by Jon Ronson
“Okay, you saw that memo,” said Gary. “Ah.”
“What happened?”
Gary let out a sigh. “Right . . .” he began.
Gary asked me to consider what happens when any of us—no matter what age we are—go home to visit our parents at Christmas. It doesn’t matter how wise and insightful adult life has made us. “Two days with your parents at Christmas and you’ll all just be swatted back to the deepest level of the family’s pathology.”
He had that exact same problem at Oak Ridge. “We’d give these guys LSD. They’d have these marathon weekends, and they’d change, but then they’d go back to a general ward that wasn’t ready for the change. So they’d be swatted right back.”
Two steps forward, two steps back. If only the entire general ward—every psychopath in the whole place—could somehow achieve metaphysical enlightenment at the same time . . .
And then it came to him: a mass LSD trip! It was radical but critical, the only way to break down the deep pathology of the ward.
“I saw it as the culmination of all the stuff I had done,” Gary said. “Give everyone the rite of passage of LSD at the same time. Or over a few days. Well, that was very upsetting for the security staff. They came into work and I said to them, ‘Just leave the guys alone.’ ”
And so the guards, bristling with anger and uncertainty, were forced to stand back as twenty-six serial killers and rapists ran around, en masse, off their heads on LSD.
“I probably didn’t play my cards properly there,” Gary said. “I think the guards lost their identity. The union guys probably thought I was going to get people fired.”
A few days later Gary received the warning memo, and a few days after that he turned up for work to discover that his keys no longer fit the locks. The guards had changed them overnight. One told him—from the other side of the bars—that he was fired and he could never set foot in Oak Ridge again.
“Oh well,” Gary said now, pushing what was left of his breakfast across his plate. “I was ready to move on.”
During the years that followed Gary’s departure, Elliott Barker continued to win over fans from across the criminal-psychiatry community. Maybe he really had achieved something nobody had managed before: “For the first thirty years of Oak Ridge, no one charged with a capital offense was ever released from here,” he had told documentary maker Norm Perry. “But there is real hope now that patients are breaking out of their psychological prison of indifference to the feelings of others, a prison that to a greater or lesser extent confines us all. We are making people well again—people who killed or raped while mentally ill—we are making them well and able to be safe and useful members of society.”
Elliott’s best friends in the world were, he’d tell his neighbors, ex–Oak Ridge patients. His father had been a violent alcoholic who had beaten his family and committed suicide when Elliott was ten. I wondered whether that was why he’d dedicated his life to teaching psychopaths to be tender. And patients were indeed released from Oak Ridge. Elliott kept in touch with many, inviting them to stay at his farm in Midland, Ontario, where they played racquetball together and built fences and planted crops.
Back home in London, as I began to piece this story together, I was bowled over by Elliott’s accomplishments. I felt terribly sorry for Tony, trapped in Broadmoor. So many psychopathic murderers—fortunate to have been under Elliott and Gary’s radical tutelage—had been declared cured and freed. Why couldn’t Broadmoor adopt some of Elliott’s ideas? Of course they seemed hokey and dated and naive and perhaps overly reliant on hallucinogenics, but they were surely preferable to locking someone up forever because he happened to score badly on some personality checklist.
I learned that, fascinatingly, two researchers in the early 1990s had undertaken a detailed study of the long-term recidivism rates of psychopaths who had been through Elliott’s program and been let out into society. Its publication would surely have been an extraordinary moment for Elliott and Gary and the Capsule. In regular circumstances, 60 percent of criminal psychopaths released into the outside world go on to re-offend. What percentage of their psychopaths had?
As it turned out: 80 percent.
The Capsule had made the psychopaths worse.
One, Cecil Gilles, was declared cured and released after many intensive therapeutic months. Within days he had grabbed at random a fourteen-year-old girl, sexually assaulted her, and thrown her, unconscious, from a bridge into a creek. She managed to crawl to a nearby house and in through a window where she was found later that night lying on the kitchen floor. She survived but suffered severe scars from where her head had hit the bottom of the creek.
Another, Joseph Fredericks, was released from Oak Ridge in 1983 and within weeks attacked a teenage girl with a knife and sodomized a ten-year-old boy. He was released again a year later and attacked an eleven-year-old boy. After being released four years after that, he headed to a mall called Shoppers World, where he abducted and raped an eleven-year-old boy, Christopher Stephenson. The boy wrote a note to his parents:
“Dear Mom and Dad, I am writing you this note.”
And then the note stopped.
When the police caught Fredericks, he showed them the boy’s body and said, “He was such a nice boy. Why did he have to die?”
Matt Lamb—whom Gary had described as not one of Elliott’s “all-stars,” but almost—ended his days in less inauspicious circumstances. While whitewashing fences and pondering his future at Elliott’s ranch, he decided to become a soldier. The Israeli army turned him down because he was a psychopath. (“See?” Gary said. “They have standards.”) But the Rhodesian army welcomed him and he died in a shoot-out with supporters of Robert Mugabe.
Most discomforting for the program was what happened with the multiple-child-killer Peter Woodcock. This was the man Steve Smith had once been attached to. He was given his first-ever three-hour pass one summer’s day in 1991. His psychiatrists were unaware that he had secretly allotted ten minutes of it (3:10 p.m. to 3:20 p.m.) to kill a fellow psychiatric patient, Dennis Kerr, who had spurned his advances. He invited Kerr into the woods behind the hospital and chopped him one hundred times.
“I did it,” he explained during his trial, “to see what effect a hatchet would have on a body.” Kerr died as a result of “chopping injuries” to his head and neck.
Later, after Woodcock had been returned to Oak Ridge, he was interviewed by the BBC about the murder:INTERVIEWER: What was going through your mind at the time? This was someone you loved.
WOODCOCK: Curiosity, actually. And an anger. Because he had rebuffed all my advances.
INTERVIEWER: And why did you feel someone should die as a result of your curiosity?
WOODCOCK: I just wanted to know what it would feel like to kill somebody.
INTERVIEWER: But you’d already killed three people. WOODCOCK: Yes, but that was years and years and years and years ago.
The interview’s most painful moment was when Woodcock admitted that Elliott and Gary’s program was kind of to blame, because it had taught him how to be a more devious psychopath. All those chats about empathy were like an empathy-faking finishing school for him:
“I did learn how to manipulate better,” he said, “and keep the more outrageous feelings under wraps better.”
The Oak Ridge program was over. Elliott Barker, crushed by the weight of evidence against his life’s work, became a director of the Canadian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, specializing in counseling the children of psychopaths.
“I have certainly always felt that Elliott’s heart was in the right place,” e-mailed a former colleague, who didn’t want to be named and who works at Oak Ridge today. “He’s been the subject of much criticism, of course, for his idea and methods and frequently has had malpractice suits against him. Yes, you guessed right, psychopaths from the program looking to make a lot of money. But Bob Hare and us have always agreed that psychopaths are born that way and not created by
controlling mummies and weak fathers.”
“That’s lucky,” I e-mailed back, “as I am a weak father and my wife is a controlling mummy.”
4.
THE PSYCHOPATH TEST
They had psychopaths naked and talking about their feelings!” Bob Hare laughed. “They had psychopaths on beanbags! They had psychopaths acting as therapists to their fellow psychopaths!”
He shook his head at the idealism of it all.
“Incredible,” he said.
It was an August evening and I was drinking with Bob Hare in a hotel bar in rural Pembrokeshire, West Wales. He was a quite feral-looking man with yellow-white hair and red eyes, as if he’d spent his life in battle, battling psychopaths, the very forces of evil. It was exciting to finally meet him. While names like Elliott Barker and Gary Maier had all but faded away, surviving only in obscure reports detailing crazily idealistic psychiatric endeavors from days long gone, Hare is influential. Justice departments and parole boards all over the world have accepted his contention that psychopaths are quite simply incurable and everyone should concentrate their energies instead on learning how to root them out using his PCL-R Checklist, which he has spent a lifetime refining. His was not the only psychopath checklist around, but it was by far the most extensively used. It was the one used to diagnose Tony at Broadmoor and get him locked up for the past twelve years.
Bob Hare saw the Oak Ridge program as yet more evidence of psychopaths’ untrustworthiness. Try to teach them empathy and they’ll cunningly use it as an empathy-faking training exercise for their own malicious ends. Indeed, every observer who has studied the Oak Ridge program has come to that same conclusion. Everyone, that is, except Gary Maier.
“Yeah,” Gary had told me, “I guess we had inadvertently created a finishing school for them. There had always been that worry. But they were doing well in the program. . . .”
They were doing well and then, suddenly, he got fired.
“When they saw their leader be trashed like that, I think it empowered them,” Gary said. “There was like a ‘This is bullshit!’ And we got a rebound.”
Some of the psychopaths, Gary believed, went off and killed to teach the authorities a lesson—that’s what happens when you fire a man as inspiring as Gary Maier.
He sounded mournful, defensive, and utterly convinced of himself when he told me this, and I suddenly understood what a mutually passionate and sometimes dysfunctional bubble the relationship between therapist and client can be.
I had e-mailed Bob Hare to ask if he’d meet me and he’d replied that he’d be teaching his checklist to a group of psychiatrists and brain imagers and care workers and psychologists and prison officers and budding criminal profilers on a three-day residential course, and if I was willing to pay the £600 registration fee, I was welcome to join them, although a copy of the thirty-page checklist wasn’t included in the price. That would cost an extra £361.31. I negotiated his office down to £400 (media discount) and we were all set.
This was the Monday evening before the first day and the attendees were milling around. Some, clearly impressed to be in the same room as Bob Hare, approached him for his autograph. Others looked skeptical from a distance. One care worker had told me earlier that she’d been sent by her employers and she wasn’t happy about it. Surely it was unfair to doom a person to a lifetime of a horrifying-sounding psychopathy diagnosis (“It’s a huge label,” she said) just because they didn’t do well on the Hare Checklist. At least in the old days it was quite simple. If someone was a persistent violent offender who lacked impulse controls, they were a psychopath. But the Hare Checklist was much wilier. It was all to do with reading between the lines of a person’s turn of phrase, a person’s sentence construction. This was, she said, amateur-sleuth territory.
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 prisonthemed 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 occurre
d 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.
