The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog (16 page)

“OK,” I said, trying to be respectful. But I could tell she had already made up her mind about me. It's no wonder that she was hostile, though. Our brains adapt to our environments, and this place wasn't likely to elicit kindness or trust.

 

THE INTERVIEW ROOM was small with a single metal table and two chairs. The floor was a tiled institutional gray with green speckles and the walls were painted cinderblock. Leon was brought in by two male guards. He looked small and childlike as he faced me, wearing an orange jumpsuit, his arms and legs shackled and chained to each other. He was thin and short for his age. He didn't look lethal. Sure, his stance was aggressive, and I could see that he already had jailhouse tattoos, his forearm branded with a crooked “X.” But the toughness came across as phony and artificial, like an undersized tomcat with his hair on end, trying to appear larger than he actually was. It was almost impossible to believe that this now eighteen-year-old boy/man had brutally murdered two people.

He'd seen his two young victims in an elevator in the high-rise building where he lived. Although it was only three or four in the afternoon, he'd already been drinking beer. He had crudely propositioned the teenagers. When the girls—not surprisingly—rejected him, he'd followed them into an apartment and, apparently after a physical confrontation, stabbed both of them to death with a table knife. Cherise was twelve and her friend Lucy was thirteen. Both were barely pubescent. The attack had happened so fast and Leon was so much larger than his victims that neither girl had been able to defend herself. He'd managed to quickly restrain Cherise with a belt. After that, while Lucy tried to
fight him off, he killed her and then, either to avoid leaving a witness, or still in a rage, slaughtered the bound girl as well. He then raped both bodies. His anger still not sated, he'd kicked and stomped them.

Though he had often been in trouble with the law, Leon's records didn't indicate that he was capable of anything like this level of violence. His parents were hard-working, married legal immigrants, solid citizens without criminal histories. His family had never been involved with child protective services; there was no history of abuse, nor foster care placements, nor any other obvious red flags for attachment problems. Yet all of his records suggested that he was a master at manipulating people around him and, more ominously, that he was completely devoid of emotional connection to others. He was often described as having little to no empathy: remorseless, callous, indifferent to most of the “consequences” set up in school or in juvenile justice programs.

Seeing him now, looking so small in his shackles in this terrible prison, I almost felt sorry for him. But then we began to talk.

“You the doctor?” he asked, looking me over, clearly disappointed.

“Yep.”>

“I told her I wanted a lady shrink,” he sneered. He pushed his chair away from the table and kicked it. I asked him whether he'd discussed my visit with his lawyer and understood its purpose.

He nodded, trying to act tough and indifferent, but I knew he had to be scared. He probably would never admit it or even understand it, but inside he was always on guard, always vigilant and always studying the people around him. Trying to work out who could help him and who could hurt him. What is this person's weak point, what does he want, what does he fear?

From the moment I came in I could see that he was studying me, too. Probing for weakness, seeking ways to manipulate me. He was smart enough to know the stereotype of the liberal, bleeding-heart shrink. He had successfully read his lead attorney. She felt sorry for him now; he had convinced her he was the one who'd been wronged. Those girls had
invited him into the apartment. They promised to have sex with him. Things got rough and it was an accident. He tripped over their bodies; that's how he got blood on his boots. He never intended to hurt them. And now he set out to persuade me, too, that he was a misunderstood victim of two teen vixens who had teased and tempted him.

“Tell me about yourself.” I started with open questions, trying to see where he would go.

“What do you mean? Is that some kind of shrink trick?” he asked, suspicious.

“No. I just figured you are the best person to tell me about you. I've read a whole lot of other people's opinions. Teachers, therapists, probation officers, the press. They all have opinions. So I want to know yours.”

“What do you want to know?”

“What do you want to tell me?” The dance continued. We circled around each other. It was a game I knew well. He was pretty good. But I was used to this.

“Well. Let's start with right now. What it is like living in prison?”

“It's boring. It's not so bad. Not too much to do.”

“Tell me your schedule.” And so it started. He slowly began to loosen up as he described the routines of the prison and his earlier experiences in the juvenile justice system. I let him talk and then after a few hours, we took a break so he could smoke a cigarette. When I came back, it was time to get to the point. “Tell me what happened with those girls.”

“It was no big deal really. I was just hanging out and these two girls came by. We started talking and they invited me up to their apartment to fool around. Then when they got me up there, they changed their minds. It pissed me off.” This was different from his original statement and from other accounts he'd given. It seemed that the more time that passed since the crime, the less violent he made the story. Each time he told it, he was less and less responsible for what had happened; he, rather than the girls, increasingly became the victim.

“It was an accident. I just wanted to scare them. Stupid bitches wouldn't shut up,” he went on. My stomach churned. Don't react. Be
still. If he senses how horrified and disgusted you feel, he won't be honest. He will edit. Stay calm. I nodded.

“They were loud?” I asked as neutrally as I could manage.

“Yes. I told them I wouldn't hurt them if they would just shut up.” He was giving me a short, sanitized version of the murders. He left out the rape. He left out how he'd brutally kicked the girls.

I asked whether their screams had enraged him, if that was why he'd kicked the bodies. The autopsy report showed that the thirteen-year-old had been kicked in the face and stomped on the neck and chest.

“Well, I didn't really kick them. I just tripped. I had been drinking some. So, you know,” he said, hoping I would fill in the blanks. He looked up to see if I had bought his lies. There was little emotion on his face or in his voice. He described the murders as if he were giving a geography report in school. The only trace of emotion was the disdain he expressed that his victims had “made him” kill them, furious with them for fighting back, for resisting.

His coldness was breathtaking. This was a predator, someone whose only concern for other people was what he could get from them, what he could make them do, and how they could serve his selfish ends. He could not even put on a compassionate performance for a shrink hired by his defense, someone looking for the smallest glimmer of goodness or promise in him.

It wasn't that he didn't know that he should try to appear remorseful. He simply wasn't capable of taking into account the feelings of others in any way other than to take advantage of them. He could not feel compassion for others, so he couldn't fake it very well, either. Leon was not unintelligent. In fact, his IQ was significantly above average in some ways. However, it was uneven. While his verbal IQ was in the low to normal range, his performance score, which measures things like the ability to properly sequence a series of pictures and manipulate objects in space, was quite high. He scored especially well in his ability to read social situations and understand other people's intentions. This split between verbal and performance scores is often seen in abused or
traumatized children and can indicate that the developmental needs of certain brain regions, particularly those cortical areas involved in modulating the lower, more reactive regions have been not been met. In the general population about 5 percent of people show this pattern, but in prisons and juvenile treatment centers that proportion rises to over 35 percent. It reflects the use-dependent development of the brain: with more developmental chaos and threat the brain's stress response systems and those areas of the brain responsible for reading threat-related social cues will grow, while less affection and nurturing will result in underdevelopment of the systems that code for compassion and self-control. These test results were the first clues that something had probably gone wrong in his early childhood.

I tried to figure out what might have happened from our interview, but didn't get very far. Most people don't remember much from the developmentally critical years of birth through kindergarten, anyway. There was evidence indicating he had been troubled from very early on, however. His records showed reports of aggressive behavior dating back to his preschool years. From our conversation I could also tell that he'd had few friends or lasting relationships with anyone outside his family. His charts showed a history of bullying and of petty crimes like shoplifting and other thefts, but he had never been to an adult prison before now. His run-ins with the law as an adolescent had mainly resulted in probation; he hadn't even spent much time in juvenile detention, despite having committed some serious assaults.

I did discover, however, that he'd committed, or been suspected of committing, several major offenses for which he had not been charged or convicted because there was not enough evidence to make the charges stick. For example, he'd once been found in possession of a stolen bicycle. The bike's teenage owner had been beaten so severely that he'd wound up in the hospital with life-threatening injuries. But there were no witnesses to the assault—or none that would come forward—so Leon was only charged with possession of stolen property. Over the course of several evaluation visits he eventually bragged about previous
sexual assaults to me, with the same cold disdain with which he'd discussed the murders.

Looking for any sign of remorse, I finally asked what should have been an easy question.

“Now that you look back on all this, what would you have done differently?” I said, expecting him to at least mouth some platitudes about controlling his anger, about not harming people.

He seemed to think for a minute, then responded, “I don't know. Maybe throw away those boots?”

“Throw away the boots?”

“Yeah. It was the boot prints and the blood on the boots that got me.”

 

MANY PSYCHIATRISTS WOULD have left the prison believing that Leon was the archetypal “bad seed,” a genetic freak of nature, a demonic child incapable of empathy. And there are genetic predispositions that appear to affect the brain's systems involved in empathy. My research, however, has led me to believe that behavior as extreme as Leon's is rare among people who have not suffered certain forms of early emotional and/or physical deprivation.

Furthermore, if Leon had the genetic makeup that increased the risk of sociopathic behavior—if such genes even exist—his family history should have revealed other relatives, such as a parent, a grandparent, maybe an uncle, with similar, even if less extreme, problems. Perhaps a history of multiple arrests, for example. But there was none. Also, Leon had been turned in to the police by his own brother, a brother who seemed to be everything that Leon was not.

Frank,* Leon's brother, like his parents and other relatives, was gain-fully employed. He was a successful plumber, married, a dutiful father of two who was respected in the community. The day of the crime, he'd come home to find Leon, still wearing his blood-encrusted boots, watching TV in his living room. On the news was an urgent bulletin about the recent discovery of the violated bodies of two young girls in Leon's building. Sneaking occasional glances at the boots, Frank waited until
Leon left, then called the police to report his suspicions about his brother's connection to the crime.

Siblings share at least 50 percent of their genes. While Frank could have been genetically blessed with a far greater capacity for empathy than Leon, it was unlikely that this alone accounted for their very different temperaments and life paths. Yet as far as I knew, Leon and Frank had shared the same home and parents, so Leon's environment didn't appear to be a likely culprit either. I would only discover what I now believe to be at the root of Leon's problems after I met with Frank and his parents, Maria* and Alan.* In our first meeting they were all in obvious distress over the situation.

 

 

MARIA WAS SMALL and conservatively dressed, wearing a cardigan buttoned all the way up. She sat erect, knees together, with both hands on the handbag in her lap. Alan wore dark green work clothes; his name was sewn into a white oval over his pocket. Frank was wearing a button-down, collared blue shirt and khaki pants. Maria looked sad and fragile, Alan seemed ashamed and Frank seemed angry. I greeted each of them with a handshake and tried to establish eye contact.

“I'm sorry we have to meet under these circumstances,” I said, carefully watching them. I wanted to see how they related to others, whether they showed an ability to empathize, whether there were any hints of pathological or odd behavior that might not have shown up in Leon's medical records and family history. But they responded appropriately. They were distressed, guilty, concerned, everything you would expect from family members who'd discovered that one of their own had committed an unspeakable crime.

“As you know, your son's attorney has asked me to evaluate him for the sentencing phase of the trial. I've met with Leon now twice. I wanted to spend some time with you to get a better understanding of how he was when he was younger.” The parents listened, but neither would look
me in the eye. Frank stared at me, however, defensive and protective of his parents. “We are all trying to understand why he did this,” I concluded. The parents looked at me and nodded; the father's eyes filled with tears. Their grief filled the room; Frank finally looked away from me, blinking back tears of his own.