Columbine — Chapter no 40

40. Psychopath

I will choose to kill," Eric wrote. Why? His explanations didn't add up.

Because we were morons? How would that make a kid kill? To most readers, Eric's rants just sounded nuts.

Dr. Fuselier had the opposite reaction. Insanity was marked by mental confusion. Eric Harris expressed cold, rational calculation. Fuselier ticked off Eric's personality traits: charming, callous, cunning, manipulative, comically grandiose, and egocentric, with an appalling failure of empathy.

It was like reciting the Psychopathy Checklist.

Fuselier spent the next twelve weeks contesting his theory. That's how he approached a problem: develop a hypothesis and then search for every scrap of evidence to refute it. Test it against alternate explanations, build the strongest possible case to support them, and see if the hypothesis fails. If it withstands that, it's solid. Psychopathy held.

Diagnosis didn't solve the crime, but it laid the foundation. Ten years afterward, Eric still baffled the public, which insisted on assessing his motives through a "normal" lens. Eric was neither normal nor insane.

Psychopathy (si-COP-uh-thee) represents a third category. Psychopathic brains don't function like those in either of the other groups, but they are consistently similar to one another. Eric killed for two reasons: to demonstrate his superiority and to enjoy it.

To a psychopath, both motives make sense. "Psychopaths are capable of behavior that normal people find not only horrific but baffling," wrote Dr.

Robert Hare, the leading authority on psychopaths. "They can torture and mutilate their victims with about the same sense of concern that we feel when we carve a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner."

Eric saw humans as chemical compounds with an inflated sense of their own worth. "its just all nature, chemistry, and math," he wrote. "you die. burn, melt, evaporate, decay."

Psychopaths have likely plagued mankind since the beginning, but they are still poorly understood. In the 1800s, as the fledgling field of psychology began classifying mental disorders, one group refused to fit.

Every known psychosis was marked by a failure of reasoning or a debilitating ailment: paralyzing fear, hallucinations, voices, phobias, and so on. In 1885, the term psychopath was introduced to describe vicious human predators who were not deranged, delusional, or depressed. They just enjoyed being bad.

Psychopaths are distinguished by two characteristics. The first is a ruthless disregard for others: they will defraud, maim, or kill for the most trivial personal gain. The second is an astonishing gift for disguising the first. It's the deception that makes them so dangerous. You never see him coming. (It's usually a him–more than 80 percent are male.) Don't look for the oddball creeping you out. Psychopaths don't act like Hannibal Lecter or Norman Bates. They come off like Hugh Grant, in his most adorable role.

In 1941, Dr. Hervey Cleckley revolutionized the understanding of psychopathy with his book The Mask of Sanity. Egocentrism and failure of empathy were the underlying drivers, but Cleckley chose his title to reflect the element that trumped those. If psychopaths were merely evil, they would not be a major threat. They wreak so much havoc that they should be obvious. Yet the majority have consistently eluded the law.

Cleckley worried about his title metaphor: psychopathy is not a two- dimensional cover that can be lifted off the face like a Halloween mask. It permeates the offender's personality. Joy, grief, anxiety, or amusement–he can mimic any on cue. He knows the facial expressions, the voice modulation, and the body language. He's not just conning you with a scheme, he's conning you with his life. His entire personality is a fabrication, with the purpose of deceiving suckers like you.

Psychopaths take great personal pride in their deceptions and extract tremendous joy from them. Lies become the psychopath's occupation, and when the truth will work, they lie for sport. "I like to con people," one of Hare's subjects told a researcher during an extended interview. "I'm conning you right now."

Lying for amusement is so profound in psychopaths, it stands out as their signature characteristic. "Duping delight," psychologist Paul Ekman dubbed it.

Cleckley spent five decades refining his research and publishing four further editions of The Mask of Sanity. It wasn't until the 1970s that Robert Hare isolated twenty characteristics of the condition and created the Psychopathy Checklist, the basis for virtually all contemporary research. He also wrote the definitive book on the malady, Without Conscience.

The terminology got muckier. Sociopath was in introduced in the 1930s, initially as a broader term for antisocial behavior. Eventually, psychopath and sociopath became virtually synonymous. (Varying definitions for the latter have led to distinctions by some experts, but these are not uniformly accepted.) The primary reason for the competing terms is that each was adopted in different fields: criminologists and law enforcement personnel prefer psychopath; sociologists tend toward sociopath. Psychologists and psychiatrists are split, but most experts on the condition use psychopath, and the bulk of the research is based on Hare's checklist. A third term, antisocial personality disorder, or APD, was introduced in the 1970s and remains the only diagnosis included in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV). However, it covers a much broader range of disorders than does psychopath and has been roundly rejected by leading researchers.

So where do psychopaths come from? Researchers are divided, with the majority suggesting a mixed role: nature leading, nurture following. Dr.

Hare believes psychopaths are born with a powerful predisposition, which can be exacerbated by abuse or neglect. A correlation exists between psychopaths and unstable homes–and violent upbringings seem to turn fledgling psychopaths more vicious. But current data suggests those conditions do not cause the psychopathy; they only make a bad situation worse. It also appears that even the best parenting may be no match for a child born to be bad.

Symptoms appear so early, and so often in stable homes with normal siblings, that the condition seems to be inborn. Most parents report having been aware of disturbing signs before the child entered kindergarten. Dr.

Hare described a five-year old girl repeatedly attempting to flush her kitten down the toilet. "I caught her just as she was about to try again," the mother said. "She seemed quite unconcerned, maybe a bit angry–about being found out." When the woman told her husband, the girl calmly denied the whole thing. Shame did not register; neither did fear. Psychopaths are not

individuals losing touch with those emotions. They never developed them from the start.

Hare created a separate screening device for juveniles and identified hallmarks that appear during the school years: gratuitous lying, indifference to the pain of others, defiance of authority figures, unresponsiveness to reprimands or threatened punishment, petty theft, persistent aggression, cutting classes and breaking curfew, cruelty to animals, early experimentation with sex, and vandalism and setting fires. Eric bragged about nine of the ten hallmarks in his journal and on his Web site–for most of them, relentlessly. Only animal cruelty is missing.

At some point–as either a cause or an effect of psychopathy–the psychopath's brain begins processing emotional responses differently. Early in his career, Dr. Hare recognized the anatomical difference. He submitted a paper analyzing the unusual brain waves of psychopaths to a scientific journal, which rejected it with a dismissive letter. "Those EEGs couldn't have come from real people," the editor wrote.

Exactly! Hare thought. Psychopaths are that different. Eric Harris baffled the public because we could not conceive of a human with his motives.

Even Kate Battan would describe him as a teenager trying to act like an adult. But the angst we associate with teenagers was the least of Eric's drives. His brain was never scanned, but it probably would have shown activity unrecognizable as human to most neurologists.

The fundamental nature of a psychopath is a failure to feel. A psychopath's grasp of fear and suffering is particularly weak. Dr. Hare's research team spent decades studying psychopaths in prison populations.

They asked one psychopath to describe fear. "When I rob a bank, I notice that the teller shakes or becomes tongue-tied," he said. "One barfed all over the money." He found that puzzling. The researcher pushed him to describe his own fear. How would he feel with the gun pointed at him? The convict said he might hand over the money, get the hell out, or find a way to turn the tables. Those were responses, the researcher said. How would you feel?

Feel? Why would he feel?

Researchers often compare psychopaths to robots or rogue computers, like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey– programmed only to satisfy their own objectives. That's the closest approximation of their behavior, but the metaphor lacks nuance. Psychopaths feel something; Eric seemed to show

sadness when his dog was sick, and he occasionally felt twinges of regret toward humans. But the signals come through dimly.

Cleckley described this as a poverty of emotional range. That's a tricky concept, because psychopaths develop a handful of primitive emotions closely related to their own welfare. Three have been identified: anger, frustration, and rage. Psychopaths erupt with ferocious bouts of anger, which can get them labeled "emotional." Look more closely, Cleckley advised: "The conviction dawns on those who observe him carefully that here we deal with a readiness of expression rather than a strength of feeling." No love. No grief. Not even sorrow, really, or hope or despair about his own future. Psychopaths feel nothing deep, complex, or sustained.

The psychopath was prone to "vexation, spite, quick and labile flashes of quasi-affection, peevish resentment, shallow moods of self-pity, puerile attitudes of vanity, absurd and showy poses of indignation."

Cleckley could have been describing Eric Harris's journal. "how dare you think that I and you are part of the same species when we are sooooooooo different," Eric wrote. "you arent human. you are a robot…. and if you pissed me off in the past, you will die if I see you."

Indignation runs strong in the psychopath. It springs from a staggering ego and sense of superiority. Psychopaths do not feel much, but when they lose patience with inferiors, they can really let it rip. It doesn't go any deeper. Even an earthworm will recoil if you poke it with a stick. A squirrel will exhibit frustration if you tease it by offering a peanut, then repeatedly snatching it back. Psychopaths make it that far up the emotional ladder, but they fall far short of the average golden retriever, which will demonstrate affection, joy, compassion, and empathy for a human in pain.

Researchers are still just beginning to understand psychopaths, but they believe psychopaths crave the emotional responses they lack. They are nearly always thrill seekers. They love roller coasters and hang gliding, and they seek out high-anxiety occupations, like ER tech, bond trader, or Marine. Crime, danger, impoverishment, death–any sort of risk will help.

They chase new sources of excitement because it is so difficult for them to sustain.

They rarely stick with a career; they get bored. Even as career criminals, psychopaths underperform. They "lack clear goals and objectives, getting involved in a wide variety of opportunistic offenses, rather than specializing the way typical career criminals do," Cleckley wrote. They make careless

mistakes and pass up stunning opportunities, because they lose interest.

They perform spectacularly in short bursts–a few weeks, a few months, a yearlong big con–then walk away.

Eric spent his young life that way: he should have been a 4.0 student, but collected A's, B's, and C's. He made one yearlong commitment, to NBK, but he had no ambition, zero plans for his life. He was one of the smartest kids in his high school, but apparently never bothered to apply to college.

No job prospects either, beyond Blackjack. Despite a childhood of soldier fantasies, a military father, and a stated desire for a career in the Marines, Eric made no attempt to enlist. When a recruiter cold-called him during the last week of his life, he met the guy, but never returned the call to find out whether he had been accepted.

Rare killer psychopaths nearly always get bored with murder, too. When they slit a throat, their pulse races, but it falls just as fast. It stays down–no more joy from cutting throats for a while; that thrill has already been spent.

A second, less common approach to the banality of murder seems to be the dyad: murderous pairs who feed off each other. Criminologists have been aware of the dyad phenomenon for decades: Leopold and Loeb, Bonnie and Clyde, the Beltway snipers of 2002. Because dyads account for only a fraction of mass murderers, little research has been conducted on them. We know that the partnerships tend to be asymmetrical. An angry, erratic depressive and a sadistic psychopath make a combustible pair. The psychopath is in control, of course, but the hotheaded sidekick can sustain his excitement leading up to the big kill. "It takes heat and cold to make a tornado," Dr. Fuselier is fond of saying. Eric craved heat, but he couldn't sustain it. Dylan was a volcano. You could never tell when he might erupt.

Day after day, for more than a year, Dylan juiced Eric with erratic jolts of excitement. They played the killing out again and again: the cries, the

screams, the smell of burning flesh…

Eric savored the anticipation.

____

Dr. Hare's EEGs suggested the psychopathic brain operates differently, but he could not be sure how or why. After Eric's death, a colleague advanced our understanding with a new technology. Functional magnetic resonance

imaging tests (fMRIs) create a picture of the brain, with light indicating active regions. Dr. Kent Kiehl wired subjects up and showed them a series of flash cards. Half contained emotionally charged words like rape, murder, and cancer; the others were neutral, like rock or doorknob. Normal people found the disturbing words disturbing: the brain's emotional nerve center, called the amygdala, lit up. The psychopathic amygdalae were dark. The emotional flavors that color our days are invisible to psychopaths.

Dr. Kiehl repeated the experiment with pictures, including graphic shots of homicides. Again, psychopaths' amygdalae were unaffected; but the language center activated. They seemed to be analyzing the emotions instead of experiencing them.

"He responds to events that others find arousing, repulsive, or scary with the words interesting and fascinating," Dr. Hare said. For psychopaths, horror is purely intellectual. Their brains search for words to describe what the rest of us would feel. That fits the profile: psychopaths react to pain or tragedy by assessing how they can use the situation to manipulate others.

So what's the treatment for psychopathy? Dr. Hare summarized the research on a century of attempts in two words: nothing works. It is the only major mental affliction to elude treatment. And therapy often makes it worse. "Unfortunately, programs of this sort merely provide the psychopath with better ways of manipulating, deceiving, and using people," Hare wrote.

Individual therapy can be a bonanza: one-on-one training, to perfect the performance. "These programs are like a finishing school," a psychopath boasted to Dr. Hare's team. "They teach you how to put the squeeze on people."

Eric was blessed with at least two unintentional coaches: Bob Kriegshauser, in the juvenile Diversion program, and his psychiatrist, Dr.

Albert. Eric was a quick study. The notes in his Diversion file document a steady improvement, session by session.

Oddly, a large number of psychopaths spontaneously improve around middle age. The phenomenon has been observed for decades, but not explained. Otherwise, psychopaths appear to be lost causes. Within the psychiatric community, that has drawn stiff resistance to diagnosing minors with the condition. But clearly, many juveniles are well on their way.

Dr. Kiehl has a mobile fMRI lab and a research team funded by the University of New Mexico. He mapped about five hundred brains at three prison systems in 2008. Because of the skewed sample pool, about 20

percent met the criteria for psychopathy. He believes that answers about the causes and treatment of psychopathy are coming within reach.

While Eric was devising his attack, Dr. Hare was working on a regimen to address his kind. Hare began by reexamining the data on those spontaneous improvers. From adolescence to their fifties, psychopaths showed virtually no change in emotional characteristics but improved dramatically in antisocial behavior. The inner drives did not change, but their behavior did.

Hare believes that these psychopaths might simply be adapting. Fiercely rational, they figured out that prison was not working for them. So Hare proposed using their self-interest to the public advantage. The program he developed accepts that psychopaths will remain egocentric and uncaring for life but will adhere to rules if it's in their own interest. "Convincing them that there are ways they can get what they want without harming others" is the key, Hare said. "You say to them, 'Most people think with their hearts, not with their heads, and your problem is you think too much with your head. So let's change the problem into an asset.' They understand that."

While Eric was in high school, a juvenile treatment center in Wisconsin began a program developed independently but based on that approach. It also addressed the psychopathic drives for instant gratification and control: subjects were rated every night on adherence to rules and rewarded with extended privileges the next day. The program was not designed specifically for fledgling psychopaths, but it produced significant improvements in that population. A four-year study published in 2006 concluded that they were 2.7 times less likely to become violent than kids with similar psychopathy scores in other programs.

For the first time in the history of psychopathy, a treatment appears to have worked. It awaits replication.

Psychopathy experts are cautiously optimistic about coming advances. "I believe that within ten years we will have a much better perspective on psychopathy than we do now," Dr. Kiehl said. "Ideally we will be able to help effectively manage the condition. I would not say that there is a cure on the horizon, but I do hope that we can implement effective management strategies."