The Anatomy of Violence

by Adrian Raine

  Let’s look further into Randy’s mental makeup, and piece together why he succeeded in staying so successful in slaying while other killers are caught more quickly. To begin with, in stark contrast with Antonio Bustamante, who had twenty-eight arrests before his homicide, Randy Kraft had almost nothing in his criminal record before he was apprehended. It was almost as clean as a whistle, and what little there was is illuminating. Let me elaborate.

  This story starts in the summer of ’66. It was the summer of Speck—the summer that Richard Speck was killing nurses in Chicago. It was also the summer of a historic first that I will never forget. It was the one and only time that England won the World Cup in soccer. I was twelve and Randy was twenty-one. He was also never to forget that time, but for a different reason. It was his first police bust.

  Randy was taking a stroll at Huntington Beach just south of L.A. and propositioned a young man on the beach. Unfortunately for him the young man was an undercover police officer. Randy was charged with lewd conduct but nothing came of it, even though it was duly recorded. That’s because he was told something that many first-time offenders are told: “Just don’t do it again.”14

  I suspect this was a double message for Randy. The message said: (1) watch out, the police are about, and (2) smarten up your act, and you can beat the cops. Remember that this was five years before Randy’s first known homicide. It was a scare that smartened him up in a way that his well-functioning prefrontal cortex could register. Poor frontal functioning results in poor social judgment, loss of self-control, and an inability to modify behavior appropriately. It was good frontal functioning that helped Randy to learn from his mistakes and adjust his careless behavior accordingly. Once bitten, twice shy.

  And yet Randy still wanted sex. What’s a man to do? Well, one adaptive strategy is to move from adults to adolescents—lower-hanging fruit that yields easier and more satisfying pickings, and a new sensual exploration of younger flesh. Given that there was also less chance of getting caught by an undercover vice officer, this is what Randy decided to do.

  There are likely many victims in the four years since that initial sting that we’ll never know about. The only one who lived to tell the tale was Joey Fancher. It was March 1970, and young Joey was just a wayward thirteen-year-old from Westminster, not far from where Randy was living in Long Beach. Joey had skipped school to race up and down the Huntington Beach boardwalk on his bicycle. There Randy clapped eyes on him. He gave Joey a cigarette, and perhaps having a sense of the kind of kid Joey was, asked him a question. Had he ever had sex with a woman? No. Would he like it? Yes! So off the two sped on Randy’s motorbike, back to his apartment under the pretext of making young Joey’s adolescent dreams of lovemaking come true.

  The bike ride itself might have been a buzz for the boy as he clung on to this cool beach dude, but a bigger buzz awaited him. Once in the apartment Randy brought out the next enticement—a bit of dope. The boy felt woozy with the cannabis, so Randy—the benevolent host that he was—brought Joey just the thing that would wipe away that wooze. Four little red capsules with some Spanish sangria to wash it down. Now the boy was all Randy’s, to fulfill his wildest wishes with. Kraft forced the disoriented boy to give him oral sex. Joey resisted, but would years later tell a jury, Kraft “put his hands on my head and forced me. I couldn’t do nothing. Period. It was like I was a rag doll.”15

  Joey retched with the ejaculate in his mouth. Kraft then took him to his bedroom, placed him on the mattress, and sodomized him. You’d think that after taking a break to go to the bathroom Randy might have gotten the better of his overflowing emotion and backed off just a bit. Instead, he beat the boy mercilessly and sodomized him yet again. Joey the rag doll was passing in and out of consciousness in a drug-drenched haze. He could still feel the intense pain of the anal penetration. He wept with the physical and psychological torture. He vomited from the alcohol-drug mix. Randy made one more trip to the bathroom. This time he came back out and nonchalantly told the boy he was going off to work—as simple as that. Randy just left the apartment, as cool as a cucumber.

  Herein lies the tragic moment. If the correct action had been taken, Kraft would have been removed from circulation. He would never have been able to continue his pedophilic impulses. But it was not to be. Joey got out of the house, crossed Ocean Boulevard in a haze, and was almost hit by a car. He just managed to make it across the road to a bar and appeal for help. A customer called 911 and Joey was taken to a hospital to have his stomach pumped to discharge the drugs and alcohol. Two police officers then returned with Joey and his family to Randy’s apartment, where Joey had left his new shoes. There they found a hoard of seventy-six photographs, largely of men in various stages of orgasm.

  You’d really think something would have happened, but it didn’t. Joey was not much different from many other sexually abused children. Too ashamed of what had happened to him, Joey could not bring himself to tell the police and parents about the wretched rag-doll rape and beating at the hands of Kraft. It was too humiliating. Plus, the police had done their inspection without a search warrant. They did not charge Randy.

  For his troubles Joey ended up that night getting a beating from his grandfather—who mercilessly used a board with a nail in it—for cutting school and almost losing his new shoes. This was on top of the intense pain from his bleeding and a torn rectum that took two weeks to heal, while he kept his lips firmly sealed on the rape.

  As for Randy, I can imagine him carefully contemplating at the end of that evening how close he had come to conviction for pedophilic rape and assault. His prefrontal cortex was recognizing once again that he must be much more careful. The under part of the prefrontal cortex specializes in learning from experience and fine-tuning decision-making based on past experience.16 Randy was contemplating how to proceed. Dead men tell no tales. From now on, he would leave no witnesses, and to our knowledge he made his first killing the following year.

  Let’s look back at Randy’s brain in Figure 3.3 and compare it this time to the normal control. You can see more activation in the very middle—the thalamus—as well as excellent activation of the occipital cortex at the bottom and the temporal cortex at the side-middle area. You don’t see as much activation in either the normal control or the one-off killer.

  But we did see this in someone else who had a brain scan very much like Randy’s. That scan is shown above Randy’s in Figure 3.3. Take a look at this one and compare it to the three you see below it. Which one would you say it most approximates? It’s not a perfect match, but it does seem more similar to Randy’s than the others. Note the plentiful prefrontal activation at the top, the bilateral thalamic activation in the very middle, the occipital activation at the bottom, and the temporal lobe activation at the sides.

  What’s interesting about this brain scan is that it’s my brain scan. As you noticed earlier, it’s hard for me not to see parallels between Randy’s life and mine, and the parallels go on. We both have flat feet and we both love tennis. Randy was one of the four top seeds in the Westminster High varsity tennis team. I was not as good, but I captained the tennis team at my college at Oxford University.

  Randy also had an elder sister who was a primary-school teacher, just as I did—we were both influenced by that sisterly connection. At university I very much wanted to be a primary-school teacher and I was accepted for postgraduate teacher training at Brighton. I particularly wanted to teach eight-year-olds, because during university breaks I took children on holiday for a charitable trust. I had different age groups but felt I could connect with eight-year-olds. Randy also wanted to be a primary-school teacher and spent a semester working as a teacher’s aide with third-graders aged eight and nine. Neither of us sustained our career goal. We’ve both been caught drunk in our cars in Southern California by the police, albeit under different circumstances. And we both have the same brain functioning.

  Am I a serial killer? I’ve never been caught and convicted for homicide. Nor an
y other offense, for that matter, with the exception of smuggling moon cake from Shanghai into Melbourne in 2000, for which I was fined about $175. Might I have a brain predisposition to be a serial killer? Maybe. Does this similarity in scans demonstrate that brain imaging is not diagnostic? I’d like to believe so.

  Clearly there are “normal” people like myself—and perhaps yourself—with “abnormal” brain scans. And by the same token, there are “abnormal” violent individuals who have quite normal brain functioning. We cannot use brain imaging as a high-tech tool to tell who’s normal, who’s a one-off killer, and who’s a serial killer. It’s just not that simple. Yet at the same time we are beginning to gain important clues as to which brain regions—when dysfunctional—could give rise to violence.

  So there we have them. Bustamante, Kraft, and Raine. Three different individuals with different yet somewhat similar backgrounds and brains. We’ve seen that the prefrontal cortex is a key brain area that is dysfunctional in murderers. And while I’d like to emphasize that fact, the exception presented by Randy Kraft gives us pause. While we cannot read too much into one case study, such fascinating individuals do, as we’re about to see, generate interesting hypotheses for further testing.

  REACTIVE AND PROACTIVE AGGRESSION

  Analyzing Randy’s brain made us reflect upon an important distinction in violence research—between “proactive” and “reactive” aggression. This distinction has been around for a long time in the work of Ken Dodge, at Duke, and Reid Meloy, in San Diego. The basic idea is that some predatory people—the proactives—use violence to get what they want in life.

  Randy was proactively aggressive. He carefully planned his actions, drugging his victims, having sex with them, and then impassionately dispatching them. Like a good computer specialist, he was methodical, logical, calculating, and an able trouble-shooter of problems. Proactively aggressive kids will bully others to get their money, games, and candy. There’s a means to an end. Proactives plan ahead. They are regulated, controlled, and driven by rewards that are either external and material or internal and psychological. They are also cold-blooded and dispassionate. They’ll carefully plan the heist they have been thinking through, and they’ll not think twice about killing if need be. Quite a lot of serial killers fit this bill—like Harold Shipman, in England, who killed an estimated 284, most of them elderly women; Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, whose terror campaign was conducted with mail bombs; Peter Sutcliffe, who bumped off thirteen women in the north of England; and Ted Bundy, who carefully killed about thirty-five young women, many of them college students.

  Flip the aggression coin and the other side to the Randy Krafts of the world are “reactive” aggressives. These more hot-blooded individuals lash out emotionally in the face of a provocative stimulus. Someone has insulted them and called them names. They’ve lent money and it has not been returned. They’ve been verbally threatened. So they hit back in anger.

  Take Ron and Reggie Kray, two identical twins who grew up in east London and operated in the swinging ’60s, the same time that Randy Kraft was operating in Southern California. Reggie Kray’s killing of Jack “the Hat” McVitie was an example of reactive aggression. It went like this.

  McVitie had said mean things about Reggie’s schizophrenic twin brother, Ron. True, Ron Kray was fond of his food, and yes, he enjoyed exploring the boundaries of his sexuality. But there are more subtle ways of expressing these facts than to call him “a fat poof,” as Jack “the Hat” did. Jack also owed the Kray twins a hundred pounds, which did not help things. Adding injury to insult, one night walking out of a Chinese restaurant, Reggie bumped into McVitie, who said, “I’ll kill you, Kray, if it’s the last fucking thing I do.”17 Now, that’s not nice.

  Reggie decided that that was going to be Jack McVitie’s last supper. Later that night Reggie pushed a knife into McVitie’s face and stabbed him to death in an explosive fit of pent-up anger. Reggie would have blown Jack’s head off, but his .32 automatic jammed twice, so he had to use a knife instead. Reactive aggression is much more emotional and unregulated. So in this context, although they were both murderers, Kraft and Kray were more like apples and oranges.

  Given this proactive-reactive subdivision, I decided to categorize our forty-one murderers into proactive, predatory killers and reactive, emotional killers. We scanned all sources for all the information that we could dredge up on our subjects—attorney records, preliminary-hearing transcripts, court transcripts, national and local newspaper stories, reports and interviews from psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers, and of course rap sheets. We even interviewed some of the previous prosecution and defense attorneys for more information on the killings. In the end, we classified twenty-four murderers as “reactive” killers and fifteen as “proactive” killers.18 In a number of the homicides there were elements of both proactive and reactive aggression, so they were left unclassified.19 Think of a revenge killing, for example. Someone gets really upset by an insult, and in response they set about carefully getting their own back. They are indeed reacting to a slight, but they plan their sweet revenge carefully and thoughtfully, and obtain satisfaction in doing so—a psychological gain. They are not unlike terrorists who react to a sociopolitical, ideological insult by carefully planning a counterattack.

  The results of our reactive-proactive comparisons are illustrated in Figure 3.4, in the color-plate section. Here you’re looking down on the brain and the prefrontal cortex is again at the top. This time the subregion you see is called the ventral—or underneath—prefrontal cortex. The reactive, hot-blooded murderer has low prefrontal functioning in the ventral subregion. In contrast, the predatory, cold-blooded killer has just as much prefrontal activation as the normal controls. Like Randy Kraft, they’ve got the goods to make a cold, calculated kill. In contrast, the hot-blooded killers are not so hot when it comes to prefrontal regulatory activation.

  We see here—even at a visual level—that homicide is nuanced. Yes, there is a cerebral basis to violence. And yes, the prefrontal cortex is one of the culprits. But even among the tiny proportion of us who kill there are differences. Our group of predatory, proactive killers features the same regulatory brain control as Randy. The brain anatomy of murder is color-coded on a reactive-proactive aggression spectrum.

  PREFRONTAL CONTROL RELATIVE TO LIMBIC ACTIVATION

  Wait a bit. If these predatory killers have relatively normal prefrontal functioning, what made them killers in the first place?

  Let’s plumb the depths of the murderous mind. Deeper down in the brain, well below the civilized upper crust of the prefrontal cortex, we arrive at the limbic system, site of the emotions, and the more primitive parts of our neural makeup. Here the amygdala fires up our emotions and stimulates both predatory and affective attack.20, 21 The hippocampus modulates and regulates aggression and when stimulated sets in motion predatory attack.22, 23 The thalamus is a relay station between the emotional limbic areas and the regulatory cortical areas. The midbrain when stoked up gives expression to full-blooded affective emotional aggression.24

  We combined these regions to get an overall measure of subcortical activation in the reactive murderers, the proactive murderers, and the normal controls. We found that both murderer groups showed higher activation of these subcortical limbic regions than the controls, especially in the more “emotional” right hemisphere of the brain. Below the façade of the boy-next-door that many cold-blooded killers are able to portray, there’s a lot bubbling under in that deeper subcortical cauldron of brain functioning.

  What exactly is going on here? We can think of these deeper limbic emotion-related brain regions as partly being responsible for deep-seated aggression and rage, which both groups of killers have in common. The difference, however, is that the cold-blooded killers have sufficient prefrontal regulatory resources to act out their aggression in a relatively careful and premeditated fashion. They feel as angry as anyone, but instead of getting mad, they get even. In cont
rast, while the hot-blooded killers also have a mass of angry feelings simmering away, they don’t have sufficient prefrontal resources to express their anger in a controlled and regulated fashion. Someone gets their goat, they see red, and they blow their lid. Before you know it, blood flows.

  This seeming paradox of good frontal regulatory control and increased limbic activation in predatory, proactive killers can be exemplified by a number of serial killers. Take Ted Bundy, who may have killed as many as a hundred women and girls, mostly college students. His homicides were the epitome of planning. With his arm in a sling to make him look vulnerable, Bundy would politely ask a young woman to help him carry something to his car. Using his beguiling charm, good looks, and debonair manners, he would lure her to a safe place where with demonic fury he would tear into her—biting her buttocks, gnawing her nipples, and bashing her head in a sexual orgy that ended in a brutal beating and killing. Despite all the planning and forethought that carefully preceded his attacks, once that stealthy lion had stalked his prey, he unleashed with ferocious fury the ultimate attack. The emotional limbic cauldron was overflowing into an unbridled, unregulated killing.

  The study I did with Monte, like all initial findings, requires replication and extension. Another study of eleven impulsive murderers also using the continuous-performance task replicated our findings of reduced prefrontal activation.25 Yet because these studies are so hard to conduct, the reality is that virtually no other research group has been able to build upon and extend our initial findings on murderers.26 For many researchers, linking the brain to homicide is a bridge too far. Nobody can cross it.