The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience (2 page)

My interview with Gordon was designed to cover all domains of his life. We reviewed his upbringing, education, family, friends, sporting activities, work experience, career goals, finances, health, intimate and romantic relationships, substance abuse and impulsive behaviors, emotions, antisocial behaviors, and his index offense. The interview typically takes anywhere from one to three hours. With Gordon I spent six hours. We pored over all the details of his life. It was fascinating; if I hadn’t been hooked on this career path yet, I was now.

Our review of his work experience was brief. Gordon had had dozens of jobs, but he never held one for more than a month. He was routinely fired because rather than working, he preferred to play jokes, take long lunches, drink, and gamble. Most of his jobs were in construction or as an auto mechanic (he admitted to choosing this vocation so he could become a better car thief). When asked about his future plans, Gordon said he wanted to leverage some of his residual bank robbery proceeds to start a motorcycle dealership. He failed to appreciate the potential legal (and tax) implications of such an endeavor.

During our discussion of his finances, Gordon admitted he rarely used bank accounts.

“Afraid of someone stealing it?” I quipped.

“No,” he replied with a wry smile, “I just don’t like to have to explain to people where I got the cash.”

“If you don’t keep your money in a bank, where do you keep it?”

“I bury it,” he said with a laugh, “all over the place; you can’t just drive around with hundreds of thousands of dollars on you after a job. Or I FedEx it to a five-star hotel in Asia, Europe, or South America where I have a reservation under a false name; once in a while I will FedEx it to a girlfriend in another town, tell her it’s a present but not to open it until I get there, stuff like that. You always have to be careful when you get to the hotel to make sure the cops are not on to you. I usually wear a disguise and scope out the place. I like to send the package two-day overnight and fly there first, then watch the delivery to make sure there are no cops. I’ve only lost a few packages.” He paused, then laughed again as he told me about a prostitute he had sent $50,000 in cash to a few years back. She never picked him up from the airport and he never saw her again. “I knew better than to trust that girl.”

“Money belts used to work through airports too, but it’s harder to do that now, more risky,” he mused. He continued. “Mules sometimes, but really, I just like to go for a hike and bury it. Then I know it’s always going to be there when I need it. I have lots of good places to bury it, but I don’t talk about that stuff with anyone.”

We turned to talking about his views on relationships, family, and friends. Gordon was a loner; he’d never felt the need to be close to anyone. He’d had hundreds of sexual liaisons, starting at the age of eleven. When asked if he had ever been in love with someone, he replied quickly and with a large smile about the time he was with three prostitutes at the same time—for a week.

“Ah, I loved them all,” he said as he took a deep breath, remembering.

Gordon equated love with good sex. He’d been married six times, all in different countries, all under aliases. When asked why he got married, he replied: “Makes the girls happy, keeps the sex coming for a while, and they are more willing to help mule or receive stolen money.” Gordon admitted the prostitute he sent the $50,000 to and never heard from again was wife number three.

He had not talked to his parents or siblings in years; the last time he bumped into his sister he heard that the family was fine, living the “white-picket-fence dream.” Inmates commonly refer to the presumed tedium and boredom of having a simple job, wife, and
house as the “white picket fence” syndrome. Actually, the majority of inmates admit they would be very happy out of prison and residing behind the white picket fence; psychopaths, however, can’t fathom it—they laugh at others who would dwell in such monotony.

Gordon viewed others as untrustworthy, but he was affable, engaging, quick witted, and full of stories. I didn’t believe all the stories—lying is common in psychopaths—so I had to trust my gut feelings and review his file again later. Because you can’t trust a psychopath is telling you the truth, you have to carefully review all their files in order to be able to verify everything they say. If you catch them in a lie, you have to be willing to call them on it and see how they respond. Just sit in the chair closest to the exit—in case you piss them off.

After another hour discussing his upbringing, I started asking questions about what Gordon liked to do when he was a kid. He grew up in Abbotsford, not far from the prison where we now sat. Nestled up against the mountains in BC, Abbotsford has wonderful views of Mount Baker to the southeast, and the local mountains are full of excellent fishing, hiking, and mountain bike trails. Gordon told me stories about his favorite fishing spots, remote lakes and places with great views. He started bragging about the enormous fish he caught—lies, I figured. He liked to hike alone even when he was a kid. After talking about a bunch of his favorite spots to go as a kid, he abruptly stopped, looking at me and then the video camera recording our interview.

He said, “That was good. You are nobody’s fool. You got me to talk about all the places I liked to go hiking and fishing as a kid so you can try and figure out where I buried the dough. People have been trying to get me to talk about that for years. You’re good.” He laughed.

I also laughed and told him that getting all the details of his childhood was a necessary part of the interview. I was bluffing. As soon as he told me he buried his bank loot, I had been tailoring the interview to find a way for him to give up the locations. I knew Gordon had spent much of his adult life in prison. I figured the locations he selected to hide his treasure had come from his childhood. Also
I leveraged his abundant grandiosity to get him to tell me stories of the “big” fish he had caught.

My main motivation was to perfect my interviewing techniques—could I successfully get a subject to talk? But a part of me couldn’t help but think about how I could train my black German shepherd to sniff out cocaine. A high percentage of $20 and $100 bills have trace residue of cocaine on them from the drug trade. It certainly would make hiking more exciting if your dog was able to dig up a bag full of cash!

I finished my interview with Gordon by asking him to describe his latest offense. It seemed that he was quite good at robbing banks, but not so good about keeping his temper in check. Gordon had “poor behavioral controls,” another classic trait of psychopathy; he was constantly getting into verbal altercations that escalated into physical fights—with little or no provocation. His current index offense was for almost killing a lover of one of his girlfriends. He had suspected she was seeing someone else, followed her, and confronted them. Tempers flared and Gordon wounded the other guy with a knife. He was arrested the next morning. It was noteworthy that, in prison, Gordon was pretty well behaved. He knew that fights in prison often led to hard time and additional charges, so he kept his temper in check. He wanted to get out as soon as he could so he could dig up his cached treasure.

When Gordon left, I pulled out my copy of the
Manual for the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised
(PCL-R).
¹
The Psychopathy Checklist, created by Professor Hare, is the instrument we use in the field to assess psychopathy. It contains twenty items that capture the essential traits of psychopathy—including lack of empathy, guilt and remorse, glibness, superficiality, parasitic orientation, flat affect, irresponsibility, and impulsivity. These traits are assessed based on the individual’s entire life and in all domains of his or her life. That is, to “lack empathy” on the Psychopathy Checklist, you must have evidence of this trait in the majority of your life—at home, work, school, with family, friends, and in romantic relationships. Each of the twenty items is scored on a three-point scale: 0, the item does not apply to the individual; 1, item applies in some respects; and 2,
item definitely applies in most respects to the individual. The scores range from 0 to 40, with the clinical diagnosis of a psychopath reserved for those with a score of 30 or above. The average inmate will score 22. The average North American nonincarcerated male will score 4 out of 40.

Gordon scored 31. He was my first psychopath.

I finished my notes justifying my Psychopathy Checklist item scores on Gordon while I wolfed down the two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I had packed the night before. I needed energy to continue with my next interview. It’s taxing to focus for hours interviewing inmates, ever cautious about walking the line between getting the information you need, challenging them to be forthright, and monitoring the door to make sure you can make a speedy exit if need be.

I returned to the housing unit and was approached by Gordon’s roommate, “Grant,” my second interview. Gordon had told him that I was fun to talk with and to “try me on.”

Grant had the kind of conventional appearance and manners that would suit a car salesman, except for the bold, spiraling tattoos covering his arms and hands. He had been involved with the legal system since birth—his mother was incarcerated when he was born—and he was currently finishing out a fifteen-year sentence for two murders he committed at age thirty. Grant was charged with manslaughter in the killing of his two accomplices to a robbery. Apparently, a disagreement occurred about the splitting of the proceeds. Knifes were flashed but they were no match for Grant’s 9mm handgun.

“Bam, bam … bam, bam … two down,” he said, pointing his index finger and thumb in a classic gun pose. “One of my better shooting days.” The killings were spoken of with such calmness, such “matter-of-factness” that I wondered if they were true. The files confirmed it; two shots center mass on both accomplices. Grant received fifteen years to life for the slayings, largely because of a plea deal—there was not enough evidence to convict him of first- or second-degree murder and he had disposed of the weapon. Interestingly,
he was distraught when he talked about getting rid of the gun, his favorite, a Glock 17 with extra magazine capacity. He had decided to plead out the case when his attorney told him that the prostitute he had hired to be his alibi witness was likely to break down on the stand.

When I asked if he had done anything for which he hadn’t been caught, Grant laughed with what seemed like childish mischief, and said, “Lots … arson, robberies, breaking and entering, car theft, check and credit card fraud, and of course there are a few bodies around.” He’d shot a few strangers, he said, for getting in his face, and drowned at least one girlfriend in a pool … which is when I realized I was sitting across from a bona fide serial killer, albeit an extraordinarily friendly one.

I eventually got Grant to concede that he had ten murder victims. Oddly, he’d never counted them up; in fact, he hardly ever thought about them. I tried to place Grant’s murders within the context of a classic serial-killer profile. It didn’t fit. Most serial killers are driven to commit their murders, usually in association with sexual dominance or sadism. Serial killers like Ted Bundy would meet criteria for psychopathy
and
they also have a paraphilia (a sexual-based disorder), like sexual sadism. The drive to kill comes from the latter; the lack of emotion, empathy, and guilt comes from psychopathy. When you combine psychopathy with a paraphilia, you get a very dangerous person. Fortunately, such people are very rare.

Grant didn’t have any sexual disorders like sadism. He described a relatively normal sex life. Yes, he admitted, he’d been a little rough from time to time with women, but he didn’t get turned on by inflicting pain. In fact, most of Grant’s murder victims were male. He seemed to resort to violence easily, quickly, and without much thought. He was lucky to have been caught for only two of the ten murders.

The rest of my interview with Grant revealed he’d been getting in trouble since his early teens, had been arrested many times, had been in lots of fights, and was unable or unwilling to stick to any occupation, profession, or job for more than a few months. He had collected social assistance under multiple names, been married
a few times, and had four kids—as best he could remember. This latter point was quite interesting. Grant didn’t recall the birthdays of his children; in fact, he knew only two of their names. He’d led a nomadic existence, moving from place to place—often on no more than a whim—living out of his van, camping, occasionally shacking up with women, occasionally getting them pregnant, and always moving on to the next adventure.

Psychopaths rarely know details about their children. Like Grant, they often don’t even know how many children they (might) have. I would come to realize during my research that psychopaths’ lack of connection with their children is one of the most salient features of the condition.

It was getting late in the day, so I wrapped up my interview with Grant, indicating to him that I might want to do a bit of follow-up later. He stood up, reached forward with his hand extended, and we shook hands. “Let’s do this again,” he said. “It was fun.” And he walked out as if he had just given a press conference.

A bit confused, I sat down and pulled out my PCL-R manual to assess Grant on the Psychopathy Checklist. I leaned back in the chair and, for a moment, wondered if I was dreaming. The day had been surreal; after all the years of reading about psychopaths, I’d finally conducted my first two interviews.

Grant scored 34 on the Psychopathy Checklist. I was two for two.

I finished up my notes and dumped the videotapes of the interviews into my locked file cabinet. We record all our interviews so that another scientist can rate the psychopathy scores too. In this way we “double-rate” everything, making sure that the interviewer did not get a biased impression of the subject.

I closed and locked the door, returned my monster key to the nearest lockbox (the brass keys don’t leave the facility), and walked down to Dr. Brink’s office.