The Anatomy of Violence (42 page)

Did Lake once watch
Dr. Strangelove
, or some similar apocalyptic narrative, and take on board some of these bizarre belief systems? Or were his violent fantasies shaped in part by his tours of duty in the Marine Corps in Vietnam? Or both? Lake certainly had
paranoid ideation and believed the wider world was under imminent attack, that it would be wiped out, and that he would need to repopulate the world. He began to act on his beliefs with
callous disregard for the suffering of others. He had the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral features of schizotypal personality disorder.

Lake put his vision into operation by setting up a compound in Wilseyville in the rural area of Calaveras County
¹²³
in California. There, in his bunker, he stockpiled arms and food to survive the nuclear fallout, complete with all the necessary shackles, chains, and
sexual devices to help him repopulate the post-nuclear world. With a partner,
Charles Ng, he lured both men and women using classified ads in which he advertised the sale and exchange of video equipment. Men who replied were immediately killed for their possessions. Women were imprisoned in an underground bunker, where Lake and Ng would make them perform sex-slave rituals in snuff videos, begging for mercy as they were
tortured and
raped.

Schizotypals score lower on empathy than normal individuals,
¹²⁴
and Lake’s level of empathy was decidedly low. He is recorded telling one of his victims,
Kathy Allen, “If you don’t do what we tell you, we will tie you to the bed, rape you, shoot you in the head, and take you out and bury you.”
¹²⁵
The reality was to be even worse. Indifferent to the pain he was causing by torturing and raping the women in his bunker, Lake took away the baby of one of his victims,
Brenda O’Connor, claiming it was for now in the safe hands of another family. Terrified and hysterical at what might happen to her baby and deluded into believing she could save it, Brenda went along with Lake and Ng’s perverted wishes in their snuff videos. The reality was that her baby had already been cut up and buried outside the bunker, and Brenda was to follow after slow torture with
sadomasochistic devices.

As was mentioned above, schizotypals have no close genuine friendships outside of their own families, and while they may have superficial associates, these relationships are not deep and meaningful relationships. Lake’s
social connectedness did not even extend as far as his own family. He killed his brother and also killed one of his few associates for his money and possessions, just as he had killed strangers.

A significant number of schizotypals have
obsessive-compulsive personality features.
¹²⁶
Lake too had his obsessive-compulsive features, taking several showers a day and repeatedly washing his hands—he was compulsively clean as a child. He also made his victims shower before sex.

Another symptom of schizotypal personality is bizarre behavior. Lake would dissect his victims after
murdering them, boil the skin off their bones, and place their remains in plastic bags, which he buried in shallow graves around his bunker. Individuals with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders are at risk for
suicide,
¹²⁷
and so it’s not entirely surprising that after being captured Lake swallowed a cyanide pill that he had carefully hidden under the lapel of his shirt. He died four days later.

Leonard Lake was not a schizophrenic hearing
voices like
Peter Sutcliffe or
Ron Kray or
Henry Lee Lucas. He did not stand out on the street looking disheveled or talking to himself. Instead, he had the kind of symptoms that are not too obvious or noticeable in isolation, but in unison can be clear signs of someone at risk for violent behavior. Clearly not all people with schizotypal personality are killers—far from it—and there were certainly additional factors that made Lake the monster he evolved into. But I suspect that features of schizotypal personality are far more common in violent offenders than today’s criminal justice system recognizes, largely because these features are not in and of themselves very striking, pathological, or “abnormal.”

After all, did anyone think that
Adam Lanza might kill his mother and twenty-six children and adults at
Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in December 2012? At the time of writing—just nineteen days after this tragic event—little definitive is known about his mental condition. Yet to me, he very likely had at the least four of the seven
symptoms of schizoid personality disorder: lack of close friends, chooses solitary activities, emotional detachment, and does not desire close relationships or being part of a family. This is the very same diagnosis Leonard Lake was given after his discharge from the Marine Corps. Four out of seven signs are sufficient for a clinical diagnosis. Lanza might also have had the remaining three: takes pleasure in few activities, indifferent to praise or criticism, little interest in sexual experiences. Like Lake, he may also have had additional features of schizotypal personality disorder, including odd appearance/behavior,
constricted affect,
social anxiety, and odd speech.

I have selected schizophrenia-spectrum disorders from a much
wider number of psychological
disorders to illustrate that health considerations do not end with physical health. Psychosis and subliminal forms of psychosis—like schizotypal personality—have a strong neurobiological basis and are also clearly related to crime and violence.
¹²⁸

There are two very important caveats to repeat, however. First, most schizophrenics neither kill nor are dangerous to others. We should take care not to stigmatize patients with
schizophrenia or schizoid personality as both “mad and bad.” At the same time, we need to recognize the raised rates of violence in schizophrenics so that they can receive treatment to reduce the likelihood of violence, and thus reduce the stigma.
¹²⁹
Second, there are many other mental disorders—including
depression,
bipolar disorder, ADHD, and
borderline personality disorder—that are also significant mental-health risk factors for violence. It does not stop with schizophrenia, and of course
alcohol and
drug use are also major mental-health disorders that increase the risk of violence.

I believe that taken together, the physical- and mental-health risk factors that we have scrutinized in this chapter are convincing components of the anatomy of violence. We’ll see later that these constituent pieces are not unalterable. Indeed, we have continued the theme seen in the past two chapters, on broken brains and natural-born killers, that the environment has a role in shaping the biological infrastructure of the violent offender. We’ll now move further forward with this recipe for violence to understand how all the different ingredients that we have discussed so far blend together to form a lethal brew.

Henry Lee
Lucas never really had a chance in life. Right from the beginning he was damaged goods. His father, an
alcoholic hobo named
Anderson Lucas, who lost both of his legs after falling off a freight train, whiled away his time drinking, selling pencils, and making illegal liquor. Henry himself became addicted to alcohol by the tender age of ten. Drunk most hours of the day, Anderson had no time for Henry—or anyone else, for that matter.

Henry’s
mother, Viola, was an even worse parent. An alcoholic as well as a prostitute, she gave birth to Henry when she was forty, after she had already abandoned four children to foster homes. Henry; his elder brother, Andrew; his parents; and Viola’s pimp all shared the same bedroom in a dirt-floor, ramshackle cabin near Blacksburg, Virginia, without electricity or plumbing. From the time he was a small boy, Henry had to watch his mother having sex with her clients.

Chronically malnourished, Henry was forced to scavenge for food in garbage bins to stay alive. His mother would cook only for her pimp, and the children ate their scavenged food off the floor, as Viola wouldn’t wash plates. His first hot meal as a child was when he started attending school and a teacher took pity on him. That same teacher also gave him his first pair of shoes.

His mother
psychologically and physically abused him. Once, when he was seven years old, he was too slow to fetch wood for the stove, so
his mother hit him hard on the
head with a wooden board. Such was the level of neglect that he lay where he had fallen for three full days in a semiconscious state, totally ignored by the rest of his family. Ironically, it was Bernie the pimp who eventually thought something was seriously wrong and took Henry to the hospital, telling doctors he had fallen off a ladder.
¹

This was likely only a fraction of the physical abuse and head trauma Henry endured. For the rest of his life he experienced blackouts, spells of dizziness, and at times felt he was floating on air. Neurological examinations and
brain scans later in life revealed evidence of extensive brain pathology, very likely a result of the early maternal abuse and deprivation he had suffered.
²

Henry was also subjected to sustained psychological cruelty by his mother. When he was seven she pointed out a stranger to him in town, telling him, “He’s your natural pa,” a fact later confirmed by Anderson, Henry’s supposed father.
³
To have such a basic fact of life shattered like that would pull the psychological rug out from under most
children’s feet, and not surprisingly Henry was devastated and in tears when hearing this news. His sister documents that his mother dressed him as a girl from the time he was a toddler up to his first day at school. His teacher, horrified by his treatment, cut his hair and got him a pair of trousers to wear.

The cruelty of his mother seemed to know no bounds. Viola once saw him enjoying playing with a pet mule. She asked him if he liked his pet mule. He said he did. So she fetched a shotgun and killed the mule in front of his eyes. As if this psychological cruelty was not sufficient to satisfy her, she proceeded to whip and beat the child because it would cost money to have the mule’s carcass carted away.
⁴

At school Henry was continuously tormented by other children because he was very dirty and smelled terrible. His abject misery was compounded when his brother
Andrew accidentally stuck a knife in his face when they were making a swing from a maple tree, puncturing his eye and impairing his peripheral vision. Bad luck morphed into extremely bad luck when a teacher at school swung her hand to hit another child in class, missed, and accidentally caught Henry in the same left eye. The accidental blow reopened the wound, resulting in the loss of his eye.
⁵

Henry would go on to become one of the most prolific serial killers in history. He was eventually convicted of eleven homicides committed
over a twenty-three-year period, from 1960 to 1983, but he was implicated in a massive 189 altogether. All his
victims were female—but we’ll return to that issue later. For now his case is particularly salutary in illustrating how a toxic mix of biological and social factors can conspire to create a serial killer.
⁶

That mix of biological and
social deprivation created a surprisingly efficient killing machine, given the disadvantages Lucas was dealt in life. On the biological side there are three very important risk factors for violence that have been highlighted in previous chapters—head injury, poor nutrition, and genetic heritage from his antisocial parents. These are abetted by a host of social risk factors, including abuse, neglect, humiliation,
maternal rejection, abject poverty, overcrowding, being in a bad
neighborhood, induction into
alcoholism, and complete absence of care and sense of belonging. It was this bitter brew—this very cruel concoction—that turned Lucas into an alcoholic killer.

Lucas’s case, while extreme, is not exactly unusual. We’ll review in this chapter the scientific evidence showing that when even mild social and biological risk factors coalesce, we can especially expect later trouble. So far we have been identifying the biological factors that go to make up the anatomy of violence. But these are just the bare bones. This chapter aims to flesh out the skeleton by outlining research showing how social factors combine—or interact—with biological risk factors to shape the violent offender.

Criminals like Lucas are a biosocial jigsaw puzzle, consisting of many different and scattered pieces. Even after identification of the biological pieces, it is a challenge to understand how they fit together with the social and psychological processes that decades of prior research have tied to violence.

From this vantage point, we will first turn our attention to understanding how social risk factors come together with biological risk factors to create violence—how they interact in a multiplicative fashion. I’ll then show you how the social environment moderates—or changes—the way that biological factors work. I call this the
“social-push” hypothesis. We’ll see how genes shape the brain to promote violent behavior and yet, at the same time, how the social environment beats up the brain and reshapes gene expression. Finally, we’ll piece together the parts of the brain that we have implicated so far and map out more precisely how they collectively give rise to violence.

Henry Lucas was ten when he allegedly became addicted to
alcohol. I was eleven when I became addicted to making it. I made wine out of anything I could lay my hands on—potatoes, strawberries, raspberries. Like Lucas I was a scavenger. I even made wine from the blossoms of our goldenrod plant. I bootlegged my brew to visitors and relatives. I used the profits to back horses, running the bet—supposedly from my mother—down to the corner shop, whose owner was a bookie. At fourteen I turned to making lager and I was pretty good at it, except I made the alcohol content too high and people got drunk too quickly, cutting my sales.

When I later began to study adolescent
antisocial behavior instead of practicing it, what stayed with me from that extensive experience in brewing was a simple lesson: it takes a complex mix of factors to create the end product. You think of wine and you think of grapes, but of course it is much more. The fermentation of the yeast in the sun with a little bit of sugar. Squishing the fruit to make the must. Adding potassium metabisulfite to kill bacteria and wild yeast. Getting the fermentation process going. Having the acid level just right. Using a hydrometer to measure the specific gravity of the liquid to ensure that there is enough sugar for the yeast to convert it into carbon dioxide and alcohol. There’s the racking of the wine by siphoning it off the sedimentary lees at the bottom of the gallon demijohn. Most important, it’s not just the mix of ingredients but the right
environment
. You need precisely the right temperature for the yeast and fermentation process.