The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience (13 page)

The irony of his latter statement was completely lost on Shock Richie.

The cop proceeded to point out a dirt road just up the way where Richie could pull over and take a piss. It was fascinating that Richie could remain calm enough not to set off any alarm bells for the cop that something was amiss. After all, Richie had a body decomposing in the trunk of the car. Yet apparently, Richie showed no anxiety in front of the cop. Most psychopaths like Richie lack anxiety and apprehension associated with punishment.

Richie turned up the dirt road the cop pointed out to him and drove in a ways. He pulled over, parked, and removed the body from the trunk.

“I had all these great plans to carry the body miles into the woods
and bury it really deep so nobody would ever find it. But it’s fucking hard to carry a body. You ever tried to carry a body?” he asked.

“No, I don’t have any experience carrying dead bodies,” I told him.

“Well, it’s a lot of work, let me tell you. So I only got about a hundred yards off the road and just into the trees before I was exhausted. Then I went back and got the shovel from the car. I started digging a huge hole.”

He looked up at me with those empty eyes and asked: “You know how hard it is to dig a hole big enough to bury a body?”

“No,” I answered, “I don’t have any experience digging holes to bury bodies.”

“Well, it’s harder than you might think.” He continued, “So I took a break from digging and noticed that my girl had rolled out of the blanket and her ass was sticking up a bit. So I went over and fucked her.”

He got me. And he knew it.

“Surprised ya with that one, didn’t I? Told ya.” He was proud of himself.

As my stomach turned, I managed to utter a reply: “Yes, you got me with that one.”

“She was still warm, ya know, and I just got horny. What’s a guy gonna do? She was always a nice piece of ass.

“So I finished up there a bit and thought maybe I should burn the body and the evidence, but in the end I decided to just cover her in dirt.

“Ah.” He starts laughing. “I had all these great plans to carry her miles into the woods and dig this monster hole so nobody would ever find her.”

A couple weeks later, a couple of hikers discovered the body. Shock Richie read about it in the newspapers, but he was never charged with the murder.

I thought back to my first day in prison, reading the inmates’ crimes written above their history binders in the nurses’ station. So there
was
a difference between rape/murder and murder/rape. Part of me still wished I didn’t know.

Richie admitted that he had no need for friends. He’d really
never been close to anyone in his life. He preferred to do everything on his own. He also didn’t trust anyone. I believed him. Richie had no friends in prison, he had no visitors, and all the other inmates said he could not be trusted and he knew not to trust them in return.

He had lived a life supported by crime, never had any vocational training, and never made even a passing attempt at any other lifestyle. He made most of his big scores by taking down rival drug pushers. He would set up deals in different towns and then rob and sometimes kill the other person. Richie had no fear or hesitation with killing. Richie also had more than a dozen fake names and accompanying identification.

For a long time he was a pimp. He used to corral runaways into working for him. He would get them hooked on drugs and then make them work the streets. He’d killed more than a few prostitutes. He saw people as objects, things to be manipulated; we were there just for his entertainment.

When Richie had been released the last time from prison, he was taken in by his older brother. His older brother was not a criminal. He was on the straight and narrow. After a few months of Richie bringing home prostitutes and doing drug deals at the house, his brother had told Richie he had to stop or he was going to kick him out. They argued, but Richie never tried to change his behavior. Finally, his brother had had enough. He picked up the phone to call the police to have him arrested for drug possession. “I was high,” said Richie, “but not more than usual. I got the jump on him and beat him with the phone. While he was lying there dazed on the floor, I ran into the kitchen and grabbed a knife. I came back and stabbed him a few times.” He looked up at me intently to see if I was shocked.

“Continue,” I said.

“I figured that I would make it look like somebody had come over and killed him as part of a drug deal gone bad. Then I thought that maybe I should make it look like my brother had raped one of my girls and one of them had stabbed him.” By girls he meant the prostitutes in his “stable.”

After killing his brother, he went out and partied for a day or two. Then he came back home with a prostitute whom he planned
to stab, and then put the weapon in the hand of his dead brother. He was going to put them both in the basement and make it look like his brother died quickly during the fight and the girl died slowly from stab wounds.

While he was having sex with the prostitute in the living room, she said she smelled something funny.

“You ever smell a body after it’s been decomposing for a couple days?” he asked.

“No,” I replied, “I don’t have any experience smelling decomposing bodies.”

“Well, they stink. I recommend getting rid of them fast.”

After having sex, he intended to lure the girl down into the basement. But the prostitute excused herself to use the bathroom and she jumped out the window and ran away. Later that evening the police showed up at his door and asked to come inside. Apparently, the prostitute recognized that odd smell to be that of a decomposing body. She had good survival instincts.

Richie told the cops he had been away from the house partying for a few days. He didn’t know that his brother had been killed. Confessing to being a pimp and drug dealer, Richie told the officers that he owed a lot of people a lot of money. He gave them a list of a dozen or so names of potential suspects.

The police eventually arrested Richie. Through his attorney, Richie received a plea deal. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to seven years in prison. He’d served six and was scheduled for release when he completed the treatment program.

Richie had a few more zingers he hit me with that day. He had indeed met my challenge. When I got home that evening, I opened a bottle of wine; it was empty before I knew it.

By the end of the following week, I had completed interviews of most of the new inmates and scheduled them for EEG studies. Shock Richie was the first on my list. I had to know what his brain waves looked like.

First, a bit of background on brain wave activity. Neurons in the brain act like millions of little batteries. The electrical field that these batteries generate can be recorded from the surface of the head using sensors called
electrodes
. Brain wave activity is known as the electroencephalogram, or EEG. It is common for EEG to be used to evaluate and screen for clinical disorders, from detecting electrical seizure activity in epilepsy to identifying abnormal EEG rhythms that characterize sleep disorders.

EEG can also be recorded and analyzed on a computer to yield details about how the brain processes information. One technique examines how certain stimuli, like words or pictures, are processed in the brain. Scientists present these words or pictures on a computer screen to research participants while their EEGs are recorded. Using a computer algorithm, scientists average the second or so of brain activity following the presentation of each class of pictures or words. This so-called event-related potential (ERP; pronounced “erp,” as in Wyatt Earp) describes the brain waves associated with processing types of stimuli. Scientists who publish ERPs are affectionately called
ERPers
. In graduate school, my classmates nicknamed those of us who did this work in prisons “the ERPer mafia.”

ERPs are typically about one second long. Scientists generally break ERPs into early, middle, and late components. Early components, the first 200 milliseconds or so, typically reflect sensory processing and attentional demands. Big early components mean either the word or picture grabbed the attention of the person or the person was focusing hard to study the word or picture. Middle components happen between 200 and 500 milliseconds after the onset of a stimulus and reflect working memory, contextual updating, and motor processes associated with generating a response to the stimulus. The more memory is engaged, typically, the bigger the middle components. Finally, the late components are considered to last from 500 to 1,000 milliseconds and reflect evaluative processes in the brain. If you really ruminate on something, it often leads to a bigger late component.

The various peaks and troughs of the ERP are labeled by their ordinal position and polarity. The first negative peak is called the
N1
, the third positive peak is called the
P3
. Positive and negative deflections are equally meaningful. If the little battery (collection of neurons) is facing up, you get a positive wave, if the battery is facing down, you get a negative wave on the scalp.

I got my start using ERPs in a rather interesting way. I helped in a study using ERPs to evaluate the hearing range of killer whales. Back at UC Davis I had attended a lecture by a graduate student, Michael Szymanski, who was developing a mobile ERP system to record the brain wave activity of killer whales at the nearby Marine World Africa USA in Vallejo, California. Fascinated by Michael’s study, I volunteered to help him develop the mobile whale ERP system. I had four years of experience working at UC Davis Veterinary School’s Department of Anesthesia, recording and monitoring brain waves while animals were undergoing surgeries. Michael was happy to have the extra technical help, and we became lifelong friends.

We designed sensors that fit in three-inch suction cups that would stick to the killer whale’s head and record ERPs. Marine World animal trainers had taught the whales to hold a position at the side of the tank so we could place the suction cups on their heads. Whales don’t have a pinna or earlobe to orient to sounds. Instead, sound underwater is transduced through their jaw. So we played the sounds to the whales underwater with a special speaker, aptly called a
hydrophone
.

The study was quite a technical challenge to complete, but after two years of designing and redesigning, testing and more testing, we figured out how to record the killer whales’ brain responses to sounds. Our study capitalized on the fact that the brain automatically responds to sounds presented in frequencies it can detect. This so-called auditory brainstem response (ABR) is very fast, just seven milliseconds long, and represents the firing sequence of the first seven nuclei of the auditory track in the brain as sounds are detected. So if we saw an ABR, we knew the whale could hear the frequency of the sound. Conversely, if we didn’t see an ABR, then we knew the whale could not hear that sound frequency. The ABR technique is commonly used to detect developmental hearing problems
in children, to detect damages in hearing following head injury, or to assess hearing loss after too many loud rock music concerts.

We found that killer whales can hear frequencies that are ten times higher than those humans can hear. Killer whales can also hear frequencies much lower than humans. This work led to changes in how the US Navy conducted ocean experiments. The navy’s studies were modified so that the noise envelope produced by their experiments would not interfere with the optimal hearing frequencies of killer whales. The brain waves from Yaka and Vigga, the two killer whales at Marine World, were published in a prestigious journal.
²
Twenty years later, they are still the largest animals from which brain waves have ever been recorded. Michael and I are very proud of the work we did and the conservation efforts that resulted to protect whale hearing and communication.

My initial training in killer whale ERPs also introduced me to many of the paradigms used to elicit robust brain waves in animals and in humans. My favorite task to ERP is also one of the simplest. It’s called the
Oddball Task
. In it, participants are presented with a series of different tones. Most of the tones are the same pitch, but occasionally a tone is presented at a higher pitch (the oddball or target tone). Participants have to press a button as quickly as possible when they hear that higher-pitched tone, but not press it for any other tone. Sometimes we also play a few funny, random tones, just to mix things up a bit. The latter tones examine the brain’s response to novelty.

The Oddball Task has been around for over fifty years. It turns out that the target tones elicit a very large and beautiful electrical brain response. The most prominent component of the target ERP is the P3 (the third positive peak following the onset of the target tone). The P3 is a very complex waveform; for years I attended an annual meeting where the only topic was what scientists thought this component meant. Since its discovery in 1965
³
there have been thousands of scientific papers published about the P3 component of the ERP.

Why is this interesting? The P3 component has a lot of clinical utility for researchers. Most forms of mental illness are associated with abnormalities in the P3. In schizophrenia, the P3 is reduced in
amplitude and delayed in latency, effects that are most prominent in sites over the left temporal lobe of the brain. In serious depression, the P3 is reduced in amplitude over the frontal lobes of the brain. So variations in the amplitude (height), latency (duration), and topography (shape) of the P3 can help to identify brain processes related to mental illnesses.

After all these scientific meetings and publications, do we know what the P3 means? The interpretation I favor is that the P3 is a probe for how the brain is functioning; when the P3 is distorted, it tells us something is wrong in the brain.

The brain tends to respond automatically, even reflexively, when processing those oddball or salient target stimuli. There is an automatic orienting process that occurs. It’s like the brain says, “Ahh, that’s an important stimulus. Let’s make sure we process it.” Let me give you my favorite example of what I mean here.