Journey into Darkness

by John Douglas

  When rehabilitation works, there is no question that it is the best and most productive use of the correctional system. It stands to reason: if we can take a bad guy and turn him into a good guy and then let him out, then that’s one fewer bad guy to harm us. This, of course, is a rather naive and simpleminded way to state the case, but in certain circumstances, it can work. If a person is stealing because he has no job and no training and he can be given training that will lead to a job, then perhaps he will gain self-respect and not feel the need to steal. If a person is stealing to support a drug habit and he can be gotten off drugs, then we can move on to the next step and get him the job and selfrespect. The fact of the matter is that in many, if not most, cases, this doesn’t work and the offender is back at his old crimes again before too long. But I’m not going to say that it isn’t worth the time or effort or money to try to get certain types of offenders onto the straight and narrow, because I think there is hope.

  Where I do not think there is much hope—and this is based on years of research and even more years of experience—is when we deal with serial killers and sexual predators, the people I have spent most of my career hunting and studying. These people do what they do not because they need to eat or to keep a family from starving, or even to support a drug habit. They do it because it feels good, because they want to, because it gives them satisfaction. You can certainly make the argument, and I will agree with you, that many of them are compensating for bad jobs, poor selfimage, mistreatment by parents, any number of things. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to be able to rehabilitate them.

  My colleague Gregg McCrary uses the analogy of the cake. You’ve baked this chocolate cake which smells great and looks terrific, but as soon as you bite into it you realize something is very wrong. Then you remember, “Oh yeah, in addition to the eggs and flour and butter and cocoa (and whatever else you put into a cake recipe), I recall mixing in some axle grease from my workshop in the garage. That’s the only problem with the cake—the axle grease! If I can just figure out a way to get the axle grease out of the cake, it will be perfectly fine to eat.”

  This is the way my co-workers, associates, and I view rehabilitation of sexual predators, particularly serial sexual predators. The fact of the matter is that in the vast majority of cases, the urges, the desires, the character disorders that make them hurt and kill innocent men, women, and children are so deeply ingrained in the recipe of their makeup that there is no way to get out the axle grease.

  The case of author and murderer Jack Henry Abbot, mentioned earlier, is just one example of many. I recall one particularly heartrending story which also makes the point. Back in the early 1990s, a child molester-killer who had escaped from prison was featured on the television program America’s Most Wanted. This individual happened to see the program himself, and realized that others who knew him in his assumed identity would undoubtedly see it as well, that they would finger him, he’d be rearrested, and the jig would be up. Knowing this, and knowing his remaining time in freedom would be short, he left home, set out in his car, and kidnapped, molested, and killed another child before the police got to him. He knew that he would be going back in the slammer permanently, where he wouldn’t have access to any little children, so he’d better do something while he had the chance.

  The other analogy that comes to mind is the fable of the frog and the scorpion. A scorpion comes up to a frog and asks the frog to take him across the pond on his back.

  “No,” says the frog. “Because if I do, you’ll sting me, and then I’ll die.”

  “Think logically,” replies the scorpion. “The reason I want the ride is because I can’t swim. If I sting you and you die, then I die, too.”

  The frog mulls this over for a moment and decides the scorpion has a point. “Okay,” he says, “hop on.”

  So the scorpion climbs onto the frog’s back and the frog swims out from shore. But then, as they’re about halfway across the pond, the scorpion stings the frog.

  In his agonizing death throes, the frog gasps, “Why’d you do that? Now we’re both gonna die.”

  And as the scorpion sinks below the surface of the pond on the way to his own death by drowning, he simply shrugs and says, “It’s in my nature.”

  I’m afraid that at this point, none of us—not police officers or detectives, or FBI agents, or lawyers, judges, psychiatrists, or priests—have any real idea how to change that nature once it’s gotten beyond the formative stage. That’s why people like former Special Agent Bill Tafoya, Ph.D., for a long time Quantico’s resident “futurist,” feels that recognition of serious behavioral problems in kids and intervention at an early age are absolutely vital. This is the man who considers Project Head Start to be the single most effective crime-fighting weapon in the American arsenal. So clearly, Tafoya states and I agree, we need to take a big-picture view of crime and its causes. As we tell anyone who’ll listen, if you’re relying on us—the FBI and local police—to solve the crime problem, you’re going to be very disappointed. By the time it makes a blip on our radar, it’s too late; the criminal personality is already well established.

  And this, unfortunately, is the reason rehabilitation often does not work.

  So the next approach is isolation from society. If we can’t “correct” or “cure” these predators, then we’ve just got to warehouse them to keep them off the street and keep the rest of us safe. Little need be said about this subject; its uses and drawbacks are self-evident. Many men who are violent and very dangerous in the outside world do okay in prison where life is highly structured and they don’t have the opportunity to be harmful to innocent people. But some of them do have the opportunity to be harmful to other prisoners and prison guards and support personnel. And if anyone out there thinks our maximum security prisons, both federal and state, are not rough and dangerous places in which to live, take it from someone who’s spent a lot of time visiting them—life in there is pretty damn precarious and threatening.

  Of course, these are all bad guys in there, so who cares if they prey on each other? Well, that is the attitude most of us take; we resent all the tax money that goes into prisons and maintaining prisoners as it is. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think rehabilitation works in a lot of cases and I am in favor of long-term isolation of the most dangerous offenders. But if we’re going to allow the dangerous situations currently operating in our prisons to continue, just don’t expect anyone coming out to be a much better person than he was when he went in. Probably, the opposite will be true. It’s not an atmosphere conducive to rehabilitation; neither is it one in which you can simply warehouse and not worry about the consequences. I don’t want more people let out of prison, but I don’t want prisons places where you take your life in your hands, either.

  Which brings us to the final view of sentencing, and that is punishment. We can try to rehabilitate, we can isolate them as long as we have to, but what about this goal? Is there any value in making a person suffer because of something he’s done to someone else, and can that suffering deter anyone else from committing the same kind of crime?

  Let me say at the outset that throughout the ages, the data on punishment as deterrence is not very encouraging. We’ve all heard the stories of pickpockets operating at the medieval public executions of felons convicted of pickpocketing. And on a level more basic and close to home, how often does spanking a child prevent his repetition of spankable offenses? Deterrence is great if it works, but to make punishment justified and worthwhile, it would seem that it needs some value beyond that.

  And I think it has that.

  In both this book and Mindhunter, I related some of my encounter with Charles Manson and my study of the gruesome crimes committed under his auspices back in 1969. And now, I’m gratified to read that former Manson family members Leslie Van Houten, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel, upon reflection of twenty or so years in prison, regret their roles in the murders of Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, Voytek Fryko
wski, Steven Parent, and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. At their periodic parole hearings, their attorneys testify to the women’s repudiation of their former guru, their sincere contrition for their crimes, and the certainty that they would no longer be dangerous if released back into society.

  I believe them. I really do. I believe they now see Manson realistically and for what he was and still is. I believe they are truly sorry for what they did those two horrible nights back in the summer of 1969. And as one who has studied violent offenders and dangerousness for many years, I believe they probably would not commit another serious crime if let out. They might even become “productive” members of society, teaching others through the errors of their own ways.

  But I have also studied the case and all its details. I have gone over all the autopsy protocols and medical examiner’s reports. I have seen the hideous crime scene photos of all seven victims, including the eight-months-pregnant Sharon Tate, who pleaded in vain with her attackers for the life of her unborn child. I have used these raw images in my lectures to FBI agents and National Academy police fellows and they never fail to elicit a gasp from these hardened professionals. So, seeing what I have seen and knowing what I know, I’m just old fashioned enough to believe that though these three convicted offenders may now be sorry, though they may no longer be dangerous, the idea of punishment alone is satisfactory justification for keeping them in prison at taxpayers’ expense. And in my mind, there is no way they can be sufficiently punished for the monstrousness of what they did.

  Does not a civilized and enlightened society believe in redemption? As opposed to rehabilitation, which is a more practical notion, I see redemption as belonging in the spiritual realm and so is a different kind of idea. But here I would argue, as Jack Collins has, that until we take seriously the most serious of crimes, we have no right to call ourselves civilized or enlightened. There are certain crimes that are simply too cruel, too sadistic, too hideous to be forgiven. We owe at least that to those seven innocent victims of the Manson family who had every right to live.

  But when I talk about punishment, aren’t I really talking about vengeance—the biblical eye-for-an-eye concept? Maybe I am. Which brings up the next question: Does vengeance have a place in punishment?

  Should punishment, as administered by the correctional system, be used as a therapeutic or cathartic tool for crime victims and their families? We all want them to have closure, but are they legally (as opposed to merely morally) entitled to it?

  Jack and Trudy Collins don’t use the words “revenge” or “vengeance” to describe what it is they and others like them seek. “Though I don’t disagree with the classic dictionary definition, ’to inflict deserved punishment for an injury,’ for most people, they’ve now become emotionally loaded words with a connotation of personal malice, and their use ends up hurting the victim,” Jack explains.

  What they want, they say, is “retribution,” which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “recompense for, or requital of, evil done.”

  “It’s a way of society balancing the scales,” says Jack, “giving the victims and their families a feeling of satisfaction for what was done to them, to make them whole as far as possible or restore integrity—the quality or state of completeness—to both the people and the system. Nothing will ever bring Suzanne back to us. But even if this retribution doesn’t bring complete closure, it shows us that society, the jury, and the entire criminal justice system care enough about us to see to it that our daughter’s killer receives his appropriate punishment. It lets us know that they did right by us as far as they could.”

  It seems to me that for serious crimes, retribution through punishment is the only just and moral action that we, as a society, can take. This is not, however, a universal opinion.

  As Jack Collins states, “Victims need to put the horror and trauma of the crime behind them as soon as possible and get on with their lives. Victims have a right to expect that defendants will be tried promptly so that, if convicted, their punishment can begin speedily. We’ve been trying to sensitize people to the fact that victims should not be considered outsiders in the criminal justice system. They have a stake; they should be in the forefront. We deserve and demand a place at the table.”

  When it comes to the next level of the criminal justice system, he says, “It seems to many observers of appeals courts, including ourselves, that too many of its judges consider the appellate function an academic and theoretical exercise that has more to do with intellectual sleight-of-hand and verbal dexterity than seeing that basic justice is done to victims and punishment meted out to wrongdoers. They appear to fancy the pose of being far above the fray, unaffected in any way by the blood, sweat, tears and violence which started the case’s journey to their very chambers.”

  What the Collinses seek, of course, is the execution of their daughter’s murderer in accord with the sentence handed down by his jury and judge.

  Capital punishment is one of those issues like abortion. Not many of us are ever going to change anyone’s opinion about it, one way or the other. If you are against the death penalty on moral grounds, I think a case can be made for putting away the worst of these monsters for life with no possibility they will ever be let out or paroled. But we know that there is no such thing. And frankly, in certain cases, I don’t think it’s enough.

  As Steve Mardigian put it, “The tremendous devastation against victims warrants that we do something appropriately serious. In my view, we have no reason to keep people capable of inflicting this kind of horror alive.”

  Some would argue that capital punishment is “legalized murder” and therefore an immoral act on the part of society. My personal feeling is that these offenders have made a choice to remove themselves from society and therefore it is a moral statement to say that society will not tolerate the perpetrator of this kind of horrible act in its midst.

  Asserting that capital punishment is legalized murder does a tremendous injury, in my opinion, to the very concept of right and wrong, in that it trivializes the crucial distinction between the victim of the crime and its perpetrator—the innocent life and the one who chose for his own vile reasons to take that innocent life.

  If you ask me if I’m personally prepared to throw the switch that would legally end the life on earth of Sedley Alley, Larry Gene Bell, Paul Bernardo, Lawrence Bittaker, or others of their ilk, my answer would be a resounding “Yes!” And for those who talk of forgiveness, I’ll tell them I am sympathetic to the concept, but at the same time I do not feel I am authorized to forgive; it’s not my place.

  Had Sedley Alley merely (and I use this word with some trepidation) raped, beaten, and tortured Suzanne Collins, but left her alive and her mental faculties intact, then she, and only she, would have been in a position to forgive him if she so chose. And as far as I’m concerned, she remains the only one capable of forgiving him, but because of what actually did happen, she can only do so now after his jury-imposed sentence has been carried out.

  That, I think, is what the Collinses mean by retribution rather than revenge.

  Now, on the subject of deterrence, I admit that there can be little doubt that as presently administered in the United States, the death penalty is not a general deterrent to murder in many, if not most, situations. Common sense should tell us that if you’re a young urban criminal making your living off the drug trade where there are huge amounts of money at stake and your business competition is out there trying to kill you every day, the dim prospect of a possible death sentence and execution somewhere at the end of a fifteen year procedural morass—that is, if you get caught, if you don’t plea bargain, if you draw a tough judge and a tough jury, if you don’t get reversed, if they don’t change the law, et cetera, et cetera—isn’t much of a deterrent, or a risk, for that matter, compared to the occupational hazards you face on the street every day of your working life. So let’s be realistic about that aspect of the argument.

  If the death penalty were applied
more evenly and uniformly, and if the period of time from sentence to execution were reduced to a reasonable matter of months rather than a protracted period of years or even the decades that people like the Collinses have had to endure, then perhaps it would become more useful in dissuading would-be offenders in certain types of murders. But frankly, this theoretical speculation doesn’t concern me all that much. Meted out fairly and consistently, perhaps the death penalty could become a general deterrent; I’m not certain and I wouldn’t be optimistic about it.

  But of one thing I am certain: it is, by God, a specific deterrent. No one who has been executed has ever taken another innocent life. And until such time as we really mean it as a society when we say “imprisonment for life,” I, and the families of countless victims, would sleep better at night knowing there is no chance that the worst of these killers will ever again be able to prey on others. Even then, I personally believe that if you choose to take another human life, you ought to be prepared to pay with your own.

  Our justice system is imperfect. Some monsters can be rehabilitated and go on to live useful and productive lives. Nathan Leopold, who partnered with Richard Loeb in the 1924 thrill killing of young Bobby Franks in Chicago, was paroled in 1958 and went on to finish out his years respectably and productively as a social worker and lab technician, volunteering for studies in malaria research. But you know something? I don’t think that would be the case with a Lawrence Bittaker, and I’m not anxious to keep him around long enough to find out. Once you’ve done something this horrendous, you forfeit your claims to rehabilitation.