The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience (37 page)

On Saturday September 5, 2009, Brian Dugan arrived at the Northwestern University Center for Advanced MRI (CAMRI) for his brain scan, dressed in an orange jumpsuit and white tennis shoes. He was escorted by two DuPage County sheriff’s deputies.

I was surprised there were only two deputies. Later I asked one of the deputies if it was standard procedure to send only two men on a transport of a serial killer. Brian’s not a risk, they told me. He’d been in prison over twenty-five years and he didn’t have a single institutional infraction. They considered him a model inmate.

Brian was very interested in the results from the brain scan. He had grown curious about what the scan might reveal about his brain. He asked a number of informed questions about the analyses and procedures we were about to complete. Apparently, he had been reading up on MRI and functional MRI from books and articles his legal team had given him, and he had become quite knowledgeable.

I had to remind myself that Brian’s IQ was 122, in the very superior range, because every time I looked at him all I could think about was his low emotional IQ. As I had predicted, testing using the MSCEIT had revealed that Brian scored in the very low range on emotional intelligence.

I reviewed the scan session details with Brian, giving him practice trials for the tasks we were going to complete. After Brian completed the pilot testing, we took him into the MRI room and positioned him on the MRI table. With surprising efficiency Todd had Brian set up and ready to scan within just a few minutes. Todd adjusted the head coil and soft head restraint system to help Brian keep his head still during the MRI scan. We had only one item left to complete before starting to scan.

Todd handed Brian the emergency call bell and told him the device was to be used only in case he panicked and needed to get our attention in the control room. Brian calmly held the call bell in his left hand.

I was flooded with fond memories of Shock Richie and the antics he had caused on my first day scanning psychopaths more than a decade ago. I recalled it like it was yesterday.

Brian just lay there calmly and gave a thumbs-up that he was ready to go. I looked at his eyes through the mirror attached to the top of the head coil. They were flat, showing no signs of anxiety.

I wondered whether Brian’s age had anything to do with his calmness. Perhaps psychopaths age out of impulsivity? Maybe I will do a sabbatical year in Florida and see if there are any geriatric psychopaths around to study.

As we exited the MRI room the sheriff’s deputy checked to see if it was secure and then followed us into the MRI control room.

“This is going to be interesting,” he stated.

It appeared everyone in the room, including the deputies and Brian, wanted to know what his brain looked like.

Todd sat down at the MRI console and set up the pulse sequences, checked on Brian through the intercom system, and the machine started up its familiar beeping and thumping.

The anticipation in the room was palpable.

As the first pictures of Brian’s brain popped up on the Siemens console, Todd studied them and then proclaimed, “Hmm. Looks pretty normal!”

The deputy next to him just chuckled and said, “Not a chance that guy’s got a normal brain.”

The rest of the MRI session went by quickly. Brian completed all
the tasks that were assigned to him. However, I noticed he made a few curious mistakes during one of the emotional tasks.

I’d asked Brian to rate pictures based on the severity of the moral violation depicted in the scene. Examples of pictures with high immoral content included scenes depicting people rioting or a man yelling aggressively at a cowering child; pictures of scenes with low immoral content included bystanders looking at a car accident or a picture of a surgical procedure. The moral picture task had been developed by one of my postdoctoral fellows, Carla Harenski.

We had published a study showing that judgments of immoral pictures engage the amygdala in nonpsychopaths. But psychopaths fail to activate this paralimbic region of the brain. The normal boost the amygdala generates to help recognize moral content did not take place in psychopaths as it did in nonpsychopaths. It coincided with the psychopath’s well-documented real-life impairments in moral decision making.
⁸

Brian rated some of the stimuli with severe moral violations as far less immoral than everyone else rated them. In particular, Brian rated one picture depicting a man holding a knife against a woman’s throat as low on moral severity. Later, during debriefing, Brian confessed that he knew most people would rate that picture as high in immoral content, but he said he was not sure it was
much
of a violation. As much as he tried, it was abundantly clear that Brian lacked the emotional connections that the rest of us take for granted.

We completed the scan session. Everything had gone perfectly; the code Todd had installed worked flawlessly.

As I was uploading the data to my server in New Mexico, Todd removed Brian from the MRI scanner. Brian was given a bathroom break and fed a quick lunch. After the upload finished, I initiated my scripts to start processing the data. The algorithms would work all night to crunch the data. I had used code developed by my programmer to parallel process the data on multiple computers so the results would be ready by the time I got back to New Mexico the next day. Once I was sure the data processing was under way, I backed up the information on a USB stick and grabbed my notes.

I had arranged to do another interview with Brian in a private
office in the CAMRI building. As Brian sat back in the office chair, he looked down at the picture of his brain I’d given him.

I tried to decipher the expression on his face as Brian looked at the picture.

He looked up and noticed me staring at him. He asked, “Is this the brain of a psychopath?”

I didn’t need a picture of his brain to know I was sitting next to a psychopath. But I replied, “You can’t tell from a simple brain picture whether someone is a psychopath. You need a computer to do the detailed analyses of the MRI data in order to compare your brain scan against those of the other psychopaths. My laboratory has found that psychopaths have reduced density in the emotional areas of the brain.”

I continued, “The brain is like a muscle, and some people’s muscles are weaker than others. Weak muscles might be genetic, or they might develop because people don’t exercise them. The brain is like that too.”

Brian nodded in agreement.

I went on. “The latest science suggests psychopaths are born with weak tissue in the emotional control areas of the brain. Children as young as twelve years old who have symptoms like
lack of empathy, flat affect
, and
poor impulse control
have similar weak emotional brain areas, just as adult psychopaths do.”

The legal team had asked me to explain to Brian what the MRI scan might mean for his trial.

“Brian, the emotional brain tissue in psychopaths does not appear to be so weak or damaged as to make psychopaths have no power to control their behavior. But it’s likely to contribute to them making poor decisions. We just don’t know exactly how weak brain tissue leads to emotional deficits, impulsivity, and the like.

“So this research doesn’t mean psychopaths are necessarily less responsible for committing crimes. But in your case, the mitigation team wants to evaluate whether analyses of your brain support the argument you have an emotional disorder. They plan to argue that you’ve had this emotional disorder since you were a kid, perhaps even since birth. The latest science supports this argument. That’s what the legal team wants to present to the jury.”

“This is really interesting for me,” Brian said. “I’ve always known I was different. I wonder a lot why I did the things I did. Prison gives you a lot of time to think.”

He continued, “I’ve read a lot about psychopathy since I interviewed with you last time. I read the list of symptoms, and I can see that I have almost all of them.”

This was the first time I’d ever had a psychopath recognize the symptoms in himself without any help.

“But I still don’t feel any different. I mean, I really wish I felt different about what I did, but I just don’t,” Brian said.

As he finished he looked at me with those flat eyes. I knew that he was trying, but he lacked the capacity. Brian didn’t seem capable of appreciating the gravity of the crimes he committed. Even after decades of working with psychopaths, it was still extremely difficult for me to accept that fact.

I spent another hour or so probing Brian for details about his life, about how he thought about people, about how he thought about the crimes he had committed. He was in a very cooperative mood. He gave me a lot of insights into how psychopaths operate and how they think. I scribbled dozens of pages of notes.

I exited the interview room and went over to the MRI control room. Todd and the two sheriff’s deputies were hunched over the computer looking at pictures of Brian’s brain.

I heard Todd say, “That looks a little weird … oh, wait. That’s not abnormal. That’s nothing. Sorry.”

And with that the three of them leaned back in unison and took another look at the screen from a distance.

“FIND ANYTHING?” I said with a loud voice, startling all three of them.

“Jesus!” Todd exclaimed. “How can you sneak up on someone when there is a serial killer in the building?”

The deputies and I had a nice laugh about that one.

As the deputies fetched Brian, I asked Todd if he had found anything abnormal in Brian’s brain.

“Nope. Looks pretty good, actually. I can’t wait to see what the VBM analysis yields.”

VBM stood for
voxel-based morphometry
, the density analyses my computers back in New Mexico were cranking out as we spoke.

“Me too,” I answered.

The next morning while I was waiting at the airport for my return flight to depart, I logged in to my computer servers to check on the status of the analysis of Brian Dugan’s MRI datasets. The brain density analysis was nearing completion; the four analyses of the functional MRI data were only about 20 percent done. I sipped my espresso and watched the status bar creep toward completion on the density analyses of Brian’s paralimbic system.

Unfortunately, my flight was boarding. I’d have to wait until I was back in New Mexico to get the results. But before I closed up my computer, I e-mailed one of my graduate students, Lora Cope, and asked her to analyze a “case study” for me. I told her where the case study MRI data resided on the servers and the exact analyses I wanted her to do. I wanted an independent analysis to verify my results.

During the flight home, I tried to decipher the notes I had hastily scribbled during my interview with Brian. I planned to type them up while they were still fresh in my mind. I balanced my computer on my lap, and my notes were sticking out from the seat pocket on the seat in front of me.

I was making good progress typing up my notes until the young woman in the middle seat got up and bumped my precariously placed notes, spilling them onto the floor. She quickly apologized and headed to the back of the plane toward the bathroom.

It took a bit of time to reorganize them and get back to work. I was just about to settle back into typing again when the flight attendant announced we were landing shortly. I closed my laptop and packed up my bag.

As the wheels touched down, I clicked on my smartphone and logged in to my computer servers. The density analysis was complete.
I could not wait to get home to review the results. I raced out of the airplane straight toward the security exit and the parking garage to get my car.

As I passed security, I felt a strong hand grab my left arm. I turned and came face-to-face with a uniformed police officer. The look on his face was sheer terror. Confused, I turned and looked around for what might be causing his alarm.

“Would you please come with me, sir?” he asked.

“What’s the problem, Officer?” I was perplexed.

“Would you please just come with me, sir?” he repeated.

“Umm, sure,” I managed to choke out. I really wanted to get home to look at the results of Brian’s brain scan. But I realized I better not mess with the airport police.

We proceeded to a small security office where the officer motioned for me to sit in the chair. I noticed he sat in the chair closest to the exit. Another officer, much larger than the first one, entered the room.

“May I search your bag, sir?” the large one asked. “Of course,” I replied.

The large officer proceeded to open my computer bag and remove its contents. I am a bit of a packrat. I had all sorts of receipts from various academic trips that I had not turned in yet for reimbursement, as well as journal articles that I was in the middle of reading, and pages and pages of notes from the Dugan interview. As the officer pulled the papers out of my bag, a few of them fell to the floor. I instinctively quickly reached to catch them, and both officers jumped back in unison.

The big one put his hand out as if to block an attack while the smaller one took a quick step toward the exit door. It was an awkward moment.

As I retreated to my chair I asked: “What’s going on, guys?”

“Please, sir, just stay seated while we complete the search,” was all the large officer said.

I sat back and tried to relax.

The large officer handed the stack of papers from my bag to the smaller officer to review, and then he removed a prescription pill
bottle from my travel bag. It was a muscle relaxant in case my back acted up. He looked at it curiously and then replaced it in the bag and continued his search.

The small officer stood up and exited the room, taking the stack of my papers with him. I didn’t object; I figured he was going to test them for explosive residue or something.

The large officer completed his search and then placed my bags on the floor for me to reclaim. He excused himself and I was left alone in the security office.

A few minutes elapsed.

A new officer came in and sat down; he had my stack of papers with him. He was followed by the two other officers, who took up positions along the wall farthest from me. Their arms were crossed in a pose of strength.