Murderous Minds (15 page)

A lot of what distinguishes us from chimpanzees can be found in this relatively recently evolved addition to our central nervous system. We may share close to 99% of our DNA sequences with this ape,
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but we seem to
express more of certain genes in our brains than chimps do. (The code of an expressed gene is read and used to produce a protein encoded by the gene. An unexpressed gene is not decoded and produces no protein product.) We have genes specific to our species (some of which are associated with cognitive disorders) and a much more complex pattern of gene expression in our frontal lobes compared to apes.
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MRI scans show that prefrontal white matter increases during infancy dramatically in humans but not in chimps.
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Apparently this contributes to our ability to plan, project, and out-problem-solve our fellow primates in such a way that we can dominate the globe for better or worse. Despite their outward similarities, human frontal lobes are more complex than chimpanzee frontal lobes. The signaling pathways and connections in human frontal lobes appear to be somewhat more elaborate than those of the great apes. Less white matter in the ape’s temporal cortex might also reflect less connectivity between neurons. More connections between nerve cells is just what you want if you want to process information more efficiently and at a more sophisticated level. Such microscopic differences may be reflected in our good and bad behavior, and in our great and not-so-great accomplishments as a species.

One way to get an idea of the important function this part of the brain plays in thinking and planning, as well as in antisocial, criminal, and psychopathic behavior, is to consider medical reports describing injuries to this region. They are full of case histories of patients who suffered damage to the frontal lobe—beginning with a man named Phineas Gage. In 1848, Gage survived an accident in which an explosion sent an iron rod through his cheek and eye socket and out the top of his head, destroying portions of his frontal lobe. The Smithsonian magazine correctly referred to Gage, whose story is told in Chapter 9, as “neuroscience’s most famous patient.” He, and many unfortunate patients after him, could no longer balance their “intellectual faculties and animal propensities” after suffering damage to their frontal lobes, according to Gage’s physician, John Martyn Harlow.
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Immediately above your eye sockets, behind your brow, is a subdivision of the frontal lobes called the orbitofrontal cortex (Figures 8 and 9) and adjacent ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The term orbitofrontal cortex comes up in the scientific literature devoted to the biological basis
of psychopathy and antisocial behavior the way “weapon” comes up when you read about holdups. When it is damaged by a stroke or an injury—or even, as some neuroscientists believe, when it develops abnormally in the womb and during childhood—it appears also to fail in its job of influencing a sense of ethics, morality, and social cooperation. Its dysfunction can lead to impulsiveness and aggression, traits closely linked to psychopathy and antisocial behavior.

“The frontal lobes are the part of the brain that put a brake on impulses and drives,” Georgetown University psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Pincus told ABC News’ Ned Potter. “It’s the part of the brain that allows us to say, ‘Don’t do that! Don’t say that! It’s not appropriate! There are going to be consequences!’”
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If you know where to look, it’s easy to see that something is missing when you look at a PET scan of Fallon’s brain, and the brains of certified psychopaths. In most pictures of healthy brains, the orbitofrontal cortex glows with bright patches of red and yellow—colors added by the computer to indicate brain cells actively sucking up and burning glucose for energy as they keep nerve impulses flowing and neurons communicating with each other. That desirable glow is missing in the brains of unusual subjects like Fallon, who admits to having some non-violent psychopathic traits such as recklessness, and in the brains of people who tend to get into fights and victimize others. Their brain portraits show only a dull gray patch where the key part of the prefrontal lobe should be cheerily lit.

Even when this area is damaged, impaired, or inactive, intellectual ability is frequently unaffected. Fallon’s distinguished non-criminal academic career is one example. High intellect among criminals does not appear to be the rule, but it is certainly not unheard of.

Smart Bad Guys

Literary intellectuals Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley, Jr. learned about the disconnection between psychopathic traits and intellectual impairment firsthand. Mailer was the celebrated, controversial author of eleven novels and twenty-eight books. He won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and nonfiction. Novelist Joan Didion described him as “a great and obsessed stylist, a writer to whom the shape of the sentence is the story.”

Buckley, founder of The National Review magazine, was a leading figure in the American Conservative movement in the second half of the twentieth century and also a prolific author of conservative political commentaries and spy novels. He was known for his dictionary-like vocabulary and his inclination to use it.

Both the conservative Buckley and the liberal Mailer befriended convicts who wrote to them from prison. The jailed correspondents impressed the two famous writers with their writing skills. Eventually, the articulate prose of the convicts convinced Mailer and Buckley that the convicts deserved their freedom.

There are, of course, precedents for literary skill and even genius coexisting with ignorance in other areas. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were, in addition to being leading literary figures and poets during the twentieth century, boorish anti-Semites. Leading American journalist H. L. Mencken and the industrialist Henry Ford were, too. Ernest Hemingway also made anti-Semitic comments. Holding such hateful, ignorant, and reprehensible views has never been inconsistent with accomplishment and fame, although it may highlight the limitations of ambition with intellect in the absence of wisdom. Buckley’s and Mailer’s assumption that intelligence and evil did not coexist in criminal minds had lethal consequences.

Buckley’s pen pal was a man named Edgar Smith. Smith was imprisoned for murdering Victoria Ann Zielinski, a fifteen-year-old cheerleader, in 1956. The murderer had crushed the girl’s skull with a forty-four-pound rock after beating her with a baseball bat. While locked up for the crime—which he denied committing—Smith wrote to Buckley. He convinced Buckley he was a good writer. Smith told the conservative maven that he had been wrongfully convicted. Buckley appreciated good writing. How could anyone so intelligent, so capable of creating such cogent, well-crafted sentences and of marshaling such insights, be guilty? Buckley believed Smith was innocent and lobbied for his release. Fourteen years after his death sentence, Smith was set free. The legal justification for his release was the improper manner in which the police obtained his statement following his arrest. It is undeniable, however, that the efforts of Buckley and others who made him a cause célèbre played a big part in the decision to free Smith.

Smith made a short career of talking and writing about the injustice done to him. He authored Brief Against Death before his release from prison and Getting Out after his release. Once freed, he lectured and made radio and television appearances while he was enjoying his fifteen minutes of fame. In his fifth year of freedom, however, he backslid. He abducted a woman and stabbed her with a butcher knife. When he contacted Buckley after the stabbing, Buckley phoned the FBI to report Smith. Fortunately, Smith’s victim survived and testified against him. Smith went back to prison; Buckley lost a pen pal.

On opposite ends of the political spectrum, Mailer, the author of The Armies of the Night, did not have a lot in common with Buckley, the author of God and Man at Yale, ideologically speaking, but he too was easily charmed by skillful prose. And so Norman Mailer, like Buckley, was seduced by the prose of a clever convict. He began corresponding with Jack Abbott, a lifelong criminal who had experienced neglect and abuse in the foster care system, which he had entered at birth.

After a youth spent in juvenile-detention centers and reform schools, Abbott went to prison for forgery. When he was twenty-one years old, he stabbed a fellow inmate to death. Facing more than twenty years for the murder, he escaped in 1971. He robbed a bank, was captured, and was sentenced to an additional nineteen years. Five years later, he began writing to Mailer and, as Smith had done with Buckley, succeeded in impressing the famous author. His letters to Mailer describing life in prison were published, with Mailer’s help, in Abbott’s book, In the Belly of the Beast.

Mailer helped Abbott again by supporting his efforts to gain parole, a goal which they realized in 1981, despite serious doubts by Abbott’s jailers. Once freed, Abbott too made the rounds of New York literary society for a month or so. But then he got into an argument with restaurant employee Richard Adan over the use of a staff-only restroom. The two took the argument outside, where Abbott stabbed the 22-year-old victim—a fledgling actor and writer himself—to death. Abbott’s plea of self-defense didn’t convince anyone; he went back to prison. Mailer, like Buckley, lost a pen pal.

Hare wrote that the lack of depth in Abbott’s conscious feeling about the murder is indicated by his statements that “There
was no pain; it was a clean wound” and “He had no future as an actor—chances are he would have gone into another line of work.”
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Abbott hanged himself in prison in 2002. His suicide note was never published.

The naiveté of Mailer and Buckley was perhaps, at the time, understandable. They could not conceive of high intellect and verbal intelligence being associated with psychopathic or criminal tendencies. Vicious murderers were, after all, ignorant, dumb thugs—not polished, skilled writers. Although we have an extraordinary amount to learn about the neurobiological basis of psychopathic behavior, we nevertheless know quite a bit more now than we knew then. We know that intelligence and writing skills are not incompatible with criminal or psychopathic behaviors. The brain is big enough and small enough, active enough and inactive enough, to accommodate both traits. We know that a man or woman may be able to write like a sage and still be a remorseless killer.

In the classic treatise on psychopathy, The Mask of Sanity, Hervey Cleckley placed “Superficial charm and good ‘intelligence’” at the top of his list of psychopathic traits. This might be because the typical psychopaths Cleckley saw usually did “not commit murder or other offenses that promptly lead to major prison sentences.”
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Buckley’s and Mailer’s friends may have been exceptions, since the scientific literature doesn’t dispute the argument that less-intelligent psychopaths get caught and sent to prison while more-intelligent psychopaths tend to move into corporate or political occupations, or else manage not to get caught.
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Like the rest of the population, psychopaths range widely in intelligence.

While we don’t know what their brain scans would have looked like, or what genes Smith or Abbott inherited, we know they displayed classic behavior of criminals with antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy. Neuroimaging studies of violent offenders with records similar to Smith and Abbott, along with neuropsychological test results, point convincingly to problems in the frontal lobes.

Adrian Raine and collaborators, for example, found using structural MRI that there was less gray-matter volume in the frontal cortex of people with antisocial personality disorder and high psychopathy scores around 28 out of 40.
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His co-author psychologist Todd Lencz said that
the 11 percent difference was “modest but noticeable when comparing groups.”
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Back in the year 2000, the researchers couldn’t be sure exactly which parts of the frontal lobes were short on gray matter, but later studies clearly pointed to the orbitofrontal cortex. That’s the same region Fallon was surprised to see was dark in his brain, as well as in the brains of the murderers he studied. The association of reduced activity and gray-matter volume in this part of the brain is significant because it appears so often in studies of this type of psychopathology.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget when discussing individual brain regions that the brain is a highly complex structure consisting of billions of interconnected units. What might look like a lesion causing a problem in one area all by itself might really be contributing to troubling behavior by interrupting communication pathways that run through it. So, the true source of the dysfunction might not lie in the prefrontal cortex alone, but instead in a circuit of brain regions and structures, all affected by an apparent lesion or flaw in one part of the brain.

The Emotional Brain

The overall trend of the research so far clearly indicates a strong connection between psychopathy and impaired function in parts of the brain that play a central role in regulating emotions and in how we react to emotions in ourselves and others. Neuroanatomists call this network the prefrontaltemporal-limbic system. This descriptive jargon describes a network of interconnected brain structures that, in addition to the prefrontal cortex, includes structures like the amygdala, hippocampus, superior temporal gyrus, and anterior cingulate cortex. In most cases studied so far, the problem linked to psychopathic behavior in this “emotional brain” is associated with decreased metabolic activity, lower volume of gray matter, and disruption in the communication pathways that link parts of the prefrontaltemporal-limbic system.

Yet these anatomical “usual suspects” are implicated by more than circumstantial evidence. The fact that identical or closely related brain structures produce antisocial behavior when they are impaired by disease, injured by accident, or perhaps in some cases even present at birth, strongly supports the argument that these regions are intimately involved in promoting psychopathic behavior in people born with a predisposition to psychopathy.