Personality and Mental Health

1: 138–153 (2007)

Published online in Wiley InterScience

(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/pmh.18 1 Article for journal edited by Kenneth Silk, MD.

 

MICHAEL H. STONE, Columbia College of Physicians & Surgeons, New York ABSTRACT

Persons committing murder and other forms of violent crime are likely to exhibit a personality disorder (PD) of one type or another. Essentially any personality disorder can be associated with violent crime, with the possible exception of avoidant PD. This includes those described in DSM as well as other disorders such as sadistic PD and psychopathy. The latter two, along with antisocial and paranoid PDs, are the most common personality accompaniments of violent crime. Narcissistic traits (if not narcissistic PD (NPD) itself) are almost universal in this domain, since violent offenders usually place their own desires and urges far above those of other persons. While admixtures of traits from several disorders are common among violent offenders, certain ones are likely to be the main disorder: antisocial PD, Psychopathy, Sadistic PD, Paranoid PD and NPD. Instrumental (as opposed to impulsive) spousal murders are strongly associated with NPD. Men committing serial sexual homicide usually show psychopathy and sadistic PD; half these men also show schizoid PD. Mass murderers usually show strong paranoid traits. With a focus on murder, clinical examples drawn from the crime literature and from the author’s personal interviews reflect 14 varieties of personality disorder. Animal torture before adulthood is an important predictor of future violent (including sadistic) crime. Whereas many antisocial persons are eventually capable of rehabilitation, this is rarely the case with psychopathic or sadistic persons. Suggestions for future research are offered. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

 

 

Introduction

The most common forms of violent crime are murder (including attempted murder), felonious assault, rape, unlawful imprisonment with torture—all of which involve either serious injury or death, extreme physical suffering, or both. Closely related to these forms of crime would be kidnapping without the infliction of physical suffering, since at the very least there will be severe psychological suffering. Rendering a victim helpless through binding and gagging constitutes yet another means of inflicting extreme suffering, even in the absence of physical wounding by knife or blunt instrument.

The majority of persons who commit violent crimes, whether habitually or in unique circumstances, exhibit a personality disorder. The personality disorder in question may be restricted to just one of the categories described in Axis-II of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (viz., in the DSM-IV, 1994), or may be complex —embodying the features of several Axis-II disorders. Furthermore, the personality of certain violent offenders may best be understood within the context of personality-types not included in DSM, such as psychopathic, sadistic, hypomanic, explosive-irritable, passive-aggressive or depressive.

As for the connection between personality configuration and crime-type, this may be quite close, as in the case of mass murder or serial sexual homicide. But single murder, especially within the family, may be committed by persons of any personality type.

One way of understanding personality disorders in general is to view them as habitual dispositions toward the interpersonal world—that limit one’s options in relation to stressful situations, and thus lower adaptiveness. From this perspective, violence, intimidation, unlawful imprisonment and the like represent desperate choices from a (presumably) seriously compromised menu of possible solutions. To take but one example, the jealous man who, in the context of a deteriorating marriage, kills his intent-upon-divorce wife ‘so that no one else can have her’, is operating within an all-or-none schema. According to this schema, a man ‘owns’ his wife totally; the ‘crime’ (in his eyes) of defection is punishable by death; killing her thus constitutes what sociologist Katz (1988) has characterized as (from the vantage point of the murderer) righteous slaughter (p. 12). The more adaptive solution: that both he and his wife might in the long run be better off separating and ultimately finding partners with whom each could be more compatible—is not available to the seriously narrowed mindset of the husband. This leaves only the option of uxoricide—which the husband pictures as ‘justified homicide’, but which the community rightly appraises as murder (i.e. unlawful killing).

If there is, from the standpoint of personality, one red thread running through the majority of violent crimes, this would be narcissism. Whoever chooses, that is, to stab, choke, bludgeon, shoot, rape, tie up, sequester, etc.—is obviously putting his own needs, desires and entitlements in first place, and is giving no place at all to the needs, desires and entitlements of the victim(s). This is self-centredness writ large. There will be examples of violent criminals whose personality profiles do not endorse quite enough of the DSM items pertaining to narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) to warrant NPD as a diagnosis—but almost invariably there will be a liberal admixture of narcissistic traits in the total personality of the offender.

 

Method

The sources from which the examples in this article are drawn consist of the following: (1) the full-length biographies of persons committing murder, or (much less commonly) kidnap or multiple rape. These number, at the time of this writing, 570, (2) articles in the media (magazines or newspapers) about persons committing violent crimes (n = 422), (3) persons interviewed in prisons.

The clinical vignettes that follow are based primarily on the full-length biographies or on personal interviews—or both, since these sources provide the richest data on personality variables. In a few instances (as indicated in the vignette) the material was derived from articles in the media.

In the full-length biographies cited here—considerable data were provided concerning (1) both the early childhood experiences and developing personality traits, and (2) the personality traits as these were made manifest to other persons (spouses, acquaintances, co-workers, relatives) during the offender’s adult life. In some cases this material was amplified by personal interviews lasting from two to five hours.

The majority of the vignettes concern persons who were ultimately brought to trial and who were examined by forensic psychiatrists (for both the defence and the prosecution). Their diagnoses were taken into consideration, along with my own diagnoses—derived from the degree to which the data from all sources then met criteria either from DSM-IV, or (as in the case of sadistic, depressive and explosive personalities) from other criterion sets. The data were not equally robust in all cases: the evidence for sadistic PD, for example, was overwhelming, whereas the evidence for histrionic PD (the case of Susan Wright) was suggestive but less certain.

 

Case reports

With one exception, the books cited in the case reports represent full-length biographies. The exception is that of Paul Kidd’s (1997) book, where a chapter is devoted to Archie McCafferty.

 

Paranoid

Persons committing violent crimes and whose personality characteristics are primarily paranoid belong to a variety of subtypes. Some exhibit pathological jealousy; others, extreme bigotry; still others, persecutory ideation and grudge-holding. Within the latter category will be situated the majority of persons committing mass murder (i.e. the murder of three or more people in one outburst). Almost all mass murderers are male.

 

Pathological jealousy

• Within the marital situation A former Lt. Commander in the Navy, Michael Blagg, later became a company executive in Colorado. He and his wife were both devout Evangelical Christians, although Blagg was addicted to pornography and was jealous, controlling and physically abusive toward his wife, Jennifer. After 10 years of unhappy marriage, Jennifer finally decided to divorce. A few days after she announced her decision, Blagg shot her and their 6-year-old daughter to death, hiding their bodies in the town dump (Scott, 2007).

• Jealousy in a paranoid stalker; mass murder Richard Farley had been an employee at a engineering lab in California where a woman, Laura Black, also He met her there in 1984 when he was 36 and began stalking her after she refused his advances. He sent her hundreds of letters, waited outside her house, and was undeterred by the restraining order she got against him. He threatened to kill her if she did not date him (as recounted in a movie made about the case in 1993: I Can Make You Love Me)—a manoeuvre that not only failed to win her heart but also got him fired. Two years later in 1988 he returned to the old workplace, taking along part of his large cache of rifles and pistols, and proceeded to kill seven people and wound four (including Laura Black). This episode of mass murder led to California passing its first anti-stalking law. (cf. Encyclopedia II: www.experiencefestival. com/a/Mass_Murder).
• Grudge-holding; persecutory ideation

Gang Lu, born in 1963 to a middle-class family from the Chinese mainland, came to Iowa University to get his PhD in physics. He was a friendless loner, morose, suspicious, but brilliant, and did outstanding work while at the university. There was another Chinese student in the program who did just slightly better than Lu, and who was also outgoing and wellliked. This man won the physics prize that Lu felt he himself deserved. Lu became progressively paranoid about the heads of the department, as though they had conspired to humiliate him and award the prize to his rival. In 1991 the 28-year-old Lu, having obtained pistol permits, calmly killed the chairman of the physics department, his mentor, another professor, his rival, Lin-Hua Shan and a female dean whom Lu felt was unresponsive to his letters of appeal. Lu then committed suicide. As to his array of personality traits, Lu was experienced by those who knew him as argumentative, envious, bitter, brooding, difficult to live with, resentful, arrogant, rigid, aloof and hypercritical. He showed, that is, an admixture of paranoid, schizoid and narcissistic traits (Chen, 1995).

 

Bigotry.

John William King had been adopted into a Texan family that was not racist in its orientation. John, whom his father found uncontrollable, became a juvenile delinquent (burglary, theft), and spent 8 years in prison. While there, he teamed up with two other young men, all of whom became white ‘supremacists’, involved in the Aryan Pride movement, dedicated to killing Blacks, Jews, Asians, etc. Upon their release in 1998, they kidnapped a Black man, promising him a ride to his home. Instead they clubbed him to near-unconsciousness, tied him to the back of their pickup truck, and dragged him for three miles, by which time his right arm and head were severed along the way. The three men were identified the day after the murder. King was convicted and sentenced to death. His personality traits were chiefly those of psychopathy, besides his paranoid race-hatred (Temple-Raston, 2002).

 

Schizoid

Joel Rifkin was adopted at 3 weeks of age by Ben and Jeanne Rifkin of Long Island (Eftimiades, 1993). He had been raised in their upper-middleclass home, and never experienced any abuse or neglect. A bright but socially odd ‘loner’, all his life, he was teased at school because of his inability to fit in. He was greatly affected by the death of his father in 1987 when Joel was 18. Friendless and unable to make any meaningful relationships with women, he then began to consort with prostitutes and to collect press clippings of serial killers and also of prostitutes. His own first murder—of a prostitute—occurred in 1989. In time he was to murder at least 17 prostitutes, all by strangling, dismembering some, dumping others whole in steamer trunks, in oil drums or in open fields, always many miles from the site of the murder. When he was finally caught in 1993, the police discovered various ‘trophies’ (women’s clothing, ID cards, jewellery, photographs) from his victims in his desk drawers at home—all of which he had kept well hidden from his mother and sister.

 

Schizotypal

The closest approximation to schizotypal personality disorder I have encountered during an interview is in the person of Robert Bardo, the man who at age 19 shot to death the actress Rebecca Schaeffer in 1989. Ill at ease with women, Bardo was a markedly shy, unself-confident and eccentric young man, whose behaviour had been erratic and bizarre already at age 13—when he ran away from his home in Arizona all the way to Maine in hopes of striking up a relationship with Samantha Reed Smith (Orion, 1997, p. 75). Smith had gained prominence for having attracted the attention of Russia’s then leader, Yuri Andropov—via her letter to him about world peace. Later, Bardo was to stalk two celebrity singers, before fixating his obsessive love on Schaeffer. On the strength of her having sent him, at his request, a signed photo of herself, Bardo created a kind of shrine to her in his bedroom, plastering it with media pictures of her, and with videotapes of her shows. It was an example of his tendency to ‘magical thinking’—to suppose that the signed photo, presumably dumped in the mail by her agent along with hundreds of others, signified a ‘personal’ interest on her part in establishing a relationship with him. He had stalked her for 2 years, sending her numerous letters and attempting to call her at her studio. But when he saw her in her latest movie (Scenes from a Class Struggle in Beverly Hills) scantily clad and in bed with the main actor—he felt his ‘idol’ had betrayed him. Declaring in a note he wrote that he had an obsession with the unattainable and had to eliminate what he could not attain, he set out to kill Schaeffer. After getting her address through the Department of Motor Vehicles and purchasing a pistol, he travelled from Tucson to Los Angeles and shot her as she answered the doorbell. Additional details are to be found in the report of Katherine Ramsland (undated).

In my conversations with Bardo, who is now serving a life sentence in California, he came across as remarkably inappropriate and childish, speaking rapidly and non-stop, jumping from one topic to another, never addressing questions about why he felt the need to kill Rebecca Schaeffer or how he felt about the murder now, 18 years later. Instead he mentioned having travelled to Maine, hoping to meet Samantha Smith in 1983 (2 years before she died at 13 in a plane crash), with whom he managed to speak on two occasions, adding ‘I had no malice, no weapon’. He would then wander on to unrelated topics, such as his having spent kindergarten in Japan, or asking if I knew anything about methane frozen hydrates under the world’s oceans. He still writes celebrities for autographs, reassuring me he can not say which ones, so as to ‘protect their privacy’. He could not grasp the irony when I pointed out that he was now admirably protective of those unnamed celebrities whom he could not possibly harm, given his incarceration, but was not so protective of the actress he professed to love.

 

Autistic spectrum disorder

Although now considered for the most part genetically distinct from the schizophrenia spectrum disorders, autistic disorders exhibit certain phenotypic similarities with schizophrenic conditions, in the sense that one’s ability to relate meaningfully and empathically to other people is impaired. This empathic failure was one of the most prominent features of Seung-Hui Cho, the 23-year-old student at Virginia Tech who, in April of 2007, murdered 31 other students plus a teacher, before turning his pistols on himself. He was described by teachers and students alike as a sullen loner whose writings for his English class were laced with violence, scatology and hatred, triggering concern on the part of the faculty. This led to a psychiatric evaluation 2 years before the massacre. It was concluded in the perfunctory exam of December 2005 that Cho had a ‘flat affect’, but that his insight and judgement were ‘normal’. His demeanour in the classroom had been alarmingly inappropriate: he spoke to no one, made eye contact with no one, but would take snapshots of some of the girls in his class without their knowledge or permission. Other students remarked that he always had the same glare, and that he would look right past you as though you were not there. His family acknowledged that when he emigrated to the US from Korea at age nine, he was diagnosed as ‘autistic’, whereas his sister was normal (New York Post, April 20, 2007, p. 12). Cho made known his envy toward ordinary people in the venomous comments he made in a video he made shortly before the murders. His vengeance fuelled by feelings of persecution, he ranted: ‘Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, your trust funds weren’t enough. Your vodka and cognac weren’t enough. All your debauchery wasn’t enough . . . You had everything’.

 

Antisocial personality disorder vs psychopathy

Since a large proportion of violent crimes, especially those involving repeated acts of violence, are committed by persons whose profiles fit criteria for either antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) or psychopathy (according to the criteria of Robert Hare, Harpur, & Hakstian, 1990)—or both, examples are legion. But here we will restrict ourselves to just two vignettes, one illustrating ASPD; the other, psychopathy—chosen in such a way as to highlight the differences in the two concepts.

A murderer with ASPD. Born in Scotland in 1948 to a working-class family, Archibald McCafferty had been a troublesome child from the beginning (Kidd, 1997). His thefts, vandalism and fistfights had established him as ‘incorrigible’ already by age eight; when he was nine, his family moved bag and baggage to Sydney, Australia, in the vain hope that such a drastic change of venue would induce a drastic change, for the better, in Archie’s behaviour. This was not to be. Instead he committed an endless series of offences: stealing, burglary, car-theft, larceny, receiving stolen goods—although nothing more on the side of violence than the occasional fistfight. He was in and out of juvenile detention facilities, and by age 24 had accumulated 34 convictions and had spent many brief periods in jail. By this time he had been abusing many drugs, including alcohol, sedatives, and LSD. When still 24, he married Janice Redington—inspiring his family’s hopes that he would now settle down. This was not to be, either. Soon after the marriage, Archie cheated on his wife and when home, battered her. They had a son in 1973, but a few months later Janice, while breast feeding, fell asleep and accidentally smothered the baby to death. Enraged, and high on LSD, Archie would go to the cemetery and have hallucinations of his son’s voice, saying ‘Kill seven, avenge me, and I’ll come back to life!’ He gathered a rag-tag group of young men and set about killing random victims in hopes of reaching his total of seven. They were apprehended after the third murder, and Archie was sentenced to life in prison. He was as violent in prison, at first, as he had been outside, killing several inmates. But as he got into his forties, he grew more tractable, and after serving 23 years, was actually granted parole—with the proviso he returned to his native Scotland. Having in the meantime married a woman, Mandy Queen, who visited the prison, he went back with her to Edinburgh, where they had two children. Archie had earned the soubriquet ‘Mad Dog McCafferty’ in Australia, and this led the Scottish tabloid press to shame him, when he once more became a father, with the headline ‘Mad Dog has Pup’. This negative notoriety proved too much for Mandy, who eventually took the children back to Australia.

When I interviewed McCafferty, he was thus living alone, spending his time with his cronies, watching TV, and the like. He has lived a calm and trouble-free life for the past dozen years, and is a man of unusual candour and openness. He permits himself, he told me, no more than a speck of remorse for the past—largely so that the floodgates of horror over the senseless murders not open and engulf him in tears. McCafferty is an example

of the once antisocial man who nevertheless had, and retains, a moral centre that held him back from rape or torture even during his criminal days. The contrast between ASPD without psychopathy and psychopathy with ASPD and violence—will be evident in the next vignette.

A murderer with psychopathy. Arthur Shawcross was convicted in 1991 of the serial sexual homicide of (at least 11) prostitutes in the Rochester, New York area (Olsen, 1993). Born in 1945, he had a history of head injuries in childhood and was considered a moody outcast by his schoolmates. They described him as ‘diabolical’ and ‘evil’. Shawcross showed the ‘triad’ (Hellman & Blackman, 1966) of enuresis, animal torture and fire-setting that is said to be a predictor of later sexually violent crimes. Arrested for vandalism and arson in his teens, he was later sent for 2 years to prison in 1970 for burglary and arson. In 1972 he pretended to his wife (by then, his third) that he was going fishing—but actually he went trolling in his Watertown, New York area for children to molest. He killed a 10-year-old boy; shortly thereafter, he raped and killed an 8-year-old girl. The evidence for those crimes was not strong and he was able to plea-bargain down to manslaughter. Minimizing his crimes, he cut a fellow inmate while in prison after the inmate told the authorities that Arthur had acknowledged killing the children. Released after 12 years in prison, he migrated to Rochester, New York with his fourth wife, toward whom he was, as he had been with his other wives, short-tempered and physically abusive. He began raping, strangling and killing prostitutes—until he was finally arrested in 1990, and sentenced to life in prison.

In my interview with him his most notable characteristics, besides his jollity and lack of remorse, was his pathological lying and grandiosity. He spoke, for example, of his tour of duty in Vietnam in self-congratulatory, not to say Bunyanesque, terms, boasting of how he once ascended a mountain (‘so high I could put my fingers through a cloud’) where he confronted a mama-san wearing a grenade-belt, whom he shot to death and whose head he then stuck to a nearby tree, as a warning to the Vietcong. He also claimed to have killed and cannibalized two Vietnamese girls. In actual fact, he was never in the front lines at all. As for the prostitutes he killed, he bragged of having eaten the genitals of several of them, but others have speculated that he has embellished the description of his crimes to impress the people (including myself) who interview him. His tone in general was breezy and outgoing, affecting a candour about the most horrifying details that ultimately strikes the listener as glib and confabulated. He showed not a twinge of remorse about the prostitutes, of whom he said ‘One of them was HIV-positive, and I didn’t know which, so I felt I had to kill them all, to make sure they didn’t infect anybody else’. He pooh-poohed the murders, that is, as a kind of necessary hygienic measure. His story about the HIV status was never validated by the authorities.

 

Borderline personality disorder (BPD)

Susan Smith (Eftimiades, 1995) achieved notoriety for the murder of her two small sons in 1994, when she was 23. She and her husband had decided to end their marriage of 3 years, after which she began an affair with the son, Tom Findlay, of the boss at whose company she had been working. Finding her too clingy, Findlay wrote her a letter breaking off the relationship. He was also reluctant to be burdened with two small children who were not his own.

Susan then made what was made to appear as a suicide attempt, steering her car, with her two boys in the back seat, into a lake near her South Carolina home. At the last moment Susan jumped out of the car, leaving the boys to drown in the lake—freeing herself in this manner of the ‘burden’ of the two children, and thus hoping to revivify the relationship. She then pretended to the press that a ‘Black man’ had hijacked the car, from which she alone managed to escape alive. The authorities soon began to doubt her story, and 10 days later she made a public confession, as well as an apology to the Black community for stirring up racial division.

Her own father had committed suicide when Susan was six, after her mother divorced him. She remarried, and according to Susan, her stepfather subsequently molested her sexually (later acknowledging this at the time of her trial), at which point she made a suicide gesture with aspirin when she was 13. Five years later she got pregnant by a married man, and had the pregnancy terminated—but not before she made another suicide gesture for which she spent a week in a psychiatric hospital. After she married the man by whom she had her two sons, both partners cheated on the other throughout their stormy marriage, separating and reconciling many times before the final split. Considered a woman with BPD, with dependent features, she was ultimately sentenced to life in prison, to serve a minimum of 30 years.

 

Narcissistic personality disorder

The ubiquity of narcissistic traits in persons committing violent crimes makes it impossible to provide vignettes of all the different varieties. Some of the main motives in this large group include greed, jealousy, the wish to get rid of one sexual partner so as to be with another, betrayal or abandonment by a divorcing spouse, and the like. The three examples here involve greed, abandonment and the wish to be with another partner.

 

Narcissistic personality; murder prompted by greed.

Steven Benson was heir to the LancasterLeaf tobacco fortune, regulated by his mother, following the death of his father in 1980 (Anderson, 1987). He had an older sister, Carol Lynn, and a nephew, Scott—who was euphemistically referred to as his ‘adoptive brother’, when actually he was the illegitimate son of Carol Lynn. Although he did not throw money away on women or drugs, Steven’s prodigality consisted of hoping to make it big via various business schemes—all of which cost his mother huge sums in seed money and all of which flopped. His mother finally grew tired of these fruitless outlays, and was just on the verge of changing her will and disinheriting him. The very next day he planted two carefully prepared pipe bombs under his mother’s car, and arranged the seating such that his mother was in the passenger seat; 20-year-old Scott was in the driver’s set, and Carol Lynn was in back. When Scott started up the car, the explosion killed Scott and Mrs Benson immediately; Carol Lynn survived with burns. But the $10 000 000 inheritance he hoped to accelerate by this manoeuvre was not awarded him; instead, he received a 50-year prison sentence, since the scheme was quickly uncovered by the police. Carol Lynn testified that Steven had earlier embezzled $2 500 000 from his mother. Thirty-four at the time of the murders, in 1984, Benson will not be free until his mid-80s. To this day, he has never admitted he had done anything wrong. An old friend of the family told people ‘I don’t know that he ever grieved about what happened. I know he never thought what he did was wrong. I don’t think he’d admit it if he was standing in front of God’ (B O’Malley, 2005).

 

Narcissistic personality, murder prompted by abandonment.

Generosa Ammons was the illegitimate daughter of Marie-Thèrese LeGaye by an Italian sailor named Generosa (Crowley, 2005). She was given the name Generosa Rand after her mother’s subsequent marriage to Clarence Rand. Generosa was sexually abused either by an uncle or a friend of the family, and was warned not to reveal the secret. Generosa was moody and difficult—more so after the death of her mother when Generosa was nine in 1965. After learning of her illegitimacy, she became irritable, insolent and demanding; she was expelled from schools because of her incorrigible behaviour. Already, as an adolescent, she had a ferocious temper, and had a cordial hatred of her half-sister, Terry. Installing herself in New York City, where she aspired to do art work, she met Ted Ammons—an up-and-coming businessman specializing in leveraged buyouts. He became a multimillionaire. Wealth did not soften Generosa’s personality; to the contrary, she became arrogant, insufferable, snobbish and bullying—alienating all who came in contact with her. She flew into rages at the slightest criticism, and once threw out thousands of tulip bulbs the gardeners had planted on the Long Island estate she and Ted purchased—because they were the ‘wrong shade of yellow’. Unable to have children of her own, she and Ted adopted a pair of fraternal twins from the Ukraine. Punitive to the point of sadism with the children, she once forced a whole cookie bag down the throat of her daughter, Alexa, for the ‘sin’ of eating a cookie before dinner. As she grew more impossible to live with, Ted began having an affair. When she found out about the other woman, Generosa sued for divorce in 2000, demanding Ted’s entire estate. She had secret video cameras planted in the summer home, seeking to prove Ted was with the other woman. The film did capture Ted in bed— only sleeping with their puppy. Generosa then took up with an ex-convict, Dan Pelosi, whom she hired to kill Ted. Pelosi bludgeoned Ted to death with a blunt instrument. Generosa died of breast cancer in 2003; Dan was convicted the following year. Generosa remained unaware that her cruel behaviour would have driven any man to leave her—hence she could not see her role in the ‘abandonment’ she then experienced.

 

Narcissistic personality; murder prompted by the wish to be with another partner.

Charles Stuart (Sharkey, 1991), the eldest of four sons in a Boston working-class family, had been married briefly to a young attorney, Carol DeMaiti. When she was in her seventh month of pregnancy, he drove with her to Boston’s Black ghetto—the Roxbury area— and while parking in that area, shot her to death and shot himself in a non-fatal area. His plan was to blame her murder on a Black man from that neighbourhood, whom he referred to as ‘Willie Bennett’. The idea was to make the incident look like a robbery gone bad, which he had the ‘good fortune’ to survive, but which his wife lamentably did not. Charles conspired with one of his brothers to hide his wife’s jewellery along with the pistol he had used. But the brother had a pang of conscience, and confessed to the police. When the true story came out, just after New Year’s in 1990, Charles knew he would face both public obloquy for the murder of a pregnant wife, plus a very lengthy prison sentence. Adding to the public obloquy of course was his creating racial tensions by blaming the murder on a non-existent Black man (a ploy later imitated, as we saw, by Susan Smith). With both reputation and future life in ruins, he opted for suicide, hurling himself over Boston’s Tobin Bridge to his death.

A narcissistic man of the super-salesman type, he was in other respects conscientious, charming, and a ‘go-getter’ at work. He had a job in a fur-store as a salesman, and was ashamed of his blue-collar background. Carol’s pregnancy seemed to shatter his dreams of saving up money to start a restaurant, and he demanded she abort, which she refused to do. Meantime, he had fallen for a younger and prettier woman who worked in the same fur-store as he, and he hoped that killing Carol would free him to pursue that relationship, without the economic annoyances of alimony and child support.

 

Histrionic personality

Susan Wright (Francis, 2005) was a quite attractive former go-go dancer in Texas who began an affair with Jeff Wright, a fairly successful carpet salesman—whom she married when already 8months pregnant. He had kept putting off a proposal for marriage until the last minute. They had a son by that pregnancy and a daughter 2 years later. Jeff was addicted to cocaine and was an inveterate philanderer, pursuing other women at bars and clubs. As a result of his extramarital affairs, she contracted herpes. He was also physically abusive toward her, and was pathologically jealous, despite his philandering. Jeff got into debt because of his cocaine habit. The marriage deteriorated, and finally in January of 2003, Susan enticed him with a promise of sex—to let himself be tied up to the four corners of their bed. She began slicing his penis with a knife, and ultimately stabbed him, according to the pathologist’s count, 193 times. Distraught as to what to do, she dragged his body to a pit in the garden and buried it. She then attempted to paint over the blood spatter in the bedroom. Their dog dug up the body several days later, giving the lie to her story that Jeff had ‘gone away without telling her where’. This also gave the lie to the prosecution’s argument that Susan killed Jeff for insurance money, since, had the body remained undiscovered, she would not have collected for 7 years. The defence argued she was a battered woman who had ‘lost it’ in a fit of rage, but had to resort to trickery to dispatch a man twice her size. Her personality configuration was histrionic; she was not psychopathic and had no history of previous offences of any kind. Public opinion after her trial (she will serve a minimum of 12 1/2 years) was mostly favourable toward her: many viewed the killing as one of self-defence on the part of an abused and physically weaker woman who had gone berserk; others drew attention to the element of torture in stabbing his genital area before delivering the fatal wounds.

 

Obsessive-compulsive personality

John Emil List (Sharkey, 1990) had grown up in Michigan as the only child (born in 1925) in a fundamentalist Lutheran family. He earned a degree in accounting, but was noted as having poor social skills. In fact others described him as joyless, rigid, ultra-conservative, super-fastidious, priggish and compulsively neat. Still others added that he was boring, unspontaneous, detail-oriented, moralistic and given to rages over trifles. In business, however, he was unsuccessful, always getting over his head in debt, while aspiring to the grand life. When he married and later had three children, he moved his family, along with his ageing mother, to an 18-room mansion in Westfield, New Jersey, whose upkeep was far beyond his means. As his debts mounted, he decided to kill his entire family, which he accomplished on the 19th of November, 1971, shooting them one by one in the head. He considered his 16-year-old daughter, Patricia, a ‘slut’—for wearing miniskirts, and professed to himself that in killing his family, he was protecting them from the ‘sinful 70s’. He even wrote a letter to his pastor afterwards, mentioning that his family was succumbing to temptation, and that he was killing them so they would go to Heaven, before they had a chance to renounce their religion and go to the other place. His planning of the murders was so meticulous that they remained undiscovered for a whole month. Meantime, he fled to Colorado, and took a new name: Robert Clark. Later he married and moved to Virginia. It was only through the artistic skills of forensic anthropologist, Frank Bender, that List was caught. Bender created a likeness in clay of what List would probably look like 18 years after his disappearance—and had it shown on the TV, which led to an acquaintance recognizing the likeness. Sentenced to life in prison, he was interviewed in 2002 by Connie Chung of ABC-TV. When she asked how come he did not simply commit suicide when the debts became unmanageable, he told her that suicide would have barred him from Heaven, whereas he had a better chance of going to Heaven if he murdered his family and then sought forgiveness. He expected to be reunited with them after his passing, where they could continue to lead a pleasant, and this time—eternally debt-free, life.

 

Dependent personality

Three weeks short of her 20th birthday, Latasha Pulliam was arrested, along with her male companion, Dwight Jordan, a man in his mid-40s, for the brutal slaying of 6-year-old Shenosha Richards, a neighbour’s daughter whom they were babysitting in March of 1991. The details of who did what to the girl are unclear. It is known that Tank (Dwight’s nickname) was en ex-convict, and that he attempted to rape the girl. When his efforts failed, he inserted a small bottle in the girl’s vagina. One of the two also shoved a hammer handle in the girl’s rectum, and shortly thereafter strangled and stabbed her. Her body was left in the rubbish can outside the mother’s house, which the mother discovered when she returned home in the early evening. Altogether there were 42 areas of injury to the body, when examined by the forensic pathologist. Latasha confessed to the majority of the inflicted wounds, after she and Tank were apprehended, and mentioned to a female acquaintance 2 days after the murder that she had inserted the hammer and had stabbed the girl’s chest.

At the ensuing trial in Illinois, Latasha was sentenced to death (later commuted to life imprisonment); Tank, to life in prison. (The case is outlined in extenso in the October 2002 Prisoner Review Board report, State of Illinois vs Latasha Pulliam).

Latasha herself had been the victim of extreme abuse at the hands both of her mother and many of her mother’s male partners, who abused her sexually from about age five.

When I interviewed her in the prison, Latasha, now in her mid-30s, was articulate and bright. She spoke of a life-pattern in which she was easily led and easily influenced by older men, whom she sought out as ‘protectors’ and to whom she would cling. She was candid about having a ‘temper’— which led her at times to lash out at those who annoyed her. In her version of the events, she claimed that Tank did most of the damage, especially the insertion of objects, and that he was really the one whose actions led to Shenosha’s death. She added that Tank warned her that if she did not confess to the bulk of the fatal acts, he would see to it that Latasha’s own 2-year-old daughter would be killed. If this is true, then her confession was partly coerced. To ascertain the truth at this point may never be possible. Granted that most anyone would be reluctant to acknowledge carrying out torturous acts against a small child, there is a measure of credibility in Latasha’s descriptions. In the literature of crime, for example, it is most uncommon for women to force objects into the genital-area orifices in a kind of simulated rape. It would be more believable that her exconvict male partner was the perpetrator of those offences.

However this may be, Latasha showed evidence of dependent personality traits, alongside the antisocial traits. She did show genuine remorse for the girl’s murder and cried when speaking about it. Not in evidence were the classic ‘narcissistic’ psychopathic traits of callousness, mendacity, glibness, grandiosity, or inability to take responsibility for the crime of which she had partaken.

 

Explosive-irritable

Betty Broderick (Taubman, 1992), born in 1949 to an affluent East-Coast family, married Dan Broderick, who completed both medical and law schools. Dan became a wealthy malpractice attorney in San Diego, where they raised their four children. Theirs was an unhappy relationship, and after some dozen years, Dan began an affair with a 20-year-old woman, Linda Kolkena, whom he hired as a receptionist. Betty, suspecting the affair, changed from the calm, devoted wife she had been to a vituperative, violent, embittered woman given to cursing and defaming her husband in front of their children. In one of her rages she tried to burn the house down. Once Dan divorced, married Linda, and moved to another house, Betty once ran her car into the side of their house. Although Dan gave Betty $16 000 a month alimony, $500 was subtracted for each time she cursed at him or Linda on the phone. Sometimes her cursing nearly depleted her alimony money. Her 10-year-old boy pleaded with her to stop the cursing, to no avail. Shortly after Dan’s remarriage, Betty bought a pistol, sneaked into their house and shot both Dan and Linda to death—for which she is now serving a life sentence.

 

Sadistic personality

Sadistic personality disorder, as it had been defined in the Appendix of DSM-III-R (1987), is common among persons convicted of violent crimes, especially rape and serial sexual homicide (Stone, 1998; Stone, 2001; Stone, Butler, & Young, 2007).

The example here concerns David Parker Ray (Glatt, 2002). Ray grew up in rural New Mexico, the son of a violent alcoholic father. Ray may have committed his first murder at 13, after tying a woman to a tree. Outwardly, he was engaging and well-liked. He was married several times and had a son and a daughter. He was mellow and not abusive toward either. Fantasies of bondage became more and more prominent; by age 30 he could masturbate to orgasm only by fantasizing murdering women. In his 40s he began kidnapping and torturing women, eventually creating his so-called Toy Box, consisting of a double-wide mobile home that he outfitted with pulleys and chains for immobilizing women, extra-thick dildoes with embedded nails, stretching devices, whips, and other torture paraphernalia. He prepared a17-page-long manifesto that he taped and broadcast to his victims, outlining in the most contemptuous and humiliating terms the tortures they were about to undergo. A gifted artist, he also drew pornographic ‘blueprints’ of the various torture devices, showing how the women would appear when these were applied to their bodies. Ray and his assistant, Cindy Hendy, were arrested after one victim managed to escape and run, naked and bleeding, to a neighbour’s house. When the police inventoried the Toy Box, they found 100 videotapes of women being tortured. Ray died after 2 years in prison at age 62 in 2001. Cindy Hendy claimed that Ray ultimately killed about 40 women, disposing of their bodies either in a nearby lake or in the desert. Because of Ray’s ability to blend in with the community as an efficient and friendly park ranger, he was able to carry on his double-life for 30 years or more undetected.

 

Depressive personality

Dr Bruce Rowan came from a large family in the North-West (Smith, 2000). He was of a depressive disposition all his life, struggling with feelings of unworthiness and with suicidal impulses. He was hospitalized briefly while in the middle of medical school, and then took a year off to help the poor in various Third World countries. He made a serious suicide attempt toward the end of medical school. A girlfriend, Debbie, stuck by him, afraid that if she left him he would kill himself. They married, and adopted a girl after they toured the world, again in Third World countries to help the poor, settling down afterwards in Washington state. Debbie wanted to adopt a second child, which Bruce was reluctant to do. He took out large insurance policies on both their lives, meantime growing increasingly resentful of Debbie’s attention to their child, and of his having to do chores around the house while she took care of the baby. At some point Bruce ‘snapped’, and in March of 1998 he killed Debbie with an axe, placing her then in a car which he pushed down an incline, making it look like an accident. He then stabbed himself, albeit not fatally. The murder took place the day the insurance policy became effective. Despite the obvious planning, his attorney was able to mount a successful insanity defence, and Dr Rowan was remanded to a forensic hospital. His personality profile was considered depressive with narcissistic features.

 

Hypomanic personality

Richard Minns (Finstad, 1991), born in 1929, had made a fortune creating a chain of gyms in Texas. When he was about almost 50, married with four children, he fell in love with a medical student and beauty queen, Barbara Piotrowski. Those who knew Minns described him as a ruthless businessman: hypomanic, arrogant, egotistical, vengeful, violent, flashy, jealous, intense, sensation-seeking, manipulative and mendacious. He worked out in his own gyms compulsively, boasting of a 20-year-old man’s body when he was already 50. Deeply infatuated and obsessed with Barbara, he sabotaged the affair, lying to her that he was not married. Ultimately he did divorce, but refused to make an adequate settlement with his wife. He grew progressively more possessive and jealous of Barbara, and became physically abusive, punching her several times. She finally packed her things and moved out. Infuriated, Minns hired hit men to kill her. She survived their shots, but was paralysed, and now runs health clubs for paralytic children. Minns escaped justice, fleeing to Europe, where he used five aliases (including Richard O’Toole and Harlan Richardson) and a variety of passports. He returned 12 years later to the US in 1994, where he was arrested and deported to Ireland. His main personality characteristics are, besides hypomanic, narcissistic and sadistic.

 

Discussion

One way of understanding personality disorders is to view them as conditions that constrict the range of options that would otherwise be available to adapt to difficult life situations. Philosophical debates about ‘free will’ often hinge on this point: many individuals with personality disorders behave as though programmed unavoidably (that is, without free will) to react along predictable and characteristic lines. Thus we picture the jealous man who assaults or kills his wife for a suspected infidelity as having a drastically reduced menu of responses: look the other way and be mocked as a ‘wimp’, or be a ‘man’ and kill her.

As shown in the examples, violent crimes can be associated with almost any personality disorder, with the possible exception of avoidant PD. The persons committing the crimes referred to in the examples behaved as though there was ‘no way out’ of a difficult or threatening life circumstance except via recourse to violence. For Robert Bardo there was no other girl in the world besides actress Rebecca Schaeffer (with whom he had no relationship at all apart from the fantasized one taking place in his own head), and when she ‘betrayed’ him by appearing in a sexy role in a film, she now merited what Bardo regarded as ‘righteous slaughter’—as her punishment.

As for the base rate of violent crimes in the US, statistics gathered by the US Department of Justice for the years 1986 to 2005 (http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ 05cius/data/table_01.html) show a violent-crimes rate of 469/100 000 inhabitants in 2005. Included within that figure are murder (and non-negligent manslaughter) 16 700 (5.6/100 K); forcible rape 93 900 (31.7/100 K); robbery 417 100 (140.7/100 K) and aggravated assault 862 900 (291.1/100 K).

Certain personality disorders are distinctly over-represented in the annals of violent crime. Besides narcissistic personality or traits thereof— which underlie almost all types of violent crime, antisocial, psychopathic, sadistic, paranoid and explosive-irritable types are particularly common in this realm. Persons with DSM’s ‘Anxious Cluster’ disorders are much less prone, though not immune, to violent crime. Robert Hare (1993) has estimated that psychopaths may constitute 1% of the general population, but 10 to 30% of prison inmates, and are responsible for more than 50% of the serious crimes committed (p. 87). And among men committing serial sexual homicide, 90% are psychopaths (Stone, 2001). It is well known that males are more prone to violence than females—by a factor ranging from 5 : 1 to 8 or 9 : 1, as reflected in the larger number (in these ranges) of male units to female units in forensic hospitals and prisons.

Mass murder, commonly defined as the murder of three or more persons in one incident, is all but unknown among women. The US Bureau of Justice prefers a definition requiring four or more murders at one time. Three categories are underlined: family annihilators, persons with mental defects and (the largest group) disgruntled workers. The usual weapon is a gun; rarely, a knife or arson. In my own review of full-length biographies, media articles and Internet data of mass murderers, numbering altogether in the hundreds, there are almost no women, especially if one holds to the criterion of three deaths. Two women attempted to murder

several persons, wounding several, but killing only one each; a third woman, Jennifer Sanmarco—a mentally-ill and disgruntled employee—shot to death six persons before turning the gun on herself. The lethality among the males was far greater: in my series, the average number of deaths was 13.3, ranging from 3 to 87 (the latter resulting from a jealousy-driven act of arson in a nightclub).

As for the decision to act violently, Stephen Hart (1998) has outlined several factors belonging to the domains of the biological (hormonal—viz., testosterone; neurotransmitter—as in low serotonin; neurological insult—as in intoxication with alcohol and other substances), the psychological (personality disorder, cognitive impairment) and the social (machismo, faulty child-rearing, lack of employment).

Compared with antisocial and psychopathic personalities, less attention has been drawn to the connection between violent crime and schizoid PD or autistic disorders. In the ranks of serial killers (here limited to men committing serial sexual homicide), however, fully half endorse the characteristics of schizoid PD (Stone, 2001), although they also showed psychopathic and sadistic attributes. It is meaningful, however, that Schizoid PD is over-represented among serial killers, to a level 50 times greater than in the general population. The key qualities here are aloofness and an indifference to the suffering of others, as though the victims were hardly distinguished from inanimate objects. This indifference is all the more striking in certain autistic-spectrum persons with their near-zero empathy, as in the case of Seung-Hui Cho in the example earlier (Baron-Cohen, 2003). Another striking example along these lines is that of the serial paedophile killer, Tsutomu Miyazaki (Ichihashi, 2001) in Japan: the schizoid man who cut off the hands of the four children he killed, and mailed the hands to their parents.

In our study of 543 biographies of murderers, where data pertaining to all eight of the DSM-IIIR items were available for 378, factor analysis suggested three main subtypes. In one, enjoyment of the victim’s suffering was the key item; the other two factors involved domination and humiliation (Stone et al., 2007). As we noted in that chapter, there are problems with the DSM definition of sexual sadism, insofar as serial killers like David Parker Ray or Mike DeBardeleben (Stone, 2004) meet criterion A (sexual arousal to the suffering of the victim) but seldom, criterion B (clinically significant distress . . .), which men indulging in actual sex-sadistic practices do not usually experience. Proneness to violent crime is, at all events, presumably greatest in those motivated by enjoyment of the victim’s suffering. There are many examples of men and women whose sadistic traits are confined to domination and humiliation. In such persons—considered by others to be cruel parents or spouses—physical abuse, torture, or grievously bodily harm are not part of the picture (and for this very reason do not earn much attention from books or the press). Analogously, there are many persons with psychopathic personalities, or at least prominent psychopathic traits, who commit ‘whitecollar’ or political crimes not involving violence, and who are less apt to be identified either in the media or in epidemiological surveys.

Even within the domain of violent crimes, more attention is paid to instrumental than to impulsive offences. This difference is particularly discernible in the study of spousal murder. Men who kill their wives (committing, that is, uxoricide) suddenly and on impulse (usually as the wife is about to divorce) often show predominantly explosive-irritable or else depressive personality traits. Their narcissistic traits, while present, may be somewhat in the shadows. But a man who plots and schemes to kill his wife, and then stages the murder to look accidental or as though committed by a stranger (as in the case of hiring a ‘hit man’), will be regularly found to harbour strong narcissistic traits, often meeting full DSM criteria for Narcissistic PD. In my series of 111 uxoricides, for example, staging could be documented in 37 cases (33.3%). Another 17 (15.3%) of the husbands hired a hit man to kill their wives, and another 4 (3.6%) caused the body of the murdered wife to disappear by tossing the body in the ocean. Only six of the husbands killed on impulse—as the wife was suing for divorce. Two of these husbands were seriously depressed and then committed suicide. In contrast over half of uxoricides mentioned in the press were impulsive murders. From the standpoint of the public, the impulsive spousal murders are noteworthy, but seldom book-worthy. This was true also of wives that killed their husbands. Of the 43 in my book series, 10 could be considered impulsive women, some narcissistic (e.g., Betty Broderick); others, not (Susan Wright). The remaining 33 were narcissistic ‘schemers’: 21 had murdered their husbands for insurance money.

BPD was a characteristic of 17 women in the book-series. In line with the hypothesis relative to evolutionary psychiatry formulated by McGuire and Troisi (1998), the traits of BPD can best be understood as ‘. . . indices of failed efforts to achieve goals that require others’ participation’(p 197). Borderline persons, that is—the polar opposites of schizoid persons—are attempting, desperately, albeit unsuccessfully, to interact with others and to form close attachments with others. This was true of almost all the 17 borderline women: they killed a husband in order to be with a new lover or (in two cases) killed their own children to ‘free themselves’ for a new relationship; several killed rivals out of jealousy. Seven had been incest victims, two of whom appeared to seek symbolic revenge against the men who had violated them by killing older men (Barbara Hoffman (Harter, 1990), and Aileen Wuornos (Russell, 2002)). Still another, having told her boyfriend that he had to marry her because she was pregnant, killed a 9-months-pregnant woman and stole her fetus, claiming it as her own (Darci Pierce (Hughes, 1992)).

Murder, like suicide, is a rare event. We know more about the personality structure linked with certain rather uncommon types of murder than we do about some of the common types (bar-room brawls ending in murder; drug-deals gone bad, etc.). We know, for example, that mass murderers are about 90% likely to show strong paranoid personality features. But as to the Bayesian algebra of the reverse situation: given a paranoid personality, what is the risk of violent crime?—we can say very little, absent the difficult epidemiological research necessary to fill in the unknowns of the equation. As matters stand, we can say that the personality types most closely linked with violence are psychopathy, sadistic, and antisocial personalities. To approach analysis of risk beyond that point requires data concerning a host of intervening variables: environmental traumata, history of head injury or brain disease, history and types of substance abuse, cultural factors, signs of cognitive limitation or impairment, and the like.

Topics for further research would include attention to the tendency among certain violent criminals to hurt or torture animals. In my study of 111 men who killed their wives, compared with the 141 committing serial sexual homicide, animal torture was significantly more common in the serial killers: 60 of 118 vs 11 of 59 among the uxoricides—where adequate data were available (c2 = 17.9, p < 0.001). Among the serial killers, those who indulged in prolonged torture of their victims—were more apt to have a history of animal torture in their youth, when compared with serial killers who did not subject their victims to torture (there were eight of 31 animal-torturers in the group that did not torture their victims; 20 of 41 in the prolongedtorture group: c2 = 3.92; p < 0.05). It is possible that early awareness of children and adolescents who torture cats and dogs especially—could lead to early treatment. The treatment would aim at enhancing compassion for living creatures, and ultimately to a lessening of the tendency, as the adult years approach, to commit torturous crimes against persons.

Criminologists are well aware of the connection between mass murder and guns. In the US, where there are 90 guns for every 100 citizens (US Department of Justice: www.ncjrs.gov/ pdffiles/165476.pdf) it is politically impossible to reduce gun ownership in any significant way. Some decrease in mass murder might be effected nevertheless, if employees were more sensitive in the handling of dismissals, particularly of employees known to be solitary and prone to suspiciousness and grudge-holding; i.e. ‘paranoid’.

The distinction between psychopathy and DSM’s antisocial PD is important in the estimation of recidivism risk, given the high risk associated with psychopathy (Hemphill, Templeman, Wong, & Hare, 1998). In the assessment—and ultimately in the sentencing—of persons committing violent crimes, greater emphasis should be placed on this diagnostic distinction. ‘Time served’ should be based optimally on the risk for future dangerousness (as best we can estimate this), rather than on arbitrary sentences of ‘x’ years for rape, ‘y’ years for murder, etc. The prognosis will often be better for those who do not meet criteria for psychopathy, however flamboyant their careers may have been for antisocial behaviours in their 20s and 30s. Among the former Los Angeles gang members (from the ‘Crips’ and other gangs) that I interviewed recently—men now in their late 40s—those who had long antisocial careers, but were not psychopathic, had changed dramatically, had entered a state of redemption and were now— after having been incarcerated for many years— leading constructive lives in the community (often working to rehabilitate troubled youths in the same gangs they had formerly belonged to). This was the case with the famous Crips leader, Tookie Williams (2004)—whose autobiography shows his evolution from a violent antisocial ‘gang-banger’ to a (still incarcerated) Nobel Peace-Prize nominee for his books cautioning young men and women not to follow in his footsteps. This was not the case with those meeting psychopathic criteria. For reasons of this sort, careful assessment of personality could contribute importantly to improvement in public policy vis-à-vis violent offenders.

 

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Address for correspondence to: Michael H. Stone, MD, Professor of Clinical Psychiatry: Columbia College of Physicians & Surgeons, Ap’t 114, 225 Central Park West, New York City, NY 10024. Email: mhstonemd@yahoo.com