The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (12 page)

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Authors: Jon Ronson

Tags: #Social Scientists & Psychologists, #Psychopathology, #Sociology, #Psychology, #Popular Culture.; Bisacsh, #Social Science, #Popular Culture, #Psychopaths, #General, #Mental Illness, #Biography & Autobiography, #Social Psychology, #History.; Bisacsh, #History

BOOK: The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
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During the years that followed Gary’s departure, Elliott Barker continued to win over fans from across the criminal-psychiatry community. Maybe he really had achieved something nobody had managed before: “For the first thirty years of Oak Ridge, no one charged with a capital offense was ever released from here,” he had told documentary maker Norm Perry. “But there is real hope now that patients are breaking out of their psychological prison of indifference to the feelings of others, a prison that to a greater or lesser extent confines us all. We are making people well again—people who killed or raped while mentally ill—we are making them well and able to be safe and useful members of society.”
Elliott’s best friends in the world were, he’d tell his neighbors, ex–Oak Ridge patients. His father had been a violent alcoholic who had beaten his family and committed suicide when Elliott was ten. I wondered whether that was why he’d dedicated his life to teaching psychopaths to be tender. And patients were indeed released from Oak Ridge. Elliott kept in touch with many, inviting them to stay at his farm in Midland, Ontario, where they played racquetball together and built fences and planted crops.
 
 
Back home in London, as I began to piece this story together, I was bowled over by Elliott’s accomplishments. I felt terribly sorry for Tony, trapped in Broadmoor. So many psychopathic murderers—fortunate to have been under Elliott and Gary’s radical tutelage—had been declared cured and freed. Why couldn’t Broadmoor adopt some of Elliott’s ideas? Of course they seemed hokey and dated and naive and perhaps overly reliant on hallucinogenics, but they were surely preferable to locking someone up forever because he happened to score badly on some personality checklist.
 
 
I learned that, fascinatingly, two researchers in the early 1990s had undertaken a detailed study of the long-term recidivism rates of psychopaths who had been through Elliott’s program and been let out into society. Its publication would surely have been an extraordinary moment for Elliott and Gary and the Capsule. In regular circumstances, 60 percent of criminal psychopaths released into the outside world go on to re-offend. What percentage of
their
psychopaths had?
As it turned out: 80 percent.
The Capsule had made the psychopaths
worse
.
 
One, Cecil Gilles, was declared cured and released after many intensive therapeutic months. Within days he had grabbed at random a fourteen-year-old girl, sexually assaulted her, and thrown her, unconscious, from a bridge into a creek. She managed to crawl to a nearby house and in through a window where she was found later that night lying on the kitchen floor. She survived but suffered severe scars from where her head had hit the bottom of the creek.
Another, Joseph Fredericks, was released from Oak Ridge in 1983 and within weeks attacked a teenage girl with a knife and sodomized a ten-year-old boy. He was released again a year later and attacked an eleven-year-old boy. After being released four years after that, he headed to a mall called Shoppers World, where he abducted and raped an eleven-year-old boy, Christopher Stephenson. The boy wrote a note to his parents:
“Dear Mom and Dad, I am writing you this note.”
And then the note stopped.
When the police caught Fredericks, he showed them the boy’s body and said, “He was such a nice boy. Why did he have to die?”
Matt Lamb—whom Gary had described as not one of Elliott’s “all-stars,” but almost—ended his days in less inauspicious circumstances. While whitewashing fences and pondering his future at Elliott’s ranch, he decided to become a soldier. The Israeli army turned him down because he was a psychopath. (“See?” Gary said. “They have standards.”) But the Rhodesian army welcomed him and he died in a shoot-out with supporters of Robert Mugabe.
 
Most discomforting for the program was what happened with the multiple-child-killer Peter Woodcock. This was the man Steve Smith had once been attached to. He was given his first-ever three-hour pass one summer’s day in 1991. His psychiatrists were unaware that he had secretly allotted ten minutes of it (3:10 p.m. to 3:20 p.m.) to kill a fellow psychiatric patient, Dennis Kerr, who had spurned his advances. He invited Kerr into the woods behind the hospital and chopped him one hundred times.
“I did it,” he explained during his trial, “to see what effect a hatchet would have on a body.” Kerr died as a result of “chopping injuries” to his head and neck.
Later, after Woodcock had been returned to Oak Ridge, he was interviewed by the BBC about the murder:
INTERVIEWER: What was going through your mind at the time? This was someone you loved.
WOODCOCK: Curiosity, actually. And an anger. Because he had rebuffed all my advances.
INTERVIEWER: And why did you feel someone should die as a result of your curiosity?
WOODCOCK: I just wanted to know what it would feel like to kill somebody.
INTERVIEWER: But you’d already killed three people. WOODCOCK: Yes, but that was years and years and years and years ago.
 
The interview’s most painful moment was when Woodcock admitted that Elliott and Gary’s program was kind of to blame, because it had taught him how to be a more devious psychopath. All those chats about empathy were like an empathy-faking finishing school for him:
“I did learn how to manipulate better,” he said, “and keep the more outrageous feelings under wraps better.”
 
 
The Oak Ridge program was over. Elliott Barker, crushed by the weight of evidence against his life’s work, became a director of the Canadian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, specializing in counseling the children of psychopaths.
“I have certainly always felt that Elliott’s heart was in the right place,” e-mailed a former colleague, who didn’t want to be named and who works at Oak Ridge today. “He’s been the subject of much criticism, of course, for his idea and methods and frequently has had malpractice suits against him. Yes, you guessed right, psychopaths from the program looking to make a lot of money. But Bob Hare and us have always agreed that psychopaths are born that way and not created by controlling mummies and weak fathers.”
“That’s lucky,” I e-mailed back, “as I am a weak father and my wife is a controlling mummy.”
4.
 
THE PSYCHOPATH TEST
 
T
hey had psychopaths
naked
and talking about their
feelings
!” Bob Hare laughed. “They had psychopaths on
beanbags
! They had psychopaths acting as
therapists
to their fellow psychopaths!”
He shook his head at the idealism of it all.
“Incredible,” he said.
 
 
It was an August evening and I was drinking with Bob Hare in a hotel bar in rural Pembrokeshire, West Wales. He was a quite feral-looking man with yellow-white hair and red eyes, as if he’d spent his life in battle, battling psychopaths, the very forces of evil. It was exciting to finally meet him. While names like Elliott Barker and Gary Maier had all but faded away, surviving only in obscure reports detailing crazily idealistic psychiatric endeavors from days long gone, Hare is influential. Justice departments and parole boards all over the world have accepted his contention that psychopaths are quite simply incurable and everyone should concentrate their energies instead on learning how to root them out using his PCL-R Checklist, which he has spent a lifetime refining. His was not the only psychopath checklist around, but it was by far the most extensively used. It was the one used to diagnose Tony at Broadmoor and get him locked up for the past twelve years.
 
 
Bob Hare saw the Oak Ridge program as yet more evidence of psychopaths’ untrustworthiness. Try to teach them empathy and they’ll cunningly use it as an empathy-faking training exercise for their own malicious ends. Indeed, every observer who has studied the Oak Ridge program has come to that same conclusion. Everyone, that is, except Gary Maier.
“Yeah,” Gary had told me, “I guess we had inadvertently created a finishing school for them. There had always been that worry. But they were doing well in the program. . . .”
They were doing well and then, suddenly, he got fired.
“When they saw their leader be trashed like that, I think it empowered them,” Gary said. “There was like a ‘This is bullshit!’ And we got a rebound.”
Some of the psychopaths, Gary believed, went off and killed to teach the authorities a lesson—that’s what happens when you fire a man as inspiring as Gary Maier.
He sounded mournful, defensive, and utterly convinced of himself when he told me this, and I suddenly understood what a mutually passionate and sometimes dysfunctional bubble the relationship between therapist and client can be.
 
I had e-mailed Bob Hare to ask if he’d meet me and he’d replied that he’d be teaching his checklist to a group of psychiatrists and brain imagers and care workers and psychologists and prison officers and budding criminal profilers on a three-day residential course, and if I was willing to pay the £600 registration fee, I was welcome to join them, although a copy of the thirty-page checklist wasn’t included in the price. That would cost an extra £361.31. I negotiated his office down to £400 (media discount) and we were all set.
This was the Monday evening before the first day and the attendees were milling around. Some, clearly impressed to be in the same room as Bob Hare, approached him for his autograph. Others looked skeptical from a distance. One care worker had told me earlier that she’d been sent by her employers and she wasn’t happy about it. Surely it was unfair to doom a person to a lifetime of a horrifying-sounding psychopathy diagnosis (“It’s a
huge
label,” she said) just because they didn’t do well on the Hare Checklist. At least in the old days it was quite simple. If someone was a persistent violent offender who lacked impulse controls, they were a psychopath. But the Hare Checklist was much wilier. It was all to do with reading between the lines of a person’s turn of phrase, a person’s sentence construction. This was, she said, amateur-sleuth territory.
I told Bob about her skepticism and I said I shared it to an extent, but that was possibly because I’d been spending a lot of time lately with Scientologists.

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