Savage Spawn (8 page)

Raine himself may have provided some clarity when he reported that a
combination
of birth complications, maternal rejection, and low arousability was the best predictor of serious violence in Danish children (58, 59). So optimal protection against criminality may result from environmental factors, such as a mother who takes care of herself during pregnancy and stays married to a nonviolent father in order to maintain an intact, loving family, rather than from a few more heartbeats per minute.

Yet another insulator against criminality is intelligence, which has been shown to be strongly negatively correlated with violence, even in children with low arousability and troubled backgrounds. However, there is some evidence that when bright boys from intact homes
do
turn bad, the link with underarousal is especially strong (50). One thinks of Leopold and Loeb dispassionately plotting the abduction and murder of Bobby Frank as an intellectual exercise, or the Menendez brothers retreating to the driveway of the family mansion in order to reload their shotguns.

So it's possible that there exists a small number of children, physiologically predisposed to antisocial behavior at a very young age, for whom a too-quiet nervous system
is
such a strong behavioral pollutant that it overrides environment. Are these kids true bad seeds, predestined genetically to evil? Or is underarousal not an inborn trait at all, but a
learned response
to abuse and neglect—a switching off of the child's nervous system in an effort to blunt psychic and physical pain?

Even the sterling facade of an intact, intelligent family may camouflage severe emotional neglect and horrendous maltreatment. (This was the Menendez brothers' precise defense, and it almost worked, despite a total lack of evidence. The circumstances of the murder certainly don't indicate defensive rage; at the time of her murder, Mrs. Menendez was performing the abusive act of filling out Erik's UCLA parking application. And several facts of the case—the glibness with which Lyle and Erik protested their innocence, the calculated nature of their crimes, subsequent attempts to deflect suspicion, the rapidity with which they began spending their dead parents' money on Porsches and Rolexes—indicate more than a bit of psychopathy.)

Whether or not the Menendez brothers' defense was nothing more than a creative bit of lawyering—my biases are obvious—is beside the point. What did or didn't occur in the house on North Elm Drive doesn't change what I learned early as a psychologist: lifting affluent and middle-class family rocks can reveal some truly revolting stuff. So much for the notion that poverty causes crime.

We know that many abused kids are more likely to exhibit a specific constellation of psychological problems known as
dissociative reactions
—symptoms such as withdrawal, amnesia, and, in extreme cases, multiple personality—which involve a literal partitioning of the mind, separating one's reality into protectively independent segments. Debate rages within psychiatry and psychology as to whether or not these symptoms represent true pathology or some sort of role playing, but either way, dissociation remains an attempt to shut out horror. Perhaps other victims of child abuse adopt a similar method of self-defense—a turning down of the emotional thermostat that cools and comforts by creating a sort of psychic cryogenics.

The nature of adolescence as it relates to abuse, changes in arousability, and violence also deserves attention. The concomitance of peaks in criminal violence and low heart rate between the ages of fifteen and twenty is striking. During this period, the teenager's body is being subjected to hormonal fluctuations and physiological changes that can turn adolescence into a period of serious emotional upheaval. Even for normal, well-nurtured, well-adjusted kids, the teen years can be tumultuous, rife with extremes of moodiness, insecurity, narcissism, and an often stumbling trajectory toward independence and autonomy. As any parent knows, even the brightest teenagers often exhibit incredibly stupid behaviors—situational idiocy that transcends mere IQ. How much more chaotic is the transition to sexual and physical maturation in abused kids?

Perhaps the process goes something like this: Some of the formerly powerless, vulnerable, maltreated children who survive to adolescence by numbing down their autonomic nervous systems find that same system suddenly tweaked and supercharged by testosterone and in dire need of sensual stimulation. One quick avenue of satisfaction is drugs, hence the strong and consistent relationship between narcotics and alcohol abuse and psychopathy and criminality. In fact, drugs play a role on both ends—as cause
and
effect—for in addition to satisfying pleasure drives, psychoactive chemicals lower inhibitions, facilitating risky, reckless, sometimes psychopathic behavior. When booze and dope fail to satisfy the cravings, the once-numb, now pleasure-craving adolescent may turn elsewhere, including to the power and kick of crime. Having been denied empathy and compassion, he lacks the capacity and the desire to reciprocate with either. He's learned a long time ago that victimizing others is an effective way to obtain what you want if you're sufficiently big, strong, and duplicitous to get away with it. Hungry to satisfy inchoate but compelling needs, he goes out and takes what he wants.

Empirical support for the numbing hypothesis as a consequence of emotional deprivation comes from a study that found children whose parents divorced by age four had lower resting heart rates at age eleven than did youngsters from intact homes (60). And the phenomenon may not be unique to humans: Adrian Raine cites research with fetal rats indicating a link between emotional stress and changes in the frontal lobes of the brain—the area most often implicated in aggressive behavior in humans (61).

More directly applicable to child criminality, a study measuring dangerousness in a group of delinquents found a triad of factors to be strongly predictive of violence: psychopathy, low IQ, and love deprivation, with
the last the single most potent factor.
Teenagers in whom all three were present were
over four times as likely
to engage in violent crime as any other comparison group (62).

In fact, Adrian Raine, the preeminent researcher on the psychophysiology of violence, is quick to suggest that the coldness exhibited by psychopaths may very well be a learned response to very early trauma (50). Rather than adopt a biologically deterministic model of human behavior, Raine wisely opts for what he terms a “biosocial” approach in which environmental stress causes actual changes in brain chemistry.

Nature? Nurture? It's both.

The numb-child-becomes-angry-adult scenario may also be consistent with the finding that parents who abuse their children show
high
arousability. We know that abused kids are more likely to become abusive parents, so some of these adults may once have been emotionally suppressed victims who now find themselves in the power role and undergo the transformation to hot-blooded victimizer. Since emotional arousability reaches its low point around the age of twenty, we would expect any upward shift to occur in early adulthood—precisely when most individuals are raising children.

Yet another indication of the biopsychosocial nature of low arousability is the fact that adult psychopaths are by no means uniformly cool. As mentioned, they show higher attentiveness to perceived threat and are more likely to react defensively and violently. And though they tend to tune out neutral and fearful stimuli, they can be hyperattentive to matters that interest them (63).

The bottom line regarding biological predictors of aggression, violence, and criminality is that a genuine link most likely
does
exist between underarousability, as measured by heart rate, and some kinds of psychopathy, but we are a long way from specifying either the precise nature or the strength of the relationship.

IX

It's Both

From a practical standpoint, a
combination
of temperament and chaotic environment is by far the best predictor of dangerousness in children, just as it is in adults.

The strongest empirical support for the interaction between environmental and biological damage comes from studies of children and teenagers who've actually killed. Features found repeatedly in young murderers include language disorders suggestive of brain damage; a history of physical and sexual abuse; exposure to frequent, high-level, real-life episodes of extreme violence, primarily within the family; other indications of family chaos, most notably parental promiscuity, incarceration, and substance abuse; low IQ (90 or below); serious school problems; alcohol and drug abuse (mostly cocaine); and documented instances of head trauma. (I will examine later how Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden fit into this picture.)

A study of fourteen juveniles who committed sexual homicide—youths ranging from thirteen to seventeen years old who stalked, raped, stabbed, impaled, and mutilated their victims—revealed a similar set of precursors: violent, chaotic, abusive families; paternal abandonment or neglect; school problems and truancy; substance abuse; and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. What separated these youths from other killers, much as it distinguishes adult sexual psychopaths from other criminals, was an early preoccupation with violent erotic fantasies. Media violence did play a role in the behavior of two members of this tiny subgroup, but it appears to have been minimal: one young rapist-murderer with long-festering violent impulses reported being inspired by a video game
(Dungeons and Dragons)
, and another linked his method, stabbing in the head, but not his fantasies, to the movie
Rambo
(13).

One contrast between these young lust-murderers and other precocious killers was their higher intelligence (mean group IQ was 101.4). This same “criminal intellectuality” is also found in many organized adult serial killers, many of whom tend to score above average on IQ tests. So these precocious lust-slayers may very well have been bush-league Ted Bundys who, fortunately for the rest of us, lacked the sophistication to avoid early capture.

X

Warning Signs and Solutions

It is very rare for teen murderers to be good kids who suddenly turn bad. The exception is a subgroup of abused children who lash out defensively against their tormentors, behavior that might be considered self-defense. However, a study of teens who murdered family members found only a small proportion of killers to be reacting against abuse. On the contrary, rather trivial events, such as being refused the family car, were more common triggers (64).

Youths who murder strangers and family members who did not abuse them typically exhibit marked and consistent signs of violence and criminality long before taking life. Recurrent factors are fascination with weapons, carrying guns and knives to school, engaging in frequent fights, cruelty to animals, and sexual solicitation of young girls. Most child murderers have also been arrested before, often several times, with common prior offenses being burglary, robbery, assault, battery, grand theft, and trespassing.

And, much like Andrew Golden, Mitchell Johnson, and nearly every other boy who's chosen to shoot up a school, the young killers studied by scientists tend to have been anything but closemouthed about criminal intent. Many joked, boasted, or warned explicitly of their plans to commit rape and homicide.

No one took them seriously. Why? Probably because our romanticization of childhood leads us to doubt the possibility that any child can be a premeditated slayer.

It shouldn't.

As a psychologist, I especially should have known better than to be shocked by the massacre carried out by Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson, because ethically and morally, kids are works in progress. Throw in psychopathy and you've got a soul that will never be complete. Add access to weapons, and what else can you expect
but
tragedy?

Childhood violence has always been a problem. Historically, many societies have channeled the murderous urges of the young by drafting kids into the military. This practice continues in many Third World cultures; American soldiers in Vietnam have recounted the shock of coming up against platoons of prepubescent guerrillas.

Sometimes military conscription has helped to defuse aggression, imposing a highly structured environment upon dangerous individuals at the peak of their criminal energies. Crime rates typically plummet during wartime and immediately following the cessation of war. In some cases, however, military training has merely provided an extended tutorial in the techniques of killing that has fed criminal careers (e.g., Timothy McVeigh).

Another reason we shouldn't be surprised by violent children is that American history and folklore are rich with examples of bad kids blazing their way across the plains. Jesse James was seventeen years old when he rode with Quantrill's Confederate guerrillas—a gang of murderous psychopaths that justified its viciousness with paramilitary rhetoric. By the age of nineteen, James had committed his first murder. William H. Bonney—Billy the Kid—was even more precocious, slaying his first victim at the tender age of fourteen. By his twenty-first birthday, he'd left twenty-one dead men behind. Butch Cassidy began rustling cattle during early adolescence and graduated to robbing trains before he was twenty. Clyde Barrow, of Bonnie and Clyde notoriety, was judged an incorrigible truant, thief, and runaway at
nine
and committed his first armed robbery only a few years later. Murder followed soon after.

One of our most frightening and unrepentant criminals, labeled “the complete misanthrope” by crime historian Robert Jay Nash, was a charming fellow born a century ago named Carl Panzram, who evinced criminal tendencies almost from the crib (65).

“Dedicated to the wholesale destruction of mankind,” as Nash terms him, Panzram began his criminal career with an arrest for drunk and disorderly behavior at the age of
eight
, went on a robbery rampage at eleven, set fire to a warehouse at seventeen, robbed, assaulted, and burned throughout his adolescence, and capped his accomplishments with the robbery, sodomy, and murder of at least ten men. (Panzram claimed twenty-one victims, including children.) Jack Henry Abbott, Norman Mailer's protégé, dedicated
In the Belly of the Beast
to Panzram. Perhaps Mailer and others should have taken the hint.

Not that admiration of psychopaths is limited to other psychopaths. The fact that American folklore has lionized the likes of Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and Bonnie and Clyde, elevating them to folk heroes, combined with our general glorification of the brutal and violent periods such as the Wild West, may tell us something about our true feelings toward youthful murderousness.

We decry the latest schoolyard rampage, but soon we're back to singing adulatory ballads about bad kids and flocking to movies about young guns. Talk about mixed messages.

That same confused attitude was exhibited, to terrible effect, within the family of Kipland Kinkel, the fifteen-year-old who murdered his parents and shot up a school in Springfield, Oregon, killing two students and wounding twenty-two others.

For years, Kinkel's parents had complained to friends and neighbors about their fear of their son. And with good reason. Kip had long displayed classical characteristics of violent psychopathy: cruelty to animals, sadism, a previous arrest for throwing rocks at cars from an overpass, attention deficit combined with learning problems, multiple school suspensions, and an obsession with weapons and explosives. Efforts to remedy the situation included Ritalin, Prozac, short-term psychiatric counseling, and overindulgence—summer trips to Spain and Costa Rica, lessons in tennis, sailing, and skiing. An attempt to sublimate Kip's aggression with martial arts training resulted in a school suspension for karate-kicking another boy in the head. Soon after, Kip threw a pencil at another boy and was suspended yet again (66).

Kip was reinforced for his behavior by being allowed to remain out of school. Mr. and Mrs. Kinkel, both teachers, took turns instructing their son at home. Friends describe them as dedicated, hardworking parents whose other child, an older sister, was a model student.

Yet Kip remained impervious to their efforts, boasting about stuffing firecrackers into a cat's mouth and reading aloud in class from a journal in which he wrote about plans to “kill everybody.” He learned about explosives on the Internet, built five bombs, and hid them in crawl spaces around the family home.

This was the boy Mr. and Mrs. Kinkel chose to favor with a semiautomatic Ruger rifle and two handguns. The rifle was the weapon Kip used to kill them and to fire fifty rounds into the cafeteria at Thurston High.

One hesitates to blame victims. But . . .
why on earth?

When I practiced psychology it wasn't at all rare to encounter parents who brought a child for treatment and expressed great distress about the identified problem, but turned ambivalent and resistant when the patient began to improve.

Sometimes ambivalence showed itself right from the beginning, like the father who bemoaned his son's bullying tendencies during an intake session, only to smile at me across the desk and add, “He
is
pretty tough. Doesn't take guff from anyone.” Other displays were more subtle—a wink and a nod, failure to comply with a treatment plan, failure to bring the child back once a treatment plan had been devised. I encountered parents who grew openly resentful toward the child
after
he got better and tried actively to undermine the therapeutic process. One particularly hostile mother went so far as to overdose on her seriously depressed daughter's antidepressants.

From what I could tell, this shift typically occurred when the child had been labeled the primary or sole problem in a
systemically
malfunctioning family. Focusing exclusively upon a problem child is easy to do even in cohesive families, because difficult kids do demand and receive a tremendous amount of attention. But there can also be defensive value in scapegoating and concentrating solely on the identified patient, as it allows everyone else to ignore their own problems.

Could that have been part of what was going on when Bill and Faith Kinkel rewarded their flagrantly dangerous son with an instant collection of lethal weapons? Was there some need to keep Kip
bad
? Or had these poor parents simply been beaten down by years of threats and rage and finally relented out of fear of what Kip might do if they continued to frustrate his lust for guns?

Whatever the reason, giving in was a tragic error that signed their death warrants and those of two children.

The backgrounds of Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson, though not as conspicuously psychopathic as Kinkel's, are also in accordance with what we know about dangerous kids. Initial accounts of the Arkansas pair described two normal-sounding country boys—Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn with speed loaders. But as information filtered in, quite another picture materialized.

Andrew's grandmother described him as an all-American kid, but neighbors labeled him as mean-spirited and recalled his strutting around the neighborhood with a hunting knife strapped to his leg (67).

“We knew the kid was evil,” said one local, “but never that evil.”

Like many juvenile slayers, Golden grew up in a household obsessed with firearms. His father was an officer of the Practical Pistol Shooters club, and he introduced Andrew to lethal weapons at a very young age, snapping photos of the boy at six, staring, rather cold-eyed, down the barrel of a pistol. Andrew's grandfather, from whom most of the Jonesboro massacre weapons were stolen, bragged about Andrew's killing his first duck the previous year—bragged
after
the schoolyard shootings. Even allowing for rural norms that encourage hunting and shooting as male-bonding experiences, all this seems more than a bit worshipful of bloodletting.

Mitchell Johnson, claimed by his mother to be just a regular kid from a regular family, was anything but. A police chief in the Minnesota town of Grand Meadow, where Mitchell spent his early childhood, described the boy as highly troubled, with a chronic tendency to wander away from home that suggests early neglect.

During a visit to the Johnson house, this same officer noticed a .357 pistol sitting on the kitchen table, in full view and reach of eight-year-old Mitchell, and warned the parents about it. The officer forbade his own children to associate with Mitchell.

Paternal risk factors also loom large in Mitchell's history. His father was fired for theft. His mother, a prison guard, obtained a divorce and moved with Mitchell to Jonesboro in order to join her new boyfriend, an ex-con incarcerated for drug and firearms crimes at the very prison where she'd worked. Shortly after, she married this felon and he became Mitchell's stepfather.

Mitchell had long attracted attention as a troubled kid. He bragged that he smoked heroin and had joined a gang, warned he might commit suicide, and finally, broadcast his intentions by exclaiming, “I've got a lot of killing to do.”

Neglectful parenting, broken home, criminal father, criminal stepfather, a mother whose choices—selection of two criminals as spouses, leaving a loaded pistol in front of a grade-schooler—suggest less than optimal judgment, guns, guns, guns. Sound familiar?

These are the kids we teach to speed-load and to shoot semiautomatic weapons?

Which leads us to the single most important step we can take, in the short run, to preventing child criminality: Restrict access to firearms.

No matter how much time is spent drilling young psychopaths in the art and etiquette of “practical shooting,” they will inevitably use firearms to victimize others, precisely the way Kip Kinkel utilized his karate skills. Given the ease with which we allow kids and guns to interact, we have no right to be astonished at incidents of headline-grabbing carnage accomplished by dangerous boys. Once again, the chief surprise is that it doesn't happen more often.

Back off, NRA, I'm not talking about trampling on any adult's constitutional right to bear arms. Let's sidestep the entire gun-control debate but accept the painfully obvious fact that no
kids
should ever be allowed access to pistols, rifles, and shotguns. Children and teens are simply insufficiently socialized to handle implements designed, no matter how you gussy them up with clubs and guilds and marksmanship contests, to
kill
. We restrict minors from driving and establish a minimum age for voting because we understand the principle that minors have not yet attained full reasoning capability. Why in the world do we continue to allow them to play around with Rugers and Colts and Mosslers?

The very fact that we even
debate
the point seems ludicrous. Then again, we are the country that lionizes the likes of Billy the Kid.

When I proposed restricting children's access to lethal weapons in my
USA Today
column, I received irate mail from gun freaks letting me know I'd missed the point completely and was probably a mushy-minded social reformer. The culprit for schoolyard shootings and similar abominations, according to these geniuses, wasn't access to weapons, it was some nebulous concept labeled “societal breakdown.”

Fine. Let's assume society has indeed deteriorated to the point of damaging the psychological stability of our youngsters. Isn't that all the
more
reason to keep them away from Messrs. Smith and Wesson et alia? The reluctance to make these commonsense decisions is truly astonishing.

If separating kids from guns violates some rural or good-ol'-boy norm, so be it. It's a
bad
norm. Wanna bond with your son? Go hiking, toss the football, play catch. Or even—and
this
is radical—sit down and
talk
to him. Maybe you can even discuss what masculinity is all about, how to temper assertiveness with kindness, why avoiding violence can be braver and more effective than lashing out.

Yes, I'm talking about that old sissy stuff. The kind of effete chatter that leads to introspection rather than mass destruction. The kind of softhearted, softheaded mollycoddling that may even protect some little girl or boy from being sighted like quail on the hot asphalt of a schoolyard.