The mind of a killer

So what does your work lead you to think about the punishment for murderers?

The issue I'm really facing is: Should this person be executed or given life imprisonment without possibility of parole? I think the latter. I am not one of those people who believe that life imprisonment is somehow the same as getting off and being free. The conditions in prison are far from plush. It's not a country club. Just the idea of not being free is a terrible, terrible deprivation.

Has your research gotten many killers off death row?

I have been moderately successful in that way. Two killers whom I've examined have been executed.

Do people call on you to make judgments of guilt or innocence -- to examine people who have been accused of violent crimes?

Everyone I've seen has been guilty.

Would it be possible for you to make accurate predictions about whether someone is likely to become a murderer?

There was a guy named Joel Rifkin who killed 16 prostitutes in New York. He killed the first one when he was 32. He's in some upstate prison now. If I had seen him before he was 32, I would have said, "Here's a guy who goes to prostitutes a lot, has neurological damage and was abused as a child, and he has some pretty weird fantasies, but he's never been violent." He had been thinking about killing people for quite some time, and most serial murderers do that. But it would have been very difficult to predict his behavior because not everybody who has all three of these things is violent. And not everybody who is violent is violent all the time.

Have your feelings toward the death penalty evolved over the period that you've been doing your research?

Yes and no. I am not a principled opponent of the death penalty. I believe that it might be appropriate in certain circumstances, but I think that it should be used rarely and for the most horrendous of crimes -- such as Adolf Eichmann. Or even Timothy McVeigh.

Did you examine Timothy McVeigh?

I did not evaluate him, but I was asked by one of the defense attorneys if I would be willing to, and I said, yes, I would. I wasn't asked because McVeigh wouldn't permit that type of a defense -- a diminished-capacity defense. He preferred to be executed as the embodiment of evil, rather than have someone say that he was a sick, weak character, which is probably what he was.

Does your theory of what makes a murderer seem to apply to him?

All I know about McVeigh is what I've read in the newspapers. He was paranoid -- he thought that the government was against the people and against him. He was also grandiose -- he believed that he was specially endowed and was going to be the Rambo to take on the government of the United States. Blowing up public buildings was his Sylvester Stallone-like posture. There was something seriously wrong with him mentally.

Although there was no history of abuse reported, I got vibes that his family didn't have a close relationship: He didn't want them to be in the prison at the time of his death, and there was very little contact during the trial. Why was that? Where did all of this hatred of authority come from? My guess is that he was abused.

But he killed 168 people, and for a crime like that, maybe the death penalty is justified.

We're talking about people who hate. What about the killers of Matthew Shepard?

I did examine Aaron McKinney, one of the killers. He satisfied the criteria. Who commits crimes of hatred? Who wants to hate people like that? It doesn't just spring into someone's mind to hate this or that group. Those things are programmed by experience. People have various reasons for hating groups. There's always some group available to hate, and it's the people who have been abused who displace their anger onto a particular group. There's an example in the chapter titled "Hitler and Hatred" of a young man who hated women.

So you think this applies to Hitler as well?

I'm almost positive it does. There were two or three paragraphs in "Mein Kampf" in which he seemed to indicate that he came from an extremely abusive home, and there was independent evidence of that. A guy by the name of [Walter] Langer was commissioned by the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, to do an in-depth psychological study of Hitler. He had primary sources of information -- Hitler had a half-brother who was a petty criminal. The story was that Hitler had been left for dead once after a particularly bad beating. His father was a drunk who would come home and beat up the family. In "Mein Kampf," he even hints that he experienced sexual abuse.

That explanation is kind of hard to swallow because Hitler seems so different from, say, the young man in your book who impulsively killed the convenience store cashier.

Remember, Hitler probably was not brain-damaged and was probably very bright. But he was also manic-depressive and filled with anger at a variety of things.

The man who held up a convenience store in Modesto, Calif., who shot and killed the proprietor and forgot to steal anything, was functioning with an I.Q. of about 70. Instead of having mental illness, as Hitler did, he was neurologically impaired. But they both had been horrendously abused.

By "abuse," you're usually talking about really disgusting abuse. Some of your passages describing child abuse are more horrifying than the murders.

This guy in Modesto had been raised in a home where he had impetigo at age 2. The neighbors described how cockroaches covered his body and there were so many cockroaches in his house that you couldn't see the color that the wall was painted. The kid was starving and he used to eat lead paint.

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