out a knife and stabbed Richard Adan to death. Then he walked away, vanishing into the night.
“What happened?” Scott Meredith said to The New York Times. “Every conversation I had with Jack we talked about the future. Everything was ahead of him.”
What happened, Bob explained to us now, although we didn’t need telling, was that Jack Abbott was a psychopath. He couldn’t bear being disrespected. His self-worth was too grandiose for that. He couldn’t control his impulses.
“When the police finally caught up with him, you know what he told them about the guy he stabbed?” Bob said. “He said, ‘Oh, but he would never have made it as an actor.’”
“These motherfucking psychologists and psychiatrists are going to tell the administration and the police what you are going to do next. Even Jesus Christ could not predict what the fuck his apostles were going to do.”
These were the words of another of Bob’s videoed case studies—Case Study J. We laughed shrewdly when we heard him say this, because we did now know. That cryptic, powerful knowledge of how to decipher and identify psychopaths and anticipate their next move, even when they were feigning normalcy, was ours now. What we knew was that they were remorseless monsters and they would do it again in a heartbeat.
As I sat in the tent, my mind drifted to what I could do with my new powers. If I’m being honest, it didn’t cross my mind at that point to become some kind of great crime fighter, an offender profiler or criminal psychologist, philanthropically dedicated to making society a safer place. Instead I made a mental list of all the people who had crossed me over the years, and wondered which of them I might be able to expose as having psychopathic character traits. Top of the list of possibilities was the Sunday Times and Vanity Fair critic A. A. Gill, who had always been very rude about my television documentaries and had recently written a restaurant column for The Sunday Times in which he admitted to killing a baboon on safari.
I took him just below the armpit. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out. I wanted to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger. You see it in all those films. What does it really feel like to shoot someone, or someone’s close relative?
“Item 8: Callous/Lack of Empathy,” I thought.
I smiled to myself and zoned back in to Bob. He was saying that if he were to score himself on his checklist, he’d probably get a 4 or a 5 out of the possible
40. Tony in Broadmoor told me that on the three occasions they scored him, he got around a 29 or a 30.
Our three days in West Wales came to an end. On the last day Bob surprised us by unexpectedly flashing onto the screen a large-scale, close-up photograph of a man who’d been shot in the face at very close range. This came after he’d lulled us into a false sense of security by flashing photographs of ducks on pretty lakes and summer days in the park. But in this picture, gore and gristle bubbled everywhere. The man’s eyes had bulged all the way out of their sockets. His nose was gone.
“Oh GOD,” I thought.
An instant later my body responded to the shock by feeling prickly and jangly and weak and debilitated. This sensation, Bob said, was a result of the amygdalae and the central nervous system shooting signals of distress up and down to each other. It’s the feeling we get when we’re suddenly startled—like when a figure jumps out at us in the dark—or when we realize we’ve done something terrible, the feeling of fear and guilt and remorse, the physical manifestation of our conscience.
“It is a feeling,” Bob said, “that psychopaths are incapable of experiencing.”
Bob said it was becoming clearer that this brain anomaly is at the heart of psychopathy.
“There are all sorts of laboratory studies and the results are very, very consistent,” he said. “What they find is that there are anomalies in the way these individuals process material that has emotional implications. That there’s this dissociation between the linguistic meaning of words and the emotional connotations. Somehow they don’t put them together. Various parts of the limbic system just don’t light up.”
And with that our psychopath-spotting course was over. As we gathered together our belongings and headed toward our cars, I said to one attendee, “You have to feel sorry for psychopaths, right? If it’s all because of their amygdalae? If it’s not their fault?”
“Why should we feel sorry for them?” he replied. “They don’t give a shit about us.”
Bob Hare called over to me. He was in a hurry. He had to get the train from Cardiff to Heathrow so he could fly back to Vancouver. Could I give him a lift?
He saw it before I did. A car was upside down. The driver was still in his seat. He was just sitting there, as if good-naturedly waiting for someone to come and turn him right way up again so he could continue on his journey. I thought, “He looks patient,” but then I realized he wasn’t conscious.
His passenger sat on the grass a short distance away. She was sitting cross-legged, as if lost in her thoughts. She must have been thrown clean through the window a moment or two earlier.
I saw the scene only for an instant. Other people had already parked their cars and were running toward them, so I kept going, pleased that I didn’t have to be the one to handle it. Then I wondered if I should worry that my relief at not having to deal with the unpleasant responsibility was a manifestation of Item 8: Callous/Lack of Empathy—“He is only concerned with Number 1.”
I glanced in my rearview mirror at the good Samaritans rushing over and surrounding the overturned car and continued on my way.
“Jon?” said Bob, after a moment.
“Mm?” I said.
“Your driving,” said Bob.
“What about my driving?” I said.
“You’re swerving all over the road,” said Bob.
“No, I’m not,” I said. We continued in silence for a moment. “It’s the shock of seeing the crash,” I said.
It was good to know that I had been affected after all.
Bob said what was happening was my amygdala and central nervous system were shooting signals of fear and distress up and down to each other.
“They certainly are.” I nodded. “I can actually feel it happening. It’s very jarring and jaggedy.”
“You do realize,” said Bob, “that psychopaths would see that crash and their amygdalae would barely register a thing.”
“Well then, I’m the opposite of a psychopath,” I said. “If anything, my amygdala and my central nervous system shoot far too many signals up and down to each other.”
“Can you concentrate on the road, please,” said Bob.
“I came to you,” I said, “because of this guy called Tony. He’s in Broadmoor. He says they’re falsely accusing him of psychopathy and he hopes I’ll do some campaigning journalism to support his release. And I do have warm feelings for Tony, I really do, but how do I know if he’s a psychopath?”
Bob didn’t seem to be listening. It was as if the crash had made him introspective. He said, almost to himself, “I should never have done all my research in prisons. I should have spent my time inside the Stock Exchange as well.”
I looked at Bob. “Really?” I said.
He nodded.
“But surely stock-market psychopaths can’t be as bad as serial-killer psychopaths,” I said.
“Serial killers ruin families.” Bob shrugged. “Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”
This—Bob was saying—was the straightforward solution to the greatest mystery of all: Why is the world so unfair? Why all that savage economic injustice, those brutal wars, the everyday corporate cruelty? The answer: psychopaths. That part of the brain that doesn’t function right. You’re standing on an escalator and you watch the people going past on the opposite escalator. If you could climb inside their brains, you would see we aren’t all the same. We aren’t all good people just trying to do good. Some of us are psychopaths. And psychopaths are to blame for this brutal, misshapen society. They’re the jagged rocks thrown into the still pond.
Available now
To purchase The Psychopath Test, click here.
Also by Jon Ronson
The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
Them: Adventures with Extremists
The Men Who Stare At Goats
