Rage (15 page)

She didn’t remember later how she did it, but DaRonch managed to open the car door and fall to the ground. The next thing she knew, he had picked her up and slammed her against the car. He held her with his left hand and had a crowbar in the other. He was threatening to bash her head in when she kicked him in the testicles. The man went down in a heap and she ran, eventually flagging down a car driven by an elderly couple. They took her—crying hysterically and with the handcuffs still hanging from her wrist—to police.

Bundy was soon arrested for DaRonch’s kidnapping on the basis of her description of him and his car. Despite the fact that he had been positively identified by her in a lineup, was shown to have the same type of blood she had on her coat, and that he had no alibi, Bundy was confident he would win the case.

He was wrong. Bundy was found guilty and sentenced to one to 15 years in prison, with eligibility for parole.

Almost as soon as he landed in prison, Bundy underwent a psychiatric evaluation. With some astonishment, the doctors found that Bundy was not “psychotic, neurotic, the victim of organic brain disease, alcoholic, addicted to drugs, suffering from a character disorder or amnesia, and was not a sexual deviate.” They did, however, decide that he had a “strong dependency on women” and, perhaps more important, a “fear of being humiliated in his relationships with women.”

The strange
modus operandi
of the DaRonch kidnapping attracted the attention of law enforcement nationwide and Bundy was soon suspected of murder. On December 22, 1976, he was charged with the murder of Caryn Campbell, a woman who had disappeared in January of 1975 while vacationing in Colorado with her fiancé and his two children.

Bundy had made a great issue in the media about how poor he considered his lawyers to be, and said that he was thinking about representing himself in the Campbell case. He eventually managed to gain permission to visit a law library in nearby Aspen. For these trips, he asked for and was granted permission to wear civilian clothes so as not to draw attention to himself. On one of these visits, while the guard wasn’t looking, Bundy leapt from a second-story window and ran to freedom.

Aware that the police would set up roadblocks around the city, he stayed in Aspen, stealing food and sleeping in empty holiday cabins. On one of his foraging trips, he ran into an armed man who was part of the search party looking specifically for him. He managed to talk his way out of the situation and the man let him go. He was free for six days before two sheriff ’s deputies spotted him in a stolen car weaving in and out of traffic. From then on, he was obliged to wear handcuffs and leg irons on his trips to the library.

Wary, the state placed him in a smaller, more secure jail. Using nothing but his abundant charm, he managed to convince a fellow inmate to give him a hacksaw blade and $500 in cash. He escaped again. He stole an MG, but the tiny roadster stalled in the deep mountain snow. Stranded, he hitched a ride to Vail and took a bus to Denver, then a flight to Chicago. He then took a train to Ann Arbor, Michigan. He went to a bar that night and watched his favorite team—the Washington Huskies—beat the hometown Michigan Wolverines 27-20. He spoke to a number of people that night, some of whom even bought him drinks, and—despite the nationwide manhunt—nobody identified him. He then stole a car, drove to Atlanta and took a bus to Tallahassee, Florida. It was a place he later said he loved because of the intellect and youth associated with the city’s Florida State University. He even sat in on a few lectures. While there, Bundy also committed a number of minor crimes and attacked six women, murdering three, including a 12-year-old who he raped and disposed of in a pigsty.

Bundy later approached a 14-year-old girl who was waiting for her brother to pick her up from school. Bundy told her he was from the town’s fire department and wanted to talk with her. He picked the wrong girl. This one happened to be the daughter of the Jacksonville Police Department’s chief of detectives and he had warned her about such people. She was suspicious of an on-duty firefighter in plaid pants and a navy blazer, so she ignored him and did her best to keep a safe distance. When her brother eventually showed up, she told him the story and they memorized the license plate number on the white van Bundy was driving.

The police visited the man the plates were registered to, and he showed proof that they had been stolen. Suspecting the worst, the children’s father showed them a book of mug shots. Both of them, in separate rooms, identified Ted Bundy as the man with the van.

Bundy ditched the van and stole an orange VW Beetle. Sensing the area was becoming aware of him, he drove west. As he passed through the then-sleepy town of West Pensacola, a police officer noticed the unfamiliar car and ran the plates. They came back stolen.

Again his slow VW was overtaken and, as the officer tried to handcuff Bundy, he fought his way free and ran. The officer shot at Bundy, who lay down, pretending to be hit. When the officer arrived to check him out, Bundy attacked him again, only to be overpowered and arrested again.

Defending himself, Bundy put on a great show in court. At one point he proposed marriage to one of the defense witnesses, his former co-worker Carole Ann Boone, and she accepted. Since both were under oath at the time, it counted as a legally binding contract. Despite fighting for his life against a staggering number of rape and murder charges, Ted Bundy managed to get married on national TV.

But he was ultimately convicted, largely because his teeth perfectly matched the bite marks on many of the victims. After the guilty verdict was returned, Bundy claimed that media misrepresentation was responsible for the decision—it was all their fault.

On one of their many conjugal visits, Bundy and Boone conceived a daughter, Tina. A series of appeals went nowhere and an offer to help find the notorious Green River Killer did nothing to alter his sentence. When Bundy was eventually put to death by electric chair on January 24, 1989, his final words were: “I’d like you to give my love to my family and friends.”

“That last line really kills me,” the doctor from New York told me. “Even though he was dying—had nothing more to gain or lose—he was still playing the game, pretending to care about his family and friends, when it was abundantly obvious that he didn’t.”

Indeed, the doctor believes (and this seems to be a consensus about Bundy) that Bundy was absolutely incapable of caring about anyone other than himself. His dying words were emblematic of his desire to be perceived as someone who did care, though.

Bundy is a crystallization of what differentiates a psychopath from a sociopath—his or her ability to mimic the outward signs of being a caring person. Early in his life, Ted Bundy realized that if he wanted to get what he wanted—eventually the total control he enjoyed through torture, murder and sex with corpses—it would be easier to get if he pretended he was “normal.” By looking like a regular, even desirable, guy he could gain the trust of and, therefore, access to women that an obvious sociopath like Cho could only dream about. While Cho repulsed the women around him with his desperate overtures, calm cool Bundy had his pick of them. In fact, all of his victims had the same look—long, dark hair parted in the middle with no bangs, because that was his favorite hairstyle.

“If you really want to get down to brass tacks, a psychopath is a smarter—or at least more pragmatic—sociopath,” the doctor from New York told me. “W hile the sociopath makes his illness obvious and scares off the people he most wants to be in contact with, the psychopath lures them in with a veil of normalcy, even exceptionality.”

That’s the problem with psychopaths; they blend in among us. Most of them, according to the medical literature I’ve read, come across as confident, charming, friendly and intelligent. Not only is it hard to identify them, it’s hard not to fall under their spell. And if you think that their victims come from the weakest, most needy or least intelligent sectors of our population, you may want to think again.

“Psychiatrists are often helplessly manipulated by the psychopath,” says Dr. Ken Magid, a clinical psychologist and author of
High Risk: Children Without a Conscience
. “Just as are the psychopath’s other victims.” While a sociopath won’t seek help because he or she denies the problem, the psychopath not only denies the problem, but has learned the ability to hide it from others, including the doctors who could potentially help them.

Of course, the doctor from New York reminds me, not all psychopaths are serial killers. It just doesn’t make mathematical sense. While people with APD make up maybe four percent of the population, murderers are a tiny fraction of that and serial murderers are a tiny fraction of them. What, I ask, do the other psychopaths do?

“Well, I know one of them who works at a Lexus dealership,” says the doctor.

He’s only half-kidding, but he makes a point. Dr. Robert Hare calls psychopaths who don’t break laws (or at least don’t get caught and punished) “subcriminal psychopaths.” Psychopaths in our society can be the dashing cad, the Type-A personality, the two-timing boyfriend or just an otherwise ordinary person who puts themselves before others. Dr. Sheila Wilson, a psychiatrist who works with the victims of psychopaths, points out that psychopaths often prey upon the weaker members of our society, and neither side may realize it. A psychopath who pays excessive attention to an emotionally needy person, for example, will find it much easier to borrow money from them and is unlikely to pay it back. But it’s not just the needy who can be targets. “Psychopaths play on the fact that most of us are trusting and forgiving people,” says Michael Seto, a psychologist at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

There’s nothing close to a consensus as to what causes a person to become a psychopath. At a time when the prevailing wisdom was that people who demonstrated this type of behavior were invariably the product of a poor, abusive upbringing, Hare postulated that what made psychopaths act the way they did was physical. He couldn’t point to exactly what made their wiring different, but he was sure it was.

“Nobody believed him thirty years ago, but Bob hasn’t wavered, and now everyone’s where he is,” says Dr. Steven Stein, a psychologist and CEO of Multi-Health Systems in Toronto. “Everyone’s come full circle, except a small group who believe it’s bad upbringing, family poverty, those kinds of factors, even though scientific evidence has shown that’s not the case. There are wealthy psychopaths who’ve done horrendous things, and they were brought up in wonderful families.”

And, since nobody knows what causes a psychopath to be a psychopath, treatment options are limited. According to Seto (a doctor at a facility dedicated largely to rehabilitation), by the time a psychopath hits his or her late teens, the condition “is almost certainly permanent.”

Over the years, various treatments have been tried out on psychopaths with sadly consistent results. No drug seems to make a difference and therapy rarely does. Therapy requires the patient to recognize they have a problem and psychopaths rarely do; it also requires honesty and psychopaths, having practiced deception their whole lives, are unlikely to change their behavior in such a situation. Besides, “psychopaths don’t discriminate who it is they lie to or cheat,” says Seto. “There’s no distinction between friend, family and sucker.” So what’s a doctor but another sucker to be used? The psychopath will talk with the therapist, say all the things he or she feels the doctor will want to hear, and often comes out of the sessions with a passing grade, although no progress has actually been made.

In fact, the treatment may actually do more harm than good. “Psychopaths often con the system, including the therapists and, ironically, may be more likely to re-offend after receiving current prison treatment programs,” said Hare. In one of his studies, psychopaths who underwent social-skills and anger-management training before release had an 82 percent reconviction rate, while psychopaths released from the same institution who didn’t take the program had a 59 percent reconviction rate.

Frustrated by the lack of effectiveness of their treatments, the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) in 1991 asked Hare to design a treatment program. He worked on something totally original. Instead of, as had historically been the case, appealing to the psychopath’s guilt or remorse (which they don’t even have) by trying to make them feel bad about what they’d done, Hare suggested that treatment be based on appealing to the psychopath’s all-important sense of self-interest—as in, look what your actions have done, they’ve gotten you in jail, so it must have been the wrong plan. It made perfect sense. Instead of wasting time, energy, money and opportunity trying to get a person unable to feel guilt to suddenly do so, Hare wanted to teach psychopaths to follow our rules because it was in their best interest. But by the time he finished the proposal the following year, there was a new team in charge of the CSC—and they didn’t like Hare’s plan at all.