The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience (29 page)

In many areas of his life, his emotions were in the normal range but were a bit stilted—he was more immature than shallow and more poorly developed than callous. There was no evidence that he had an inability to feel guilt for petty transgressions. Indeed, he had a normal relationship with his brother and a few other teen friends.

There was no evidence of his leeching or living off others. Chris had a job for many months working at Subway. He did not have a history of stealing from his parents, friends, girlfriends, neighbors, or employers. He did not excessively borrow money from family or friends. He did not try to live a life beyond his means.

Chris’s first sexual experience did not occur until he was nineteen.

There was no evidence of any severe behavioral problems as a child or teen and no encounters with the police before the index offense. He was not impulsive or irresponsible.

One area of his life that was particularly distressing to Chris was his relationship with his mother. Chris felt that his mother had abused him, and he was sent to a psychologist as a teenager to get help.

During our interview, I asked Chris to describe the abuse he claimed he’d suffered. He related stories of being spanked as a kid for not doing his homework. He said that his mother would put him on “restriction” for not completing his chores or other duties.

I pointed out to Chris that the vast majority of stories he told about his mother would not constitute child abuse.

In a rare moment of clarity, Chris volunteered that he recognized
that many people would not think that his mother’s behavior was abusive, but it was a source of great distress for him. His
perception
of her behavior led him to interpret it as abusive.

Chris was in complete denial about the crime he had committed. Moreover, instead of accepting that he made a mistake, Chris tried to glorify the crime.

Then Chris told me that he was a psychopath.

His statement took a minute to settle in. I’ve never had an individual tell me he was a psychopath with such enthusiasm. To me, it was a signal something was amiss.

I asked Chris if he knew what a psychopath was. He said that a psychologist who had treated him for his problems with his mother had told him he scored high on the self-report MMPI psychopathic deviate subscale and told him he was a psychopath.

“A psychologist told you were a psychopath during a treatment session based on an MMPI profile?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said.

I was so shocked that it took me a minute to compose myself and continue the interview. Not only had this psychologist committed an enormous ethical error by telling a teenager he was a psychopath, but he also based his diagnosis on a self-report test that has dubious utility to assess the condition.

The impact of the psychologist’s diagnosis on Chris was unmistakable.

Armed with this new label, Chris had decided to act like a psychopath. It had become a sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Psychologists are concerned that if people start to believe something to be true (even if there is no evidence of it), they may precipitate the actions they are trying to avoid. For example, a woman might falsely believe her marriage is failing and change her behavior in such a way that actually causes more marital problems and eventually leads the marriage to fall apart. This process has been termed a
self-fulfilling prophecy
.

Prior to meeting Chris, I was unaware of anyone being told he was a psychopath and then having that suggestion precipitate psychopathic behavior. But that is exactly what happened to Chris. Before the crime, there was very little evidence of psychopathic
symptoms in his background. But after the crime, Chris wanted the world to believe he was a psychopath.

However, Chris did not present like a psychopath; he was just developmentally disabled in terms of his social interactions and ability to emotionally connect to people. In addition, I noticed that there was something odd about Chris.

My clinical “spidey sense” was going off in a big way.

Chris’s eye movements were slightly abnormal, but not in the way that psychopaths’ eyes are abnormal. His eyes were completely disconnected from thought and affect. I thought his abnormal eye movements were a reflection of brain disturbances due to his aberrant social and emotional development.

Underlying Chris’s thoughts and expressions was an incredible emotional and intellectual immaturity. He had a very poorly developed worldview, and his social skills were dismal. His IQ was also well below normal.

“Once we had broken into the house, we prevented the alarm from going off by walking slowly so as to not set off the motion sensors,” Chris explained. He then proceeded to stand up and demonstrate how slow he could walk. He shuffled his feet and inched across the linoleum floor of the prison interview room.

Public defender Donna Brown was shaking her head with a look of complete embarrassment on her face.

“I was watching really closely and would slow down even more if the motion sensor turned from green to red. But I was able to go slow enough that it didn’t detect me.”

Chris proceeded to inch his way around the Cates home until he found the electrical circuit breaker panel. He turned off all the power to the house in an effort to defeat the house burglar alarm.

I glanced over at Donna; she had her head down and she was partially covering her face with her hand to keep Chris from seeing her expressions.

I informed Chris that home alarms in general and motion sensors in particular have a battery backup to prevent criminals from being able to defeat them by turning off the power to the house. Homes often lose power in storms; the battery backup protects the alarm system.

I also told him that when a motion sensor turns from green to red, it means it has detected motion.

The reason the alarm did not go off, I told him, was because the Cateses had not armed it that night.

“Oh,” he muttered. “I guess you learn something new every day.”

There were countless other examples that indicated Chris was a very unsophisticated individual.

For example, Chris was extremely susceptible to suggestion. He would watch television shows and then believe that he could do what he saw on TV. He thought that by watching enough
Law and Order
episodes he could become a lawyer.

I came to understand that Chris’s belief that he was a psychopath was akin to a delusion.

Let me explain. I once had to perform a risk assessment on a prisoner who believed that his father was a famous Hollywood actor. “Michael,” as I will call him, had developed this belief about his parental lineage and had in fact driven long distances from his home in Canada to Los Angeles to see his famous father. He had broken into a house he believed to be owned by the actor and started living there. After he was arrested, he continued to believe, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that his father was the famous actor. Michael’s real father used to visit him in prison; Michael thought of him more as a friend than a father. Michael’s delusion lasted his entire adult life.

I met Michael some twenty years after his third break-in of the Hollywood actor’s home. The third crime had triggered special provisions in Canada that placed Michael in the “dangerous offender” category, and he had received a long prison sentence.

The treatment team had been trying to break Michael’s delusion for years. In the past year, Michael had finally started telling the treatment team that he no longer believed that actor was his father.

I had been asked to evaluate whether Michael was fit for parole.

Two hours into the interview we had a good rapport going, so I subtly sprang the question on Michael I had most wanted to ask, inquiring what his mother and father did for a living.

Michael took the bait. He told me that his father was an actor and began to tell me stories about his famous father. As he spoke,
he looked right into the video camera recording the risk assessment interview. He was just telling the truth—as he believed it.

I showed the video to his treatment team. They looked confused. “When did you do the interview?” his main therapist asked.

“Today,” I replied. They looked at each other in disbelief.

It turned out that Michael had grown tired of people telling him that the actor was not his father, so he told them what they wanted to hear. But he still believed it to be true.

I recommended that he not be released from prison. I knew that he would drive straight down to Los Angeles and break into the actor’s house again. I thought I would save the actor that hassle.

Michael was not violent; he was not a problem at the prison. He just suffered from a delusion, and his treatment team had no idea how to fix it. None of us did. We only knew that he had to be contained in order to prevent him from breaking the law.

I believed Chris Gribble suffered from the same type of delusion. Chris’s delusion was that he thought he was a psychopath. And that made Chris very dangerous.

Chris’s psychopathic symptoms are more a result of a break from reality than a reflection of his underlying personality. There was just no evidence from the other domains of his life that Chris has severe psychopathic symptomology. He does not score high on the Youth Version of the Psychopathy Checklist. Indeed, he scores below average for a youth in prison.

Chris blames his mother for his problems and claims he has wanted to kill her for years. However, he never actually tried to hurt his mother. A child or teen with elevated CU traits would typically not hesitate to hurt or lash out at his or her parents. Indeed, many youth with elevated CU traits fight with their parents as easily as they fight with other children on the playground. I have interviewed more than a few psychopaths who had murdered their parents.

The fact that Chris did not act on his thoughts of hurting his mother confirms that he had some internal controls.

But those internal controls had been completely overcome by the social pressures exerted on him by Steven Spader. Spader had a long history of criminal activity and encounters with the police. He abused alcohol and drugs. He had many different girlfriends
and frequent infidelities. He stole from family and friends. He manipulated others into dealing drugs for him. He fit the profile of a psychopath far more than Chris did, although I never tested Spader personally.

Chris was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had joined the wrong peer group. Had he gotten the right help, that terrible crime might never have taken place.

Tragic crimes like those committed by Gribble are unfortunately far too common. It seems that every few weeks there is a mass killing committed by some disturbed young person. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High School; Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech University; Jared Loughner at a political rally in Tucson, Arizona; James Holmes in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado; and Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, are just a few examples of the type of heinous spree killings that plague society.

I am often asked whether the perpetrators of such crimes are psychopaths. Certainly, the act of mass killing can be described as
psychopathic
, but does that clinical label fit the personality of the attacker? For the vast majority of spree killer cases, the answer is no—the offender was not a psychopath. Most killing sprees are committed by individuals who suffer from psychosis, not psychopathy. Recall that psychosis is a fragmentation of the thinking processes in the brain that leads to symptoms like hallucinations and delusions.

Hallucinations come in all modalities—a patient with psychosis might hear voices that are not there (auditory hallucinations), see things that are not real (visual hallucinations), feel things that are not real (touch or somatosensory hallucinations), smell things that are not there (olfactory hallucinations), and taste things that are not real (gustatory hallucinations). All sensory modalities can be affected in a psychotic illness. Hallucinations can take many forms, but the most dangerous types are known as
auditory command
hallucinations. Command hallucinations are voices that the patient hears
instructing him or her to perform some behavior. Sometimes the command hallucinations tell the patient to kill people. The voices that constitute command hallucinations can be powerful forces that compel a person to act in an irrational manner.

Delusions are also a central symptom of psychosis. Delusions come in many forms, most of which are relatively harmless. But when a delusion robs a person of understanding the impact his or her behavior will have on others, it can be very dangerous. Delusions can override normal rational thinking processes, and some delusions lead people to commit homicide.

It is important to recognize that most patients with psychosis do not harm others. But psychotic symptoms do increase an individual’s risk for committing homicide.

Schizophrenia is one of the main disorders associated with psychosis. The prevalence of schizophrenia is estimated to be below 1 percent of the general population, but patients with schizophrenia comprise between 5 and 20 percent of all homicide offenders.
⁹
A worldwide study found that 1 in 629 patients in his or her first episode of psychosis ended up committing a homicide.
¹⁰
In comparison, only 1 in 25,000 individuals in the general population of the United States will commit homicide. Thus, psychosis is associated with a fortyfold increased risk for homicide than that found in the rest of the population. The average age of onset of psychosis in men is eighteen and in women it is twenty-five, and research shows that the vast majority of homicides committed by such patients occur within the first year of illness onset.

However, if psychotic patients receive treatment, the risk for homicide drops from 1 in 629 to 1 in 9,090.
¹¹
The most effective way to prevent homicide in patients with psychosis is to get them early and effective evidence-based treatment. Unfortunately, as has been well documented in the cases in Arizona, Virginia, and Colorado, despite ample evidence the perpetrators were mentally ill prior to the commission of their crimes, they did not receive good treatment.