More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
March 14 - March 16, 2021
Alone in a room with a serial killer is neither the time nor the place to quibble about inconsistencies.
Paranoia—the unwarranted sense that one is being threatened, endangered, disrespected—is probably the most common symptom fueling recurrent acts of violence. Jonathan and I have found that this is as true of violent juvenile delinquents as it is of violent adult criminals. This does not mean that most violent people are schizophrenic. As Jonathan and I teach our trainees at Georgetown and Bellevue, paranoia is characteristic of almost any neuropsychiatric disorder: schizophrenia, mania, depression, brain damage, seizures, alcoholism, senility, and more. It can emerge whenever something goes
...more
Prisons in Georgia, we have discovered, are different. In Georgia, defense lawyers are not allowed to be present during psychiatric evaluations of inmates. At least that has been our experience at the state penitentiary.
The difference is, men are more likely to confront them head on. Women wait and listen. We don’t forget; we simply hold off until the time is right to address them. Suppose, for example, that, as I sat alone with Theodore Bundy, I had confronted him with the discrepancies between his stories: “But, Mr. Bundy, last time I talked with you you told me you had killed …” Not a good idea. Based on the years I worked on his case, not a good idea at all.
The older we are, the more control we have of our lives, the less buffeted we are by the casual or deliberate maliciousness of those around us. I guess as we mature we also don’t need to be loved by everybody—one or two people will do. Still, the question had been planted and remained: Why do some people when hurt or angry, just lose it while others don’t?
Once again, West Side Story, with its poverty, its gangs, its ethnic and racial tensions, its motto “We’re depraved ’cause we’re deprived,” seemed to portray better than any textbook the forces that my professors at medical school were convinced bred violence. I knew the words and music backwards and forwards.
Only after Jonathan and I had evaluated a group of juveniles condemned to death, after we had tried to talk with their parents, their brothers and sisters, struggled in vain to reconstruct their pasts, would we understand that many of these families would rather see their children put to death than reveal what had happened behind the closed doors of childhood. What is more, we would find that many of the adolescents themselves preferred death to exposing their abusive parents.
These were years of increasing awareness, a time when doctors were being trained to recognize ethnic and cultural differences. Unfortunately, some of us were so well trained, or so we thought, that we often dismissed the pathological hallucinations and delusions of many sick African-American and Hispanic children as normal religious experiences or cultural beliefs and we failed to treat them. White children, on the other hand, with the very same symptoms, we referred posthaste to child guidance clinics.
Symptoms are the subjective discomfort patients experience and can talk about. Signs are what doctors see for themselves.
Delinquents as a group had horrendous medical histories compared to nondelinquents. Black delinquents were the most injured and sickliest of all.
Guze, Emperor, chairman of one of the country’s most distinguished departments of psychiatry, the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis, had spoken. What is more, he had based his statements on research, on statistics.
Ted Bundy’s four or five execution dates alone kept several greasy spoons from bankruptcy. Periodically his impending death breathed life into the moribund town. In fact, when Bundy’s final appeal failed, and he was executed, many of the townsfolk were secretly sorry to see him go. Bundy put bread on their table.
When I began our final interview, I asked him why he had wanted to talk with me. His response: “Because everyone else I’ve talked with these past days only wants to know what I did. You are the only one who wants to know why I did it.” We are still studying the data from the Bundy case and hope some day to report what we find in a scientific journal.
Trying to sound light about what had obviously been a harrowing experience, I said, “You are looking at the last woman to kiss Ted Bundy.” Mel’s comment: “And live.”
With the first gate solidly closed behind us, the second not yet open, and coils of razor-sharp wire on either side, Jonathan and I had a taste of what it was like to be a prisoner in the South.
When the MRI results came in, showing distinct scarring in both frontal lobes, we had hard, visible evidence of severe brain injury. Lucky’s car accident had resulted in the equivalent of bilateral frontal lobotomies.
As I said, the route to death row for some murderers is straight and swift. In fact, for some it’s a veritable speedway. Several of the murderers Jonathan and I have seen were advised by their ill-paid, ill-motivated attorneys, “Plead guilty and throw yourself on the mercy of the court.” Big mistake. Courts in the South are not noted for their mercy.
I have found that the fascination of a case tends to be inversely proportional to the fee available for services rendered on that case. (Now there’s a formula for the tweedy statistician to ponder.)
With a little ingenuity we manage to fit new data into old mind-sets. Anything that doesn’t fit we filter out as extraneous noise.
By the time we examined Johnny, we had done research on violent inmates in Connecticut, Florida, California, and states in between and we could easily have written a Michelin Guide to Death Rows and Detention Centers in the United States.
Ever since the advent of Thorazine and the like, with the slow demise of the state hospital system, prisons have become repositories of disruptive, impoverished, mentally ill men. Psychotic, aggressive men who just a few years ago would have lived out their days muttering quietly to themselves or raising havoc on the back wards of state hospitals now make the rounds of prisons, shelters, and a dwindling assortment of available public psychiatric institutions.
Because so many poor, sick men now make their homes in prison cells, their keepers get lots of clinical experience—more, perhaps, than many psychiatric residents.
In Johnny’s world, not only were past and present one, but also twins of different ages could exist side by side. I nodded, as though Johnny were making perfect sense.
Everyone knows that a serial killer who eats his victim, even a teensy piece of his victim, is crazy. But somehow, by adopting purely moralistic and unmeasurable definitions of insanity and forcing psychiatrists to make use of them, the legal profession forces us to reach some pretty peculiar conclusions. Was Arthur Shawcross crazy when he murdered his victims and consumed their genitalia? Of course. He had to be. Insane? Not necessarily. Not according to some forensic psychiatrists. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if someday soon a state legislature develops a concept of crazy not insane or
...more
Only now, as I reread the earlier chapters of this book and seek the words to bring it to a close, am I struck by the irony of that scene. There, as I drove through the gates to meet with Mr. Bundy for the last time, I saw a hoard of citizens, confident that they could never become killers, clamoring for death.
Judges are not the only ones who sometimes find it easier not to know. I think of Velma Barfield. She was a serial murderer. She was also the first and only woman to be executed in the United States in the last quarter-century.
The gruesomeness of a murder is directly proportional to the craziness of the murderer. That’s just the way it is. Now ask a jury to wrestle with that equation and come up with the right answer. It can’t be done.
