Murderous Minds (5 page)

It is commonly assumed that people with schizophrenia like Jared are more likely to be violent than people without schizophrenia. Criminologist Adrian Raine, for example, cites studies from around the world showing that people with schizophrenia are more likely to have a criminal and violent history than healthy people.
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He concludes in his book,
The Anatomy of Violence
, that the “relationship between violence and schizophrenia is not weak.” Later he softens his assertion by noting that “It’s true that most schizophrenics are not dangerous, and neither kill nor perpetuate violence.”

It is true that studies show that only a small number of people with mental illnesses do become violent. The threat in the public’s imagination, however, is exaggerated by the publicity that acts such as Jared’s receive and by the public’s general lack of understanding of the disease schizophrenia.

“The challenge for medical practitioners is to remain aware that some of their psychiatric patients do in fact pose a small risk of violence, while not losing sight of the larger perspective—that most people who are violent are not mentally ill, and most people who are mentally ill are not violent,” Richard A. Friedman, M.D., wrote in
The New England Journal of Medicine
.
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It is worth reiterating that most violent people are not mentally ill—as countless acts of violence are committed every day by sane people with decidedly obvious motives: frustration, desperation, jealousy, greed, or anger.

Crimes like Jared’s are “extraordinarily rare events,” according to Meloy. And that, the clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California in San Diego says, is the reason they get so much publicity. The media coverage of such events skews the public perception of the threat posed by the mentally ill.

A look back at nearly thirty years of research reveals that there is indeed an association between schizophrenia and violence—homicide, in particular. But most of this violence can be attributed to drug and alcohol abuse. In fact, people
with
schizophrenia who abuse drugs are about as violent as people
without
schizophrenia who abuse drugs,
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so the corollary to violence could arguably be the drug use versus the schizophrenia itself. Jared’s friends reported that he had used drugs extensively in the years before he was arrested, although he had reportedly stopped using them in the last few months before he was arrested. His past history included abuse of alcohol, marijuana, and hallucinogens.
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The confounding issue of drug abuse and violence illustrates the difficulty of sorting out a complex issue like violence and its multiple causes. Robert Hare and his co-workers, for example, suggested in 1994 that drug use by psychopaths, which is hardly rare, could probably be linked more to their unstable and antisocial lifestyles than to the characteristic features of psychopathy.
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There are superficial similarities between brain abnormalities reported in schizophrenia and abnormalities found in psychopaths. For example, they both are believed to involve dysfunction in the frontal lobes. But schizophrenia and psychopathy are distinct disorders. The uninformed diagnosis of “psycho killer” doesn’t begin to capture the mysteries behind either condition. Of the two, psychopathy may be the more puzzling, and even the scarier, because when it involves violence, the violence springs from someone who on the surface appears as normal as the rest of us.

“No I Am Not Crazy …” —Eric Harris
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Eric Harris left us thousands of words in his notebooks and on his web pages, words that tell us a lot about him: “My belief is that if I say something, it goes,” he ranted. “I am the law, and if you don’t like it, you die. If I don’t like you or I don’t like what you want me to do, you die… . I’ll just go to some downtown area in some big ass city and blow up and shoot everything I can. Feel no remorse, no sense of shame.”
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There are indeed no indications of remorse or shame in Eric’s personal

manifestos and ranting announcements. But he had no problem feigning those feelings when it would help him, as Dave Cullen pointed out in his 2004
Slate
article, “The Depressive and the Psychopath: At Last We Know Why the Columbine Killers Did It.”

Frank Ochberg, M.D., a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Michigan State University, said he believes Eric lacked a conscience.
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Based on his history and writings, Eric impressed Ochberg and other experts as someone who was good at reading and manipulating people and ingratiating himself to them when it would benefit him.
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For example, the FBI agent perhaps most familiar with the motivations of the Columbine killers, clinical psychologist Dr. Dwayne Fuselier, told Cullen that Eric wrote “an ingratiating letter” to a person he had robbed.
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Eric wrote it when he was participating in a community service program that allowed him to avoid prosecution for breaking into a man’s van. The letter offered not just apologies, but went so far as to express empathy. Fuselier said Eric’s letter “was packed with statements like
Jeez, I understand now how you feel and I understand what this did to you.
”
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Eric added: “My parents and everyone else that knew me was shocked that I did something like that. My parents lost almost all their trust in me and I was grounded for two months … I am truly sorry for what I have done.”
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That is the mask of contrition and human decency Eric brought out and wore when it suited him. Eric and other criminal psychopaths may be able to express empathy, but it is not part of their emotional repertoire. Behind the mask, in private, he revealed how he really felt: “Isn’t America supposed to be the land of the free? How come, if I’m free, I can’t deprive a stupid fucking dumbshit from his possessions if he leaves them sitting in the front seat of his fucking van out in plain sight and in the middle of fucking nowhere on a Frifuckingday night. NATURAL SELECTION. Fucker should be shot.”
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This is the type of rationalization for immoral, unethical, or criminal behavior typical of many criminals whose psychopathy has been established by psychological testing: if someone is dumb enough to become a victim, they deserve it.

“
I’ll never forget talking to the head counselor, who counseled both boys

before all this [the shooting] happened. He described how different they were. Harris would just tell you what you needed to know to satisfy your needs so he could get what he wanted,” psychiatrist Ochberg remembered fourteen years after the events at Columbine. Dylan, on the other hand, was depressive and emotional, Ochberg recalls.

Eric’s writings provide a fascinating and revealing look into the mind of a non-psychotic person who would not just dream about—but actually take the extraordinary step of—planning and executing a coldblooded massacre.

There is no record that a formal “psychological autopsy” had been performed on either Eric or Dylan, and no evidence of an official document describing their psychological state. Former FBI Special Agent and criminal profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole, Ph.D., an expert on psychopathy with firsthand knowledge of the behavior of the Columbine shooters, confirms that no formal evaluation analysis was issued.

Cullen’s
Slate
magazine article describing the opinions of Drs. Ochberg and Fuselier is still the main source of information for most people about the killers’ psychological states.

O’Toole, who worked for over fourteen years as a profiler in the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, recalled the crime scene this way: “Based on the behavior at the crime scene: it was predatory, it was preplanned, and it was extremely callous.” As the killers moved through the school picking out victims and shooting them, they displayed a calm coldbloodedness, according to O’Toole. Experts call this eerily calm style of execution hypo-emotionality, and it is characteristic of other campus and school shooters. They moved through the school, O’Toole said, “in a very tempered and controlled way. When I saw his [Eric’s] videotapes in which he talked about his plans, there was a sense of thrill and excitement. It was [a] very risk-taking kind of behavior. I would say, based on the behavior at the crime scene, that would be a manifestation of some of the traits of psychopathy.”
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O’Toole’s FBI colleague Fuselier and Ochberg, a former Associate Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, go a bit further in discussing Eric’s psychopathic traits. Fuselier, a clinical psychologist, spent months studying Eric and Dylan before he arrived at his opinion. In the summer of 1999, according to Cullen’s book
Columbine
, Fuselier was in
Leesburg, Virginia attending a meeting organized by the FBI to discuss school shootings.
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He reviewed his findings about Eric’s personality by concluding that Eric was a “budding young psychopath.”

A prominent psychiatrist at the meeting, however, disagreed with Fuselier, according to Cullen’s account:

“‘I don’t think he was a budding young psychopath,’ the psychiatrist said.

“‘What’s your objection?’

“‘I think he was a full-blown psychopath.’

“His colleagues agreed. Eric Harris was textbook.”
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Like Fuselier, Ochberg saw a budding psychopath in Eric. Ochberg traveled to Columbine repeatedly in the year following the tragedy to help victims and members of the community recover from the trauma. And he read Eric’s writings and reviewed his history.

“I did reach a conclusion that Eric Harris appeared on his way to becoming psychopathic, that he was very good at imitating caring,” Ochberg recalled in an interview for this book.

Few mental health professionals are willing to call someone a psychopath before they reach the age of eighteen. Eric would have been eighteen years old a mere eleven days after he calmly shot his classmates and teachers.

“You don’t call someone a psychopath until they have given a lot of evidence and they have grown up… . After age eighteen and in the adult range, they have a series of behaviors that can be observed,” Ochberg said in a short film produced by Joyce Boaz,
What Is a Psychopath?
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While Eric’s crimes prevented him from graduating from high school, they were also evidence that he appeared to have graduated into adult psychopathy before his eighteenth birthday.

“Some psychopaths become sadists,” Ochberg continued. “Being sadistic means you enjoy hurting another person. Not every psychopath becomes a sadist but if they stumble into sadism, they have absolutely no regret, no empathy, no remorse as a product of their being a psychopath. And they practice and they get better.

“The worst are the serial killers who are not only psychopaths and sadists, but they have learned to enjoy their own grandiosity. They’re narcissist. They care about themselves. They want to outwit the police. They want to humiliate logical, decent people. They hold us in contempt.

They are ‘the worst of bad.’” Eric was not a serial killer, but his personal

history and his status as a mass murderer suggest he had the traits Ochberg describes. Mass murderers kill multiple people during a single violent event, while serial killers commit a series of murders over an extended period of time. Between murders, they often do not attract attention. Spree killers murder multiple people in a series of violent, related events.

Eric’s parents have since come to accept that their son was a psychopath. He had fooled them, as he had fooled a psychiatrist he had once been sent to visit.
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But being fooled by a psychopath is nothing to be ashamed of. Experts who have spent their careers working with psychopaths, experts like Dr. Robert Hare, attest to the fact that even they, for a time anyway, have been fooled by the appearance of normality that psychopaths can convincingly present.
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It can take time to see behind what psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley referred to as “the mask of sanity.”

It is fair to document a person’s psychopathic characteristics or traits, but it is up to the reader to realize that psychopathy requires documentation of more than a few such traits before the label “psychopath” can be authoritatively applied to an individual. One nasty comment, spiteful act, fist fight, theft, lawsuit, or self-serving action doesn’t amount to psychopathy. A lifetime pattern of antisocial behavior, such as Eric was well on his way to establishing just before his eighteenth birthday, may—providing the determination is made by a professional trained to evaluate a person’s behavior as well as his or her legal and medical history.

Eric’s personal history, his journals and videos, combined with his many traits characteristic of psychopathy, convinced the experts who examined his writings and life that he was either well on his way to being a psychopath or had already become one, a “textbook psychopath.”

“I am higher than you people,” he announced. “If you disagree I would shoot you … some people go through life begging to be shot.”

And some people go through life without a conscience. Scientists are accepting the difficult challenge of trying to figure out why an estimated one out of every hundred adults share this deficit with Eric. Not all of them are killers, but so many are criminals that they make up an estimated 15 to 25 percent of the prison population in the United States. And criminal psychopaths, by one estimate, commit half again as many crimes
as non-psychopathic criminals.
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Criminal or unsuccessful psychopaths may be a subgroup in the heterogeneous population of all psychopaths that includes non-criminal or successful psychopaths. It is the record they leave and often their confinement that make criminal psychopaths the best scientific subjects for anyone who wants to see into the psychopathic brain.