The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect us from Violence (8 page)

Though we live in space-age times, we still have stone-age minds. We are competitive and territorial and violent, just like our simian ancestors. There are people who insist this isn’t so, who insist that they could never kill anyone, but they invariably add a telling caveat: “Unless, of course, a person tried to harm someone I love.” So the resource of violence is in everyone; all that changes is our view of the justification.

Studying and interviewing those who use violence to reach their goals, I long ago learned that I must find in them some part of myself, and, more disturbingly at times, find in myself some part of them. There must be a place to hook the line before I drop down into the dark mine of some dark mind; there must be something familiar to hold on to.

A man kills a cow with an ax, cuts open the carcass, and then climbs inside to see what it feels like; later he uses the ax to kill his eight-year-old stepbrother. Another man murders his parents by shooting out their eyes with a shotgun. We use the word
inhuman
to describe these murderers, but I know them both, and they are not inhuman—they are precisely human. I know many other people like them; I know their parents and the parents of their victims. Their violent acts were repugnant, to be sure, but not inhuman.

When a bank robber shoots a security guard, we all understand why, but with aberrant killers, people resist the concept of a shared humanness. That’s because
US
and
THEM
is far more comfortable. In my work I don’t have that luxury. The stakes of some predictions require that I intimately recognize and accept what I observe in others no matter who they are, no matter what they have done, no matter what they might do, no matter where it takes me in myself. There may be a time in your life when you too won’t have the luxury of saying you don’t recognize someone’s sinister intent. Your survival may depend on your recognizing it.

Though anthropologists have long focused on the distinctions between people, it is recognizing the sameness that allows us to most accurately predict violence. Of course, accepting someone’s humanness does not mean excusing his behavior. This lesson is probably starkest when you spend time with the world’s most violent and dangerous people, the ones you might call monsters, the ones who committed acts you might think you couldn’t have imagined. Many of them are locked up at Atascadero State Hospital in California. I founded and fund a program there called Patient Pets, which allows patients to care for small animals. Many of these men will be locked up for life without visitors, and a mouse or bird might be all they have.

I recall the way the patients reacted to the death of a particular guinea pig who had been one of the first pets in the program. When they noticed the old animal was sick, they wanted to find a way to keep her from dying, though most knew that wasn’t possible. The program’s coordinator, Jayne Middlebrook, sent me this report:

So, even in a gathering of aberrant murderers there is something of you and me. When we accept this, we are more likely to recognize the rapist who tries to con his way into our home, the child molester who applies to be a baby-sitter, the spousal killer at the office, the assassin in the crowd. When we accept that violence is committed by people who look and act like people, we silence the voice of denial, the voice that whispers, “This guy doesn’t look like a killer.”

Our judgment may classify a person as either harmless or sinister, but survival is better served by our perception. Judgment results in a label, like calling Robert Bardo a monster and leaving it at that. Such labels allow people to comfortably think it’s all figured out. The labels also draw a bold line between that “wacko” and us, but perception carries you much further.

Scientists, after all, do not observe a bird that destroys its own eggs and say, “Well, that never happens; this is just a monster.” Rather, they correctly conclude that if this bird did it, others might, and that there must be some purpose in nature, some cause, some predictability.

▪ ▪ ▪

People who commit terrible violences choose their acts from among many options. I don’t have to provide a list of horrors to demonstrate this—you can find the proof in your own mind. Imagine what you believe is the worst thing anyone might ever do to another human being; imagine something worse than anything you’ve ever seen in a movie, or read about or heard about. Imagine something
original
. Pause in your reading and conjure this awful thing.

Now, by virtue of the fact that you could conceive it, rest assured it has likely been done to someone, because everything that can be done by a human being to another human being has been done. Acts of extraordinary horror and violence happen, and we cannot learn why they happen by looking at rare behavior as if it is something outside ourselves. That idea you just conjured was in you, and thus it is part of us. To really work toward prediction and prevention, we must accept that these acts are done by people included in the “we” of humanity, not by interlopers who somehow sneaked in.

One evening a few years ago, legendary FBI behavioral scientist Robert Ressler, the man who coined the term “serial killer,” visited my home for dinner. (Ressler wrote the book
Whoever Fights Monsters
, the title of which comes from a Nietzsche quote I have often considered: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. For when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”) Having just read an advance copy of
The Silence of the Lambs
, I was discussing its fictional (I thought) character who killed young women to harvest their skin for a “woman suit.” Ressler matter-of-factly responded, “Oh, the Ed Gein case,” and he described the man who stole corpses from cemeteries, skinned them, and cured the skin in order to wear it. Ressler knew that nothing human is foreign. He had learned enough about so-called monsters to know that you don’t find them in gothic dungeons or humid forests. You find them at the mall, at the school, in the town or city with the rest of us.

But how do you find them before they victimize someone? With animals, it depends on perspective: The kitten is a monster to the bird, and the bird is a monster to the worm. With man, it is likewise a matter of perspective, but more complicated because the rapist might first be the charming stranger, the assassin first the admiring fan. The human predator, unlike the others, does not wear a costume so different from ours that he can always be recognized by the naked eye.

The blind eye, of course, will never recognize him, which is why I devote this chapter and the next to removing the blinders, to revealing the truths and the myths about the disguises someone might use to victimize you.

I’ll start with a hackneyed myth you’ll recognize from plenty of TV news reports: “Residents here describe the killer as a shy man who kept to himself. They say he was a quiet and cordial neighbor.”

Aren’t you tired of this? A more accurate and honest way for TV news to interpret the banal interviews they conduct with neighbors would be to report, “Neighbors didn’t know anything relevant.” Instead, news reporters present non information as if it is information. They might as well say (and sometimes do), “The tollbooth operator who’d taken his quarters for years described the killer as quiet and normal.” By the frequency of this cliché, you could almost believe that apparent normalcy is a pre-incident indicator for aberrant crime. It isn’t.

One thing that does predict violent criminality is violence in one’s childhood. For example, Ressler’s research confirmed an astonishingly consistent statistic about serial killers: 100 percent had been abused as children, either with violence, neglect, or humiliation.

You wouldn’t think so by the TV news reports on the early family life of one accused serial killer, Ted Kaczynski, believed to be the Unabomber. They told us that his mother was “a nice woman, well-liked by neighbors,” as if that has any bearing on anything. Neighbors usually have only one qualification for being in news reports: They are willing to speak to reporters. Don’t you think something more than the neighbors knew about might have gone on in that home when Ted and his brother, David, were children?

Just look at a few facts about the family: The Kaczynski’s raised two boys, both of whom dropped out of society as adults and lived anti-social, isolated lives. One of them lived for a time in a ditch he dug in the ground—and that was the
sane
one, David, who didn’t end up killing anybody. If prosecutors are right, then the “crazy” one, Ted, grew up to become a brutal remote-control serial killer. Yet neighbors tell reporters that they saw nothing unusual, and reporters tell us the family was normal, and the myth that violence comes out of nowhere is perpetuated.

I don’t mean here to indict all parents who raise violent children, for there are cases in which awful acts are committed by people with organic mental disorders, those the National Alliance of Mental Illness correctly terms “No-fault Diseases.” (It is also true that many people with mental illnesses were abused as children.) Genetic pre-dispositions may also play some role in violence, but whatever cards are dealt to a family, parents have at a minimum what Daniel Goleman, author of
Emotional Intelligence
calls “a window of opportunity.”

That window was slammed shut during the childhoods of most violent people. To understand who these mistreated children become, we must start where they started: as regular people. One of them grew up to rape Kelly and kill another woman, one of them murdered Rebecca Schaeffer, one of them killed a police officer just after Robert Thompson left that convenience store, and one of them wrote the book you are reading. Difficult childhoods excuse nothing, but they explain many things—just as your childhood does. Thinking about that introspectively is the best way to sharpen your ability to predict what others will do. Ask and answer why you do what you do.

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When assassin Robert Bardo told me he was treated at home like the family cat, fed and left in his room, it occurred to me to ask him to compare his childhood with his current life in prison.

Bardo: It’s the same in the sense that I’m always withdrawing within myself in my cell, just like back at home.

GdeB: Are there any differences between what you do here and what you did when you were a child?

Bardo: Well, I have to be more social here.

GdeB: Didn’t you have any requirement at home to be social?

Bardo: No, I learned that in prison.

As long as there are parents preparing children for little more than incarceration, we’ll have no trouble keeping our prisons full. While society foots the bill, it is individual victims of crime who pay the highest price.

In studying Bardo’s childhood of abuse and neglect, I could not ignore the similarity of some of our early experiences. I was also struck by the extraordinary intersection of our adult experiences, both drawn as we were to opposite sides of assassination.

The revelation reminded me of Stacey J., a would-be assassin I know well. For years, my office has prevented him from successfully encountering the client of mine with whom he is obsessed. I came to know his family through the many times I had to call and ask them to fly to Los Angeles and take him home, or the times they called our office to warn that Stacey was on his way to see my client, or that he had stolen a car, or was missing from a mental hospital. Once, I found him slumped in a phone booth, clothes torn, bleeding from a wound on each leg, wounds all over his face, and completely crazy from a week off medication. On the way to the emergency room, he described the origins of his interest in assassination: “When John Kennedy was killed, that’s when I knew; that’s when it all started.” Stacey and I had both been profoundly affected by the same event, each of us sitting at ten years old in front of a television at the exact same moment in time. In part because of what we saw back then, we now found ourselves together, one of us stalking a public figure, the other protecting a public figure.