Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior (6 page)

M. Sindy Felin, acclaimed for her first novel,
To u c h i n g S n o w,
observed, “I always thought I was destined to be either a serial killer or a mystery writer.” The serial killer, however, is incapable of transforming the basic drives that we all have into higher, life-affirming attitudes and behaviors. Theirs are failures of sublimation. Their pathological self-centeredness is in large measure the consequence of unsocialized, unchanneled sexual and aggressive impulses. Against the primitive drives that constantly demand self-gratification, the conscience of the serial killer is no match. Driven to gratify his deadly desires, the serial sexual killer has no joy in his life, only a transitory sexual release at the death of a victim, a release that soon requires the torture and death of a new victim. Instead of engaging in passionate relationships and work interests, as mentally healthy people do, this killer pursues the domination and submission of others. Instead of having the commitment to life goals and progress that characterize mentally healthy people, the serial killer is doomed to repeat a neverending cycle of compulsion, death, and more compulsion. Beyond envisioning murder and sadistic gratification, the imagination of the serial killer is blind.

The ability to examine unacceptable antisocial thoughts and feelings without translating them into action is not just a requirement for psychiatrists or their patients. Most people are able to curb or modify feral instincts, often with the help of knowing that a policeman stands on the corner. An enormous difference exists between thinking evil and doing evil, and although some religions do not accept this distinction, the law does. If it did not, all of us who occasionally have antisocial thoughts would be in jail, perhaps on death row. As the pioneering psychoanalyst Theodore Reich observed, “If wishes were horses, they would pull the hearses of our dearest friends and nearest relatives. All men are murderers at heart.”

Jeffrey Dahmer killed and cannibalized 17 young men. His father, Lionel Dahmer, wrote in his book that, as a youth, he himself had awakened at times with the feeling that he had committed murder. The difference was that Jeffrey had actually done what Lionel had only feared having done: “I had awakened in a panic that consciousness soon ended. Jeff had awakened into a nightmare that would never end.” Lionel Dahmer worried that he had passed on to his son a killer gene that had caused Lionel’s murderous dreams to burst full force into Jeffrey’s brain and actions. Various theories emphasize different combinations of environmental, biological, and genetic factors in serial killers, but no one knows why Lionel’s dreams stayed as dreams and Jeffrey’s were acted out as murders. We can only echo the prophet Jeremiah (17:9), who concluded, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?”

We may not be able to know the heart, but we can discern that big and little evils occur when we ascribe our unacceptable thoughts and feelings to others through the processes of dehumanization and projection. If we can acknowledge the beam in our own eye, we will be less likely to stigmatize the mote in the eye of others. To have, to hold, and to recognize the universality of the darker side that we each have within ourselves can be the key to enhancing our ability to experience a shared humanity rather than yield to the impulse to persecute others for our frailties. An important element of what the world calls
evil
is our failure to see an aspect of ourselves in others’ behavior, especially in their bad behavior. The mote in his eye is the beam in mine, and to acknowledge that is essential to achieving ordinary human goodness.

Understanding and insight about our psychological mechanisms, such as projection, dehumanization, and the ability (or inability) to empathize, permit us to exercise options rather than be bound by reflexive behaviors. We have the ability to learn about ourselves from multiple sources, from everyday experience, especially tragedies; from education; from arts and literature; from our relationships, whether constructive or destructive; from personal therapy; and from the myriad other ways that life can teach us. But self-knowledge and insight are not enough. Some people in this world understand themselves quite well but have neither the desire, the ability nor the character to harness their antisocial impulses.

“Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward,” Job laments, yet, remarkably, there are very many “good” people in this world, able to rise above the destructive impulses that we all possess.

It is the human condition to have dark demons and to struggle against them. When we acknowledge the dark side of our humanity, when we locate the possibility of evil within ourselves, when we attempt to tame our demons by channeling them into fantasies, dreams, and creative achievements, we are doing what humanity as a whole has done in taming fire—even though, inevitably, sparks will still fly and will be infinitely dangerous. By striving to harness our demons, we express the undaunted aspect of the human spirit, the urge to pursue and fulfill our destiny as individual human beings.

3
Psychopaths

The Predators Among Us

They are absolutely the world’s best manipulators, liars, and fabricators of truth. They do so convincingly because they believe their own lies. After all, their life is nothing but a lie, a sham, how can we possibly assume they know anything different.

—
Hervey Cleckley, M.D.

W
hen FBI supervisor Robert Philip Hanssen was arrested in February 2001 and charged with selling government secrets to the U.S.S.R. and then to Russia over a 15-year period, for $1.4 million in cash and diamonds, his espionage was termed “possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history.” The son of a Chicago police officer, Hanssen was reported to have been emotionally abused in childhood. He has said that he decided to betray his country at age 14. He studied dentistry and Russian and received an M.B.A. degree, but then went to work in the Chicago police department as an internal affairs investigator. Joining the FBI at the age of 35, he rose quickly to supervisor in the counterintelligence bureau in Washington, D.C. He began spying for the Soviets in the mid-1980s, compromising U.S. agents and double agents. His espionage was attributed, in part, to his belief that his FB I colleagues did not appreciate his brilliance and refused to accept him as a peer and friend. Hanssen refused to be considered for a higher position in the FBI because he would have been required to

29

take a lie detector test, which he suspected he would fail. A convert to Catholicism, he attended mass almost daily, was a member of the secretive Opus Dei sect, and seemed devoted to his wife and six children. At one point, his wife confronted him and demanded he confess his crime to a priest; the priest directed him to hand over to charity, as penance, some of the money he had received for his espionage.

Insight into Hanssen’s complex psychological makeup and his reasons for the espionage has been limited by his imprisonment and a gag order forbidding him to speak to the public. However, the personalities and early lives of a previous group of very damaging spies, the Walker family, are better known.

For 17 years, John Anthony Walker, Jr., used his position and knowledge as a career Navy Chief Warrant Officer to gain access to top-secret naval communications involving U.S. nuclear submarines. He sold these critical military secrets to the Soviet Union. To assist him, he recruited his son, his brother, and his best friend, Jerry Whitworth, all of whom were also in the Navy. He also tried to enlist his daughter’s help when she was in the Army, but she refused. It has been alleged that he strapped a money belt on his unsuspecting mother to bring spy payments back from Europe. The Walker spy ring jeopardized the lives of all Americans and, possibly, everyone in the free world. It inflicted enormous damage to the military security of the United States, with economic costs estimated in the high millions, if not billions of dollars. John A. Walker received about $1 million from the Soviet Union for his treachery. Of that amount, he paid his son only $1,000.

In my opinion, John A. Walker, Jr., displayed many of the antisocial behaviors typically found among psychopaths. Because I have not examined Walker personally, I cannot make a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder. But there is plenty of detailed information about Walker’s childhood and family in Pete Earley’s book
Family of Spies,
from which the following account is drawn.
¹
John Anthony Walker, Jr., was born on July 28, 1937, the second of three sons. “Jack” became his mother’s favorite. A special bond between them grew stronger over the years. His father was severely alcoholic, a man who held and lost a succession of jobs. The family was often impoverished. The parents fought constantly. During the father’s drunken states, he often beat the mother and sometimes abused the Walker children.

¹
From Pete Earley,
Family of Spies
. Copyright ©1988 by Pete Earley. Used by permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

By approximately age 10, Jack had conceived an intense hatred toward his father and determined to kill him. His plan was to thrust a cast-iron rollaway bed down the stairs as his drunken father was staggering up them. If the resulting fall did not kill his father, Jack planned to finish him off with a baseball bat. The plan went awry when the father returned to the house as expected, but passed out before he could get up the stairs. Jack fell asleep while waiting for him to continue his climb. The antisocial side of Walker’s personality became more evident as he moved through adolescence. A childhood best friend recalled that “what you see on the surface with Jack is not what you get. Trust me. I knew him like a brother, better than anyone else. Jack is cunning, intelligent, clever, personable, and intrinsically evil.”

As an adolescent, Jack and his friends stole eggs and used them to pelt streetcars. They rolled used tires down hills at cars that passed below. They threw rocks through the windows of the local Catholic church. They stole coins from church sanctuaries where parishioners left contributions in small receptacles for the poor. At school functions, they stole money from coats and purses. Jack crafted a pair of brass knuckles and precipitated a fistfight to try them out. He and his friends set fires. The boys borrowed a rifle one evening to shoot at cans and beer bottles. Jack became bored with these targets and sat on a ledge to shoot at the headlights of cars on a highway below. After Walker and his friends were arrested for a series of burglaries, Walker, as a teenage high school dropout, joined the Navy to escape punishment. In the service, he rose rapidly through the ranks because he was intelligent and easily able to pass the various promotion exams.

During his 21-year naval career, Jack Walker had many sexual experiences with prostitutes. He seemed to be drawn to “bleak harbor hotels, lurid bars, and crude hookers.” One of Walker’s Navy bosses told Earley: “The problems with John Walker involved moral turpitude. The guy just didn’t have any moral standards, as far as I was concerned. He constantly bragged about women, and if a woman looked at him twice, why, he’d be unzipping his britches.” A business colleague of Walker described him, years later, as a person who enjoyed involving himself in intrigues.

Walker married, but the marriage was troubled. His wife, Barbara, discovered that he was having many affairs. She described him as moody, continually oscillating from pleasantness to anger and violence. She alleged that Walker intimidated her physically and abused her. When he fell into debt because of failed business ventures, he tried to force her into prostitution to earn money.

Barbara Walker began to suspect her husband’s espionage activities in 1967. She found incriminating evidence that he had recklessly left in a tin box in a desk drawer, a box that contained the couple’s bonds and other personal items. She found maps, photographs of “dead drops” (locations for secret exchange of information), and even a letter from his KGB contact. Although she warned him that she would report his spying, he did nothing to stop her. Barbara Walker remained silent about it for some time. She later explained that she had always protected her husband to safeguard her children. At some point, all of his children, and a son-in-law, supposedly knew about the espionage as well. He allegedly tried to persuade his daughter to have an abortion when her pregnancy threatened to interfere with his spying. During a custody suit that erupted between his daughter and son-in-law, the son-in-law allegedly threatened to expose the espionage if he lost custody of the child. One of Jack’s childhood friends tried to articulate the power Jack had over family and friends: “It was almost hypnotic…I can’t explain it, but he was my Svengali. There was just something intriguing about him that drew me to him. He had a certain manipulative power.”

Walker loved the fast life; in bars and ports around the world, he enjoyed calling out, “Bartender! I’ll have a shot of the scotch that’s named after me—Johnny Walker.” He was flamboyant. He portrayed himself as a fervent patriot, expressed conservative views, and kept a color photo of then President Ronald Reagan on his wall. He made extravagant boasts about his high-ranking military connections, claiming once that he had keys to the War Room.

In June of 1976, after 19 years of marriage, Barbara Walker divorced her husband and moved to Maine to be as far away from him as possible. Shortly thereafter, Walker retired from the Navy. During his service career he had received two Navy commendation medals, a good conduct medal, the Vietnam Service medal, and the National Defense Service medal.

After retiring, Walker became a private detective and carried such weapons as a cane with a knife concealed within it. Walker was able to purchase office space for his three private detective agencies as well as a houseboat, a camper, two cars, and a single-engine plane that he loved to fly. In a safe deposit box, Walker kept ten 100-ounce silver bars. He told one of his detective employees that the key to his method of operation was to tempt people by playing on their greed. The employee reported that Walker himself “felt basically greedy” and believed that you could get to anyone “through their greed.” When his KGB case officer informed Walker that he had been awarded the rank of admiral in the Soviet Navy for his outstanding contributions to world peace through espionage, Walker replied, “Tell them thanks a lot.” His reason for spying was to obtain money and what it could buy.