The Psychopath Test

by Jon Ronson

  “The smell of Mary Barnes’s shit was proving a real ideological problem,” Adrian said. “They used to have long discussions about it. Mary needed to be free to roll around in her own shit, but the smell of it would impinge upon other people’s freedom to smell fresh air. So they spent a lot of time trying to formulate a shit policy.”

  “And what about your father?” I asked. “What was he like in the midst of all this?”

  Adrian coughed. “Well,” he said, “the downside of having no barriers between doctors and patients was that everyone became a patient.”

  There was a silence. “When I envisaged Kingsley Hall, I imagined everyone becoming a doctor,” I said. “I suppose I was feeling quite optimistic about humanity.”

  “Nope,” Adrian said. “Everyone became a patient. Kingsley Hall was very wild. There was an unhealthy respect for madness there. The first thing my father did was lose himself completely, go crazy, because there was a part of him that was totally fucking mad. In his case, it was a drunken, wild madness.”

  “That’s an incredibly depressing thought,” I said, “that if you’re in a room and at one end lies madness and at the other end lies sanity, it is human nature to veer towards the madness end.”

  Adrian nodded. He said visitors like Elliott Barker would have been kept away from the darkest corners, like Mary Barnes’s shit room and his father’s drunken insanity, and instead steered toward the Indian silks and the delightful poetry evenings with Sean Connery in attendance.

  “By the way,” I said, “did they ever manage to formulate a successful shit policy?”

  “Yes,” Adrian said. “One of my dad’s colleagues said, ‘She wants to paint with her shit. Maybe we should give her paints.’ And it worked.”

  Mary Barnes eventually became a celebrated and widely exhibited artist. Her paintings were greatly admired in the 1960s and 1970s for illustrating the mad, colorful, painful, exuberant, complicated inner life of a schizophrenic.

  “And it got rid of the smell of shit,” Adrian said.

  Elliott Barker returned from London, his head a jumble of radical ideas garnered from his odyssey, and applied for work at a unit for psychopaths inside the Oak Ridge hospital for the criminally insane in Ontario. Impressed by the details of his great journey, the hospital board offered him a job.

  The psychopaths he met during his first days at Oak Ridge were nothing like R. D. Laing’s schizophrenics. Although they were undoubtedly insane, you would never realize it. They seemed perfectly ordinary. This, Elliott deduced, was because they were burying their insanity deep beneath a façade of normality. If the madness could only, somehow, be brought to the surface, maybe it would work itself through and they could be reborn as empathetic human beings. The alternative was stark: unless their personalities could be radically altered, these young men were destined for a lifetime of incarceration.

  And so he successfully sought permission from the Canadian government to obtain a large batch of LSD from a government-sanctioned lab, Connaught Laboratories, University of Toronto. He handpicked a group of psychopaths (“They have been selected on the basis of verbal ability and most are relatively young and intelligent offenders between seventeen and twenty-five,” he explained in the October 1968 issue of the Canadian Journal of Corrections ); led them into what he named the Total Encounter Capsule, a small room painted bright green; and asked them to remove their clothes. This was truly to be a radical milestone: the world’s first-ever marathon nude psychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths.

  Elliott’s raw, naked, LSD-fueled sessions lasted for epic eleven-day stretches. The psychopaths spent every waking moment journeying to their darkest corners in an attempt to get better. There were no distractions—no television, no clothes, no clocks, no calendars, only a perpetual discussion (at least one hundred hours every week) of their feelings. When they got hungry, they sucked food through straws that protruded through the walls. As during Paul Bindrim’s own nude psychotherapy sessions, the patients were encouraged to go to their rawest emotional places by screaming and clawing at the walls and confessing fantasies of forbidden sexual longing for one another even if they were, in the words of an internal Oak Ridge report of the time, “in a state of arousal while doing so.”

  My guess is that this would have been a more enjoyable experience within the context of a Palm Springs resort hotel than a secure facility for psychopathic murderers.

  Elliott himself was absent, watching it all from behind a one-way mirror. He would not be the one to treat the psychopaths. They would tear down the bourgeois constructs of traditional psychotherapy and be one another’s psychiatrists.

  There were some inadvertently weird touches. For instance, visitors to the unit were an unavoidable inconvenience. There would be tour groups of local teenagers: a government initiative to demystify asylums. This caused Elliott a problem. How could he ensure the presence of strangers wouldn’t puncture the radical atmosphere he’d spent months creating? And then he had a brainwave. He acquired some particularly grisly crime-scene photographs of people who had committed suicide in gruesome ways, by shooting themselves in the face, for instance, and he hung them around the visitors’ necks. Now, everywhere the psychopaths looked they would be confronted by the dreadful reality of violence.

  Elliott’s early reports were gloomy. The atmosphere inside the Capsule was tense. Psychopaths would stare angrily at one another. Days would go by when nobody would exchange a word. Some noncooperative prisoners especially resented being forced by their fellow psychopaths to attend a subprogram where they had to intensively discuss their reasons for not wanting to intensively discuss their feelings. Others took exception to being forced to wear little-girl-type dresses (a psychopath-devised punishment for noncooperation in the program). Plus, nobody liked glancing up and seeing some teenager peering curiously through the window at them with a giant crime-scene photograph dangling around his neck. The whole thing, for all the good intentions, looked doomed to failure.

  I managed to track down one former Oak Ridge inmate who had been invited by Elliott to join the program. Nowadays Steve Smith runs a plexiglass business in Vancouver. He’s had a successful and ordinary life. But back in the late 1960s he was a teenage drifter, incarcerated for thirty days at Oak Ridge in the winter of 1968 after he was caught stealing a car while tripping on LSD.

  “I remember Elliott Barker coming into my cell,” Steve told me. “He was charming, soothing. He put his arm around my shoulder. He called me Steve. It was the first time anyone had used my first name in there. He asked me if I thought I was mentally ill. I said I thought I wasn’t. ‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ he said, ‘I think you are a very slick psychopath. I want you to know that there are people just like you in here who have been locked up more than twenty years. But we have a program here that can help you get over your illness.’ So there I was, only eighteen at the time, I’d stolen a car so I wasn’t exactly the criminal of the century, locked in a padded room for eleven days with a bunch of psychopaths, the lot of us high on scopolamine [a type of hallucinogenic] and they were all staring at me.”

  “What did they say to you?”

  “That they were there to help me.”

  “What’s your single most vivid memory of your days inside the program?” I asked.

  “I went in and out of delirium,” Steve said. “One time, when I regained consciousness, I saw that they’d strapped me to Peter Woodcock.”

  “Who’s Peter Woodcock?” I asked.

  “Look him up on Wikipedia,” he said.

  Peter Woodcock (born March 5, 1939) is a Canadian serial killer and child rapist who murdered three young children in Toronto, Canada, in 1956 and 1957 when he was still a teenager. Woodcock was apprehended in 1957, declared legally insane and placed in Oak Ridge, an Ontario psychiatric facility located in Penetanguishene.

  —FROM WIKIPEDIA

  “That does sound unpleasant,” I said. “Oh. I’ve just found a video interview with him.”


  PETER WOODCOCK: I regret that children died, but I felt like God. It was the power of God over a human being.

  INTERVIEWER: Why was that important to you?

  WOODCOCK: It was the pleasure it gave me. I got very little pleasure from anything else in life. But in the strangling of children I found a degree and a sensation of pleasure. And of accomplishment. Because it was such a good feeling I wanted to duplicate it. And so I went out to seek duplication.

  INTERVIEWER: People would be horrified to hear you view it as an accomplishment.

  WOODCOCK: I know, but I’m sorry, this is not meant for sensitive ears. This is a terrible recitation. I’m being as honest as I can.

  —The Mask of Sanity (BBC DOCUMENTARY)

  “Why were you strapped to Peter Woodcock?” I asked Steve.

  “He was my ‘buddy,’ making sure I got through the drug trip safely.”

  “What did he say to you?”

  “That he was there to help me.”

  That was all Steve said about his time with Peter Woodcock. He depicted it as a fleeting hallucinatory nightmare. But a few months later, in March 2010, when I e-mailed Steve to ask if he’d heard the news that Woodcock had just died, he replied: “That makes my skin crawl. God damn! You see, I have a deep but unwanted connection with that monster. We had matching small flower tattoos on both our right forearms. We did it together—typical jailhouse tattoos.”

  Getting a matching tattoo with a multiple-child-killer was just the kind of twisted thing that happened inside the Oak Ridge Capsule, Steve said, where nothing made sense, where reality got malformed through LSD, where psychopaths all around you were clawing at the walls, where everyone was suffering sleep deprivation, and Elliott Barker was watching it all from behind a one-way mirror.

  But then, as the weeks turned into months, something unexpected began to happen. The transformation was captured by a CBC documentary maker, Norm Perry, who was invited into Oak Ridge by Elliott in 1971. It is an incredibly moving film. These tough young prisoners are, before our eyes, changing. They are learning to care for one another inside the Capsule.

  “I love the way you talk,” one prisoner tells another. There is real tenderness in his voice. “You just let it flow from you as if you own all the words in the world. They’re your personal property and you make them dance for you.”

  We see Elliott in his office, and the look of delight on his face is quite heartbreaking. He’s trying to conceal it, trying to adopt an air of professionalism, but you can tell. His psychopaths have become gentle. Some are even telling their parole boards not to consider them for release until after they’ve completed their therapy. The authorities are astonished. Patients never request not to be let out.

  By the mid-1970s, the milieu at Oak Ridge became, if anything, a little too beautiful. This was when Elliott—tired and a bit burned out and wanting a break—stepped down for a while and a prodigy, a young psychiatrist named Gary Maier, took the helm. Oak Ridge staff were quite taciturn on the subject of what had occurred under Gary Maier’s stewardship. “He was no Elliott, that was for sure,” e-mailed one staff member, who didn’t want to be named. “Whereas Elliott to all appearances was a conservative-looking fellow in spite of the outlandish treatment ideas, Gary was a long-haired, sandal-clad hippie.”

  Nowadays Gary Maier lives in Madison, Wisconsin. He’s semiretired but still practices psychiatry at two maximum-security prisons there. When I met him for breakfast at the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Milwaukee, he told me how he first heard about Elliott’s program. It was at a government-sponsored recruitment seminar for psychiatry graduates. Barry Boyd, who ran Oak Ridge, was one of the speakers. He eulogized Elliott to the audience and recounted the program’s many success stories.

  “Like Matt Lamb,” Gary said. “This Matt Lamb fellow had apparently killed people.” (The nineteen-year-old Matt Lamb had been hiding behind a tree near a bus stop in Windsor, Ontario, in January 1967, when a group of young people walked past. He jumped out from behind the tree and without saying a word shot them all. Two of them, a twenty-year-old girl and a twenty-one-year-old boy, died.) “And when they asked him what it was like to kill those strangers, he said it was like squashing bugs. He was one of Elliott’s . . . I wouldn’t want to say all-stars, but he had about as cold a personality as psychopaths have and he really seemed to warm up and benefit from the program.”

  When Barry Boyd recounted the Matt Lamb story at the recruitment seminar, some of the psychiatry graduates gasped to hear that he was now a free man, declared cured in 1973, a Capsule success story, and was living with Elliott and his family at their farm, spending his days peacefully whitewashing fences and pondering his future. He had stayed trouble-free, but the consensus was that psychopaths invariably lapsed into chaos. Inviting Matt Lamb to live with him was a huge leap of faith, like a liontamer sharing a house with his lion.

  But Gary didn’t gasp. He clasped his hands in delight. At the end of the night he approached Barry Boyd.

  “If there’s ever a job going at Oak Ridge . . .” he told him. As it happened, Elliott was searching for a collaborator, and a few weeks later they offered the job to Gary.

  That evening Gary had a spontaneous out-of-body experience. He took it as a sign that it was right.

  “And how did you feel on your first day at work?” I asked.

  “I felt like I was home,” Gary said.

  Gary has the thick, muscular body of a prison guard but the goatee and kind eyes of a sixty-seven-year-old hippie. He said he saw the men at Oak Ridge back then as searching souls with kind hearts, just like he was. He gazed into their eyes and he didn’t fear them.

  “When you gaze into the eyes of another person, you can only see as far as his closed door,” he said. “So take it as an opportunity to knock on that door. If he doesn’t want to open the door, you bow to him and you say, ‘That’s fine. When you’re ready.’ ”

  “What would be behind their closed doors?” I asked.

  “Freedom,” said Gary.

  And there was freedom at Oak Ridge, Gary said, freedom everywhere: “One guy had a real liking for another guy who lived in a different ward. He’d see him in the yard. So he’d simply leave his body, walk through the walls, make love to the guy, and then come back to his cell. We all said he should feel free to continue to do it as long as he was gentle. He kept me personally apprised of their lovemaking. I have no idea what that other fellow experienced.” Gary laughed sadly. “I haven’t had that memory for a long time,” he said.

  They were the best days of Gary’s life. He knew how to make these men well.

  “I honestly believe I was doing a job that most Canadian psychiatrists couldn’t do,” he said. And the hospital administrators had faith enough in him to allow him to take his psychopaths on a journey into uncharted waters. Like the Dream Group.

  “People dream, and I wanted to capture what was going on in their dreams,” Gary said. “So before they went to bed, I’d have them hold hands and say, ‘Let me experience my dream life in this community.’ And then they would quietly go to sleep and dream.”

  When they awoke, they’d head straight to the Dream Group, which consisted of an equal number of psychopaths and schizophrenics.

  “The problem,” Gary said, “was that the schizophrenics had incredibly vivid dreams—dream after dream after dream—but the psychopaths would be lucky if they even had a dream.”

  “Why do schizophrenics dream more than psychopaths?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” Gary laughed. “I do remember the schizophrenics usually dreamed in color—the more intense a dream, the more likely it’s going to be in color—but the psychopaths, if they managed to have a dream at all, dreamed in black-and-white.”

  All this was creating a power imbalance. In regular group meetings, Gary said, the schizophrenics would be subservient to the psychopaths, “but suddenly the poor psychopaths had to sit and listen to the schizophrenics go on about dream one, dream
two, dream three . . .”

  When it was time for the patients to vote on whether to continue the Dream Group, the schizophrenics said yes, but the psychopaths vociferously argued against it and were victorious.

  “Just because of the power struggle?” I asked.

  “Well, there was that,” said Gary, “plus who wants to listen to some schizophrenic’s boring dream?”

  Then there was the mass chanting.

  “We’d do it after lunch. We chanted Om for maybe twenty-five minutes. It was so pleasurable for the guys. The ward sounded like sort of an echo chamber, and pretty soon they started to chant Om in harmony.” Gary paused. “We used to have visiting psychiatrists. One day one of them was sitting in on the chant when she suddenly jumped up and ran from the room. It was quite an embarrassment. We found her out in the corridor. She said, ‘Being in that room was like a freight train coming to run me over. I just had to get out of it.’ ”

  “She panicked?”

  “She panicked,” Gary said. “She thought she’d lose control and would somehow be attacked.”

  Gary’s most vivid Oak Ridge memories involved gentle psychopaths learning and growing but foolish psychiatrists and security guards conspiring to spoil everything. Which is exactly, he said, what happened when it all went too far, when it all went somewhat Heart of Darkness.

  Concern has been expressed as to the direction of recent developments in treatment. The use of LSD appears to be undergoing some change from the approach originally approved [along with] the introduction of mystical concepts. I would ask you to gently de-escalate these aspects of your program.

  —MEMO FROM OAK RIDGE MEDICAL DIRECTOR BARRY BOYD TO GARY MAIER, AUGUST 11, 1975