The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience (18 page)

For example, if the inmate receives a high-risk score, the parole board may recommend that he starts with day parole rather than full parole. Day parole would mean that the inmate was in a secure facility at night but was allowed to go out during the day. In this way the inmate was slowly reintegrated into society, and he was gradually allowed more privileges. These management plans essentially tried to minimize the risk variables and increase the mediating variables to promote a safer society. In my opinion it’s good practice for everyone, including and especially the inmate.

When I conducted risk assessments, I would always ask the inmates if they wanted to return to prison. “No” was the ubiquitous answer. I would tell them that this interview was designed to figure out how to reduce the chances that they will get in trouble again after they are released. Many of the inmates enjoyed learning about what variables promote risk and what variables help avoid the risk to reoffend.

Although it was not originally designed for this purpose, scores on the Psychopathy Checklist uncannily predict which inmates will commit new crimes and which inmates won’t. Indeed, inmates who score high on the Psychopathy Checklist are four to eight times as likely to recidivate than inmates with low scores. Inmates who get
low Psychopathy Checklist scores love the test; inmates who get high scores don’t like it so much.

One day while I was interviewing an inmate, another inmate came down and started knocking loudly on my door. Through the window in the door we could see who was pounding on my door. The inmate in my office volunteered to come back later and finish up the interview. He didn’t want to get in the way of the inmate at the door. I agreed.

The inmate at the door was a very high-scoring psychopath named “Martin.” Martin got in a lot of trouble at the prison, and he had a bad reputation. I opened the door to let the other inmate out and let Martin in.

Martin paced around the office, clearly agitated, and then sat down and tossed a piece of paper onto my desk. I retreated to the other side of the desk, picked up the piece of paper, and sat down.

“What can I do for you, Martin?” I asked.

“You can tell me what the fuck that Psychopathy Checklist score means? I just got my risk assessment done and the doc told me I was a psychopath. He said it meant that I was very high risk to reoffend. I’m no Hannibal Lecter,” he said.

I looked down at the photocopy of the Psychopathy Checklist score sheet. Martin had scored a 37. I had scored Martin a bit higher than that during his research interview—a 39—but when you are in the 99th percentile, as scores of 37 and 39 out of 40 represent, it doesn’t make too much of a difference that I had scored him in the 99.8th percentile versus the 99.5th.

“I can tell you about the Psychopathy Checklist. We use this test and many others in our research.”

“Good. What the fuck is this stuff about, this
Lacks Empathy, Lacks Remorse
, shit.” He was so angry he was spitting saliva as he spoke.

“You remember when you told me about your victims?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“You told me that you would do it again?” Martin had raped several women very brutally.

“Sure. Whatever. Those bitches deserved it. What’s your point?”

I paused, waiting to see if Martin would clue in to the lack of empathy expressed in his last sentence. He didn’t.

“Well, your attitude and inability to understand the impact of what you did to those women contributes to your score on
Lacks Empathy and Remorse
.”

“Oh. Well, that sucks” was his reply.

“Remember when you told me that you screwed your boss out of that deal and when you extorted money from your parents?”

The light was beginning to shine for Martin.

“Fuck. That’s all that score means?” he said.

“Yes,” I answered honestly.

“And these other items, what do they mean?” he asked.

I explained some of the other items to Martin.

He just nodded. The Psychopathy Checklist items fit him in all respects. In all aspects of his life, Martin was a classic psychopath.

“Christ. That’s all those scores mean,” he said, smiling now.

“Yes, that’s it,” I replied again.

“Well, this psychopath thing really sucks; I don’t want to be called a psychopath.”

I just looked back at him with my best poker face.

Then Martin scooted forward to the end of his chair, grabbed a pen off my desk, and turned his photocopy of the Psychopathy Checklist score sheet around and started to scribble. He crossed out the word
Psychopathy
from the top of the page and then wrote in big block letters SUPERMAN. He turned to show me his creative work and then said: “I’m no psychopath. That’s the wrong term for me. I’m renaming this the
Superman Checklist
. And now I’m Superman.”

My poker face broke with a smile. I might have to elevate Martin’s score on Psychopathy Checklist Item 1—
Glibness and Superficial Charm
.

Martin stormed out of my office and for the next several days he showed everyone his score on the
Superman Checklist
. Martin told his roommate that he had to call him Superman or he would beat him up.

Prison is never boring.

The day of my University Defense arrived. I dressed in my only suit, and I went over my slides one more time just to make sure my presentation was ready. The auditorium was packed with about two hundred members of the scientific community. Apparently, a thesis defense on psychopaths was interesting to a large number of people.

I gave a thirty-minute presentation and gratefully received the audience’s applause before the questions began. I took my time answering questions, and I kept my answers brief. My defense lasted only about an hour. My committee then asked me to step outside while they pondered the pass/fail verdict.

The door opened a few minutes later, and my graduate school mentor, Dr. Robert Hare, extended his hand to me and said, “
Dr
. Kiehl, would you like to come back in the room?” I’d passed!

I now possessed a doctorate of philosophy, or PhD, in psychology and neuroscience from the University of British Columbia. The crowd applauded as I returned to the room and I thanked them for coming.

My committee nominated, and the university president agreed, that my dissertation be noted for “Distinction,” the highest university honor, bestowed upon only a select few dissertations.

I returned to Dr. Liddle’s laboratory as a
postdoctoral fellow
.

Not long after I received my degree, Dr. Hare retired from the university but he remained a very active researcher. I would be his only student to publish brain wave and brain imaging studies on psychopaths.

Just three months into my postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Liddle, he called me into his office for an urgent meeting. He explained that for family reasons he and his wife were moving their family back to England. I was a bit shocked. I had signed on to work with him for three years.

I realized that I had to start looking for a new job. And I also knew that my time working in Canadian maximum security was coming to a close.

I returned to my comfort zone—prison—to continue working on brain wave studies using a new EEG system we had just built. This EEG system had sixty-four channels, more than eight times my previous system. The extra channels allowed me to cover the entire head during a recording session rather than the sparse sampling of the eight-channel system I had started off with.

I also updated my curriculum vitae and sent it out to all the academic jobs around the world that might fit my background. To keep myself from worrying about where life would take me, I kept my head buried in my prison research. I had returned to my schedule of arriving at the prison before dawn and working through a lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

One dark, rainy Wednesday, I left prison at 5 p.m. so that I could head to the university MRI to work with Dr. Mackay and his group for one of our evening research sessions. His graduate students had asked if I would let them scan my brain that night.

The windshield wipers on my little Toyota truck had worn out, and I was having trouble seeing the highway through the pouring rain. I slowed down to try to improve visibility. The intermittent shine of the streetlights spaced far apart made it unusually difficult to see the road where there was no light. I slowed down some more.

A loud
whoosh
exploded by my left ear, and my startle response nearly put me through the roof of my Toyota. A wave of water engulfed my truck and I swerved to avoid the onslaught. My truck fishtailed and I instinctively countersteered, hoping that I would not hydroplane off the highway. As the wipers worked furiously, I was able to get the vehicle pointed again in a straight line. I realized that I had been passed on the left by a large semitrailer. As the truck had passed, we had both gone through a flooded section of the freeway.

My headlights must have danced all over the place, indicating to the trucker that I was in trouble. The trucker put on his flashing hazard lights and slowed down, and then signaled he was pulling over at a rest stop.

My hands were squeezing the steering wheel so tightly that I
could barely feel them. I instinctively followed the trucker down the entrance to the rest stop. Adrenaline was coursing through my body.

I pulled in next to him in the parking lot. He jumped out of his cab and walked over to me. As I rolled down my window, the rain started to pour inside.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yes, I think so,” I managed to reply.

“You really fishtailed all over the place; that was a great recovery.”

“Thanks.” I didn’t bother telling him that it had been sheer luck that I had not headed off the side of the highway and tumbled down the mountain.

“I’m really sorry. I didn’t see the water on the road. It nearly caused me to lose control too.”

“It’s all okay,” I said. “Everything is okay. Nobody got hurt.” I looked over at his semi for the first time to see if there was some damage from the wave of water. The words
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
were written in blue ink on the side of the trailer. I read the signage again.

“What’s in your truck?” I asked.

“It’s an MRI.” came the reply.

I pushed my door open, rudely bumping the driver.

“Hey, what are you doing?” he said as he recoiled back against the side of his truck. “It was an accident,” he stammered. “I don’t want any trouble.”

“No, no,” I said as I held up my hands in a show of peace. “I’m not angry. I want to know about what’s in your trailer.”

Clearly relieved, but still unclear what I was doing, the driver asked, “Why do you care what’s in my trailer?”

I told the driver, “I study criminal psychopaths. Does your trailer have an MRI that can be used for research? If so, can I take it into a prison?”

The driver backed away from me; the fear on his face was clear. “You wanna do what?” he asked.

I put my hands up again in a placating gesture. “Sorry,” I said. “Let me start over.”

“I’m
Dr
. Kiehl. I’m a forensic psychologist who studies psychopaths. I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with them.”

I took a step back to take in the size of the truck.

It was a full-size semitrailer, with two axles at the back that were spread a bit farther apart than normal. There was a large belly compartment that sat just inches above the ground. I figured that belly compartment must have contributed to amplifying the wave of water that had engulfed my truck. There was a door about four feet off the ground near the middle of the trailer.

“Can I take a look inside?” I asked.

“Sorry,” he replied, “I’m not supposed to open the doors until I get to the next location.”

“Come on,” I said, “you almost ran me off the road. The least you can do is let me take a peek inside.”

“Okay, but just for a second. I have to get this to the site in Surrey.” Surrey was a suburb outside of Vancouver.

The driver pushed a button on the door of the belly compartment and it popped open. He flipped a switch, and I heard the locks snap open.

He walked over to a small hatch under the door and pushed on it. It popped down, then he reached in and pulled out a retractable staircase.

He went up the stairs and pulled a key from his pocket and unlocked the door, pulling it open. I followed him inside.

He flicked four light switches on, and the room was bathed in a bright light. I squinted to allow my eyes a second to adjust. The trailer consisted of three rooms. To my right was a door that contained all the hardware that ran the MRI. The middle room, where I was standing, was a long, narrow control room with a desk and chair. To my left was a door with a window next to it. I could see the MRI at the far rear of the trailer—positioned right in the middle of those two oddly spaced axles, balancing the weights, I assumed.

I was drawn to the door to the MRI room, as if I was being pulled in by the magnetic field.

“Don’t go in there,” the driver said. “The MRI is still on. I don’t know why, but they told me they never shut it off.”

I started to explain the physics of the superconductive magnet
sitting in that room, but then stopped and simply told him that you can’t shut them off; it costs too much to ramp them back up again.

“Oh,” he replied. But his tone indicated that my knowledge of the machine’s engineering had convinced him I was who I said I was.

The driver explained that the mobile MRI was used for clinical patients in the lower mainland of British Columbia. It traveled to where there were populations of people who needed scans, but where there were no MRIs available in the local hospitals. The driver’s full-time job was to drive the machine around.

The mobile MRI was not the type or quality that we needed for our research, but it planted a seed in my brain. I knew that as the technology advanced, engineers would figure out a way to put the best MRI scanners in a trailer. And then I might be able to take one into prison and scan lots of psychopaths.