Mindhunter (48 page)

He didn’t have an answer and I don’t think I made a convert that day, but this is something I feel strongly about. It’s the basis of what we do in my unit. The dilemma, as I’ve stated many times before, is that much of psychiatric therapy is based on self-reporting. A patient coming to a therapist under normal circumstances has a vested interest in revealing his true thoughts and feelings. A convict desirous of early release, on the other hand, has a vested interest in telling the therapist what he wants to hear. And to the extent that the therapist takes that report at face value without correlating it with other information about the subject, that can be a real failing of the system. Ed Kemper and Monte Rissell, to name but two, were in therapy while they were committing their crimes, and both managed to remain undetected. In fact, both showed "progress" to their therapists.

The problem as I see it is that you get young psychiatrists and psychologists and social workers who are idealistic, having been taught at their universities that they really can make a difference. Then they come up against these guys in prison, and they want to feel that they’ve changed them. Often, they don’t understand that in trying to assess these convicts, they’re actually assessing individuals who themselves are expert in assessing people! In a short time, the convict will know if the doctor has done his or her homework, and if not, he’ll be able to downplay the crime and its impact on victims. Few criminals will willingly give out the nitty-gritty details to someone who doesn’t already have them. That’s why complete preparation was so critical in our prison interviews.

As with Thomas Vanda’s doctor, people in the helping professions often don’t want to be prejudiced by knowing the gory details of what the criminal did. But as I always tell my classes, if you want to understand Picasso, you have to study his art. If you want to understand the criminal personality, you have to study his crime.

The difference is, the mental-health professionals start with the personality and infer behavior from that perspective. My people and I start with the behavior and infer the personality from
that
perspective.

There are, of course, varying perspectives on the issue of criminal responsibility. Dr. Stanton Samenow is a psychologist who collaborated with the late psychiatrist Dr. Samuel Yochelson on a pioneering study at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., about criminal behavior. After years of firsthand research that gradually stripped away most of his preconceived notions, Samenow concluded in his penetrating and insightful book,
Inside the Criminal Mind,
that "criminals think differently from responsible people." Criminal behavior, Samenow believes, is not so much a question of mental illness as character defect.

Dr. Park Dietz, who works with us frequently, has stated, "None of the serial killers that I’ve had the occasion to study or examine has been legally insane, but none has been normal, either. They’ve all been people who’ve got mental disorders. But despite their mental disorders, which have to do with their sexual interests and their character, they’ve been people who knew what they were doing, knew what they were doing was wrong, but chose to do it anyway."

It’s important to keep in mind here that insanity is a legal concept, not a medical or psychiatric term. It doesn’t mean someone is or is not "sick." It has to do with whether that person is or is not responsible for his or her actions.

Now, if you believe that someone like Thomas Vanda is insane, fine. I think a case can be made for that. But once we’ve carefully examined the data, I think we have to face that whatever the Thomas Vandas of the world have, it may not be curable. If we accepted that, they wouldn’t be let out so fast to keep doing what they do over and over again. Remember, this murder wasn’t his first.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the concept of criminal insanity, and this talk isn’t new. It goes back at least hundreds of years in Anglo-American jurisprudence, to William Lambard’s
Eirenarcha,
or "Of the Office of the Justices of Peace" of the 1500s.

The first organized statement of insanity as a defense against criminal charges is the M’Naghten Rule of 1843, named after Daniel M’Naghten (sometimes spelled McNaughten or McNaghten), who tried to kill British prime minister Sir Robert Peel and did manage to shoot Peel’s private secretary. Peel, by the way, was responsible for organizing London’s police force. To this day, London cops are still referred to as bobbies in his honor.

After M’Naghten was acquitted, public outrage was so great that the lord chief justice was called before the House of Lords to explain the logic. The basic elements state that a defendant is not guilty if his mental condition deprived him of the ability to know the wrongfulness of his actions or understand their nature and quality; in other words, did he know the difference between right and wrong?

The insanity doctrine evolved over the years into what was often referred to as the "irresistible impulse test," which stated that a defendant was not guilty if, because of mental illness, he was unable to control his actions or conform his conduct to the law.

It received a major overhaul in 1954 with Judge David Bazelon’s Court of Appeals ruling in
Durham
v.
United States,
which held that a defendant is not criminally responsible if his crime was the "product of mental disease or defect," and if he would not have committed the crime but for that disease or defect.

Durham,
which gave such broad latitude and wasn’t primarily concerned with appreciating the difference between right and wrong, wasn’t terribly popular with law enforcement personnel and many judges and prosecutors. In 1972, in another Court of Appeals case,
United States
v.
Brawner,
it was abandoned in favor of the American Law Institute (or ALI) Model Penal Code Test, which hearkened back to M’Naghten and irresistible impulse in saying that the mental defect had to make the defendant lack substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct or conform his conduct to the requirement of the law. In one form or another, the ALI Test has enjoyed increasing popularity among courts as time goes on.

But along with this discussion, which often degrades into a speculation on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, I think we have to deal with a more basic concept. And that is
dangerousness.

One of the classic confrontations in the ongoing battle of the shrinks was the serial-murder trial of Arthur J. Shawcross in Rochester, New York, in 1990. Shawcross had been accused of the murders of a string of local prostitutes and street people whose bodies had turned up in the wooded areas in and around the Genesee River gorge. The murders had gone on for nearly a year. The later bodies had also been mutilated after death.

After doing a detailed—and, as it turned out, highly accurate—profile, Gregg McCrary studied the UNSUB’s developing behavior. When police discovered a body that had been mutilated, Gregg realized that the killer was going back to the dump sites to spend time with his prey. He then urged police to comb the woods to locate the body of one of the still-missing women. If they could do that, then secretly stake out the site, Gregg was sure they would eventually find the killer there.

As it happened, after several days of aerial surveillance, New York State Police did find a body in Salmon Creek along State Route 31. At the same time, Inspector John McCaffrey noticed a man in a car parked on a low bridge spanning the water. State and city police were called in to follow him. The man they picked up was Arthur Shawcross.

Under interrogation from a team led by Dennis Blythe of the State Police and Leonard Boriello of the Rochester Police Department, Shawcross confessed to several of the crimes. The key issue at his intensely covered ten-count murder trial was whether or not he was insane at the time of the killings.

The defense brought in Dr. Dorothy Lewis, a well-known psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital in New York, who had done important work on the effects of violence on children. Lewis had become convinced that most, if not all, violent criminal behavior resulted from a combination of childhood abuse or trauma and some kind of physical or organic condition, such as epilepsy, an injury, or some kind of lesion, cyst, or tumor. There is, of course, the case of Charles Whitman, the twenty-five-year-old engineering student who climbed to the top of the clock tower at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966 and opened fire on passersby below. Before police could surround the tower and kill him ninety minutes later, sixteen men and women lay dead and another thirty wounded. Prior to the incident, Whitman had complained of periodic murderous rages. When doctors performed an autopsy, they found a tumor in the temporal lobe of his brain.

Did the tumor cause Whitman’s deadly behavior? We have no way of knowing. But Lewis wanted to show the jury that as a result of a small benign temporal-lobe cyst that showed up on Shawcross’s MRI, a form of epilepsy she characterized as "partial complex-seizure state," post-traumatic stress from Vietnam, and what he claimed was severe childhood physical and sexual abuse at the hands of his mother, Arthur Shawcross was not responsible for his episodes of extreme violence. In fact, she testified, he was in some kind of fugue state when he killed each woman; his memory of each episode would have been impaired or nonexistent.

One of the problems with this line of reasoning is that weeks and months after the murders, Shawcross was able to relate the details to Boriello and Blythe in minute detail. In some cases, he actually brought them to body dump sites the police had been unable to find. He was probably able to do this because he had fantasized about each one so many times that they were fresh in his mind.

He took steps to destroy some of the evidence so the police wouldn’t find him. After his arrest, he also wrote a rather analytic letter to his girlfriend (he had a wife, too), saying that he hoped for the insanity defense because doing time in a mental hospital would be a lot easier than doing time in prison.

On that score, Shawcross clearly knew whereof he spoke. His troubles with the law began in 1969 when he was convicted of burglary and arson in Watertown, north of Syracuse. Less than a year later, he was arrested again and admitted strangling a young boy and girl. The girl had also been sexually molested. For those two crimes, Shawcross was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. He was paroled after fifteen. That, if you recall from a previous chapter, was why age was the one aspect of the profile that Gregg McCrary had called wrong. Shawcross’s fifteen years in stir had merely been a holding pattern.

Now let’s take this step-by-step. First of all, if you ask me or just about any of the many thousands of cops, prosecutors, and federal agents I’ve worked with over the course of my career, you’ll get a resounding consensus that twenty-five years for ending the lives of two children is pretty obscene in and of itself. But second, to let this guy out early, it seems to me you have to presume one of two opposite premises.

Premise number one: despite this guy’s bad background, despite his dysfunctional family, the alleged abuse, the lack of good education, his violent past, and everything else, prison life was such a wonderful, spiritually uplifting, eye-opening, and rehabilitative experience that Shawcross saw the light, realized the error of his ways, and because of all the good influence in prison resolved to turn over a new leaf and be an upright, law-abiding citizen from that moment hence.

Okay, if you don’t accept that one, how about premise number two: prison life was so completely horrible, so unpleasant and traumatic every day, so thoroughly punishing in every way, that despite his bad background and continuing desire to rape and kill children, he never wanted to be back in prison and resolved to do anything he could to avoid going back.

I agree, that one’s just as unlikely. But if you don’t accept either of these two premises, how in the hell do you let someone like that out without considering the strong possibility that he’s going to kill again?

Quite clearly, some types of killers are much more likely to repeat their crimes than others. But for the violent, sexually based serial killers, I find myself agreeing with Dr. Park Dietz that "it’s hard to imagine any circumstance under which they should be released to the public again." Ed Kemper, who’s a lot brighter and has a lot more in the way of personal insight than most of the other killers I’ve talked to, acknowledges candidly that he shouldn’t be let out.

There are just too many horror stories out there. Richard Marquette, whom I interviewed and who had a string of disorderly conduct, attempted rape, and assault and battery charges against him in Oregon by his early twenties, progressed to rape, murder, and mutilation after an unsuccessful sexual experience with a woman he’d picked up in a Portland bar. He fled the area, was placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, and was arrested in California. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Paroled after twelve years, he killed and dissected two more women before being captured again. What in God’s name led a parole board to think this guy was no longer dangerous?

I can’t speak for the FBI, the Justice Department, or anyone else. But I can say that for myself, I would much rather have on my conscience keeping a killer in jail who might or might not kill again if sprung, than the death of an innocent man, woman, or child as a result of the release of that killer.

It’s an American attribute to think that things are always getting better, that they can always be improved upon, that we can accomplish anything we set out to do. But the more I see, the more pessimistic I become about the concept of rehabilitation for certain types of offenders. What they went through as children is often horrible. That doesn’t necessarily mean the damage can be undone at a later date. And contrary to what judges, defense attorneys, and mental health professionals might want to believe, good behavior in prison isn’t necessarily predictive of acceptable behavior in the outside world.