The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (14 page)

Read The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry Online

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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“No,” he replied. “Just schoolyard shenanigans.”
These were critical questions, Bob later explained, because the answers might inform Item 12 of his checklist:
Early Behavior Problems
. Almost all psychopaths display serious behavior problems as a child, Bob said, starting around age ten to twelve, like persistent bullying, vandalism, substance abuse, arson.
“I had a couple of incidences of fisticuffs,” said Case Study H. “Well, one time I broke this kid’s arm. It was really distasteful. I was holding him down and I put excessive pressure on his arm and it just snapped. It was not something I wanted to happen.”
There was, we noted in our assessment sheets, something weirdly disconnected about his description of the event:
“I put excessive pressure on his arm and it just snapped.”
It was like he couldn’t properly place himself there.
Item 7: Shallow Affect—An individual who seems unable to experience a normal range and depth of emotions.
Item 8: Callous/Lack of Empathy.
Item 10: Poor Behavioral Controls.
I remembered a time I perforated my eardrum on a plane and for days afterward everything around me seemed faraway and hazy and impossible to connect to. Was that foggy sensation a psychopath’s continual emotional state?
“One of my old buds from the FBI was investigating this woman, Karla Homolka,” Bob had told me earlier. “She and her husband had videotaped themselves torturing and raping and murdering these young women. The police were taking her through the house where they’d cut up the bodies, carved them up, and Karla was saying, ‘My sister would like that rug . . .’ They took her into the bathroom and Karla was saying, ‘Can I ask you something? I had a bottle of perfume here . . .’ Totally disconnected. It was stunning.”
Bob said it’s always a nice surprise when a psychopath speaks openly about their inability to feel emotions. Most of them pretend to feel. When they see us non-psychopaths crying or scared or moved by human suffering, or whatever, they think it’s fascinating. They study us and learn how to ape us, like space creatures trying to blend in, but if we keep our eyes open, we can spot the fakery.
“What happened to Karla Homolka in the end?” I asked him.
“She’s out now,” he said. “They believed her little-girl act. Hair in braids. All sweet and lovely. Very convincing. She blamed it all on her husband. She did a plea bargain. They gave her twelve years.”
Item 5: Conning/Manipulative.
Item 4: Pathological Lying—An individual for whom lying is a characteristic part of interactions with others.
 
 
 
Case Study H’s video testimony continued. Around the time he broke the kid’s arm he locked his stepmother in a closet—revenge for her trying to discipline his brother.
Item 14: Impulsivity.
“She was in the closet for nearly twelve hours. And then my father came home. He let her out. It was pathetic. She just sobbed.”
One time, Bob said, one of his researchers interviewed a bank robber who told him how a cashier had soiled herself from fear as he pointed his gun at her.
“It was pathetic,” the bank robber had told Bob’s researcher, “seeing her soil herself like that.”
 
 
I glanced at one or two of my fellow skeptics in the crowd. We were looking a bit less skeptical now. We took notes.
Item
6
,
I wrote on my pad.
Lack of Remorse or Guilt.
“How did it feel to lock your stepmother in a closet?” the interviewer asked Case Study H.
“It felt invigorating,” he replied. “It felt good. I had some power. I was in
control
.”
Item 2: Grandiose Sense of Self-Worth.
“I became the night clerk at a local place,” he continued. “If people came in drinking, swinging around, if they wouldn’t respond to politeness, well, then I would get physical with them. I beat a couple of people pretty bad.”
“How did you feel about that?” the interviewer asked.
“I didn’t really have any feelings about it,” he replied.
We attendees glanced excitedly at each other and scribbled notes. I began thinking about the people I knew who didn’t have as many feelings as they ought to have.
“Ever injure anyone badly enough to get them into hospital?” the interviewer asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “I didn’t care. It wasn’t my problem. I won the fight. No room for second place.”
I was good at this, good at reading between the lines, at spotting the clues, the needles in the haystack. It’s what I’ve been doing for twenty years as a journalist.
Case Study H reminded me of a blind man whose other senses had become enhanced to compensate. His enhanced qualities, compensating for the lack of guilt and fear and remorse, included the ability to skillfully manipulate—“I was able to manipulate those people that were close to me, for drugs, for money, using my friends, the more I know about them the better I am at knowing what buttons to push,” he told Bob’s researcher (
Item 9: Parasitic Lifestyle
)—and also an aptitude for not feeling bad about his crimes afterward.
“It was a business.” He shrugged, recounting one robbery he committed. “They had insurance.”
Psychopaths, Bob said, will invariably argue that their victims had no right to complain. They had insurance. Or they learned a valuable life lesson getting beaten up like that. Or it was their own fault anyway. One time Bob interviewed a man who had impulsively killed another man over a bar tab.
“He only had himself to blame,” the killer told Bob. “Anybody could have seen I was in a rotten mood that night.”
Item 16: Failure to Accept Responsibility for Own Actions.
 
 
All this was building toward the moment Case Study H would detail his most awful crime. His recounting of it began quite vaguely. I didn’t quite know what he was talking about at first. There was a kid he knew. The kid hated his parents. It was a real weakness of the kid’s. Case Study H thought he could get something out of this hatred. Maybe he could provoke the kid into robbing them and then they could share the money. So he started needling the kid. All his troubles were the fault of his parents. Case Study H really knew which buttons to push to rile a boy who was already on the edge.
“The more he told me about himself, the more leverage I had for manipulation,” he told Bob’s researcher. “I just kept fueling the fire; the more fuel I added to the fire, the bigger payoff for me. I was the puppet master pulling the strings.”
Eventually the kid became wound so tight he got a baseball bat, jumped into his car, with Case Study H in tow, and drove to his parents’ house. When they arrived, “I sort of gave him that mocking look,” Case Study H said. “‘Show me.’ And he showed me. He went into the master bedroom equipped with a baseball bat and I sort of shrugged it off. And then the beatings started. It was endless. It seemed to last an eternity. He came back into the hall brandishing a baseball bat covered in blood. I came face-to-face with one of the victims. He didn’t look real. He just didn’t look real. He was looking right at me. It was just a vacant expression. There were three people in the house. One person died. The other two were severely injured.”
This was what happened when a psychopath got control of the emotions of a troubled, thuggish kid.
Bob’s researcher asked him if he could go back in time and change things from his life, what would he change?
“I have often pondered that,” Case Study H replied. “But then all that I have learned would be lost.” He paused. “The hotter the fire when forging a sword, the tighter the bond on the blade,” he said.
“Is there anything else you want to say?” said Bob’s researcher.
“No,” he replied. “That’s it.”
“Okay, thanks,” said Bob’s researcher.
The video ended. We broke for lunch.
 
 
And so passed the three days. And as they did, my skepticism drained away entirely and I became a Bob Hare devotee, bowled over by his discoveries. I think the other skeptics felt the same. He was very convincing. I was attaining a new power, like a secret weapon, the kind of power that heroes of TV dramas about brilliant criminal profilers display—the power to identify a psychopath merely by spotting certain turns of phrase, certain sentence constructions, certain ways of being. I felt like a different person, a hardliner, not confused or out of my depth as I had been when I’d been hanging around with Tony and the Scientologists. Instead I was contemptuous of those naive people who allowed themselves to be taken in by slick-tongued psychopaths, contemptuous of, for instance, Norman Mailer.
 
 
In 1977, Mailer—who was working on
The Executioner’s Song,
about the recently executed convicted murderer Gary Gilmore—began corresponding with a tough Utah prisoner, a bank robber and murderer named Jack Henry Abbott. Mailer came to admire Abbott’s writing, and then to champion him when he was up for parole in 1981. “I love Jack Abbott for surviving and for having learned to write as well as he does,” Mailer wrote the Utah Board of Corrections.
“Mr. Abbott has the makings of a powerful and important American writer,” Mailer went on, promising that if the board paroled Abbott he’d give him a job as a researcher for $150 a week. Surprised, and somewhat dazzled, the Board of Corrections agreed. Jack Abbott was free. And he headed straight for literary New York.
 
 
This was no surprise. New York City was where his champions were. But even so, Bob said, psychopaths tend to gravitate toward the bright lights. You’ll find lots of them in New York and London and Los Angeles. The psychologist David Cooke, of the Glasgow Centre for the Study of Violence, was once asked in Parliament if psychopaths caused particular problems in Scottish prisons.
“Not really,” he replied. “They’re all in London prisons.”
It wasn’t, he told them, a throwaway line. He had spent months assessing Scottish-born prisoners for psychopathy, and the majority of those who scored high were in London, having committed their crimes there. Psychopaths get bored easily. They need excitement. They migrate to the big cities.
Item 3: Need for Stimulation/Proneness to Boredom.
They also tend to suffer from self-delusions about their long-term prospects. They think if they move to London or New York or L.A., they’ll make it big, as a movie star, or a great athlete, or whatever. One time one of Bob’s researchers asked a grossly overweight prison psychopath what he hoped to do when he got out, and he replied that he planned to be a professional gymnast.
Item 13: Lack of Realistic Long-Term Goals.
(Unless the guy had been joking, of course.)
Jack Abbott thought he’d be the toast of literary New York. And, as it turned out, he was. He and Mailer appeared together on
Good Morning America
. He was photographed by the great New York portraitist, and wife of Kurt Vonnegut, Jill Krementz.
The New York Times
expressed gratitude to Mailer for helping get Abbott out on parole. He signed with the powerhouse agent Scott Meredith and was guest of honor at a celebratory dinner at a Greenwich Village restaurant, where Mailer, the editorial directors of Random House, Scott Meredith, and others toasted him with champagne.
And then, six weeks after getting out of prison, at 5:30 a.m. on July 18, 1981, Abbott stopped at a twenty-four-hour Manhattan restaurant, the Binibon. He had with him (according to reports the next day) two “attractive, well-educated young women he had met at a party.”
Item 11: Promiscuous Sexual Behavior.
Although, in fairness, Item 11 may not have applied to that threesome. It is impossible to know if they all were intending to have sex. Because everything was about to be altered. Everything was about to get worse.
Behind the counter at the Binibon was a twenty-two-year-old aspiring actor named Richard Adan. Abbott asked to use the toilet. Adan said it was for employees only. Abbott said, “Let’s go outside and settle this like men,” and so they did, and Abbott got out a knife and stabbed Richard Adan to death. Then he walked away, vanishing into the night.
 
 
“What happened?” Scott Meredith said to
The New York Times
. “Every conversation I had with Jack we talked about the future. Everything was ahead of him.”
What happened, Bob explained to us now, although we didn’t need telling, was that Jack Abbott was a psychopath. He couldn’t bear being disrespected. His self-worth was too grandiose for that. He couldn’t control his impulses.
“When the police finally caught up with him, you know what he told them about the guy he stabbed?” Bob said. “He said, ‘Oh, but he would never have made it as an actor.’ ”
 
 
“These motherfucking psychologists and psychiatrists are going to tell the administration and the police what you are going to do next. Even Jesus Christ could not predict what the fuck his apostles were going to do.”

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