The Appeal of the Psychopath
GEWEN, BARRY
Writers & Writing THE APPEAL ?F ??E PSYCHOPATH BY BARRY GEWEN The psychopath may indeed be the perverted and dangerous front-runner of a new kind of personality which could become the...
...Life for them is a constant game of wits where nothing is real except their own desires...
...Acceleration of another kind is detailed in Masquerade, a book that is a variation on the theme since its focus is the victim, a Detroit psychologist with psychopathic tendencies...
...Norman Mailer GENRES tell us about ourselves...
...Compulsive behavior of the type described in these books usually culminates in either violent death or capture, and a standard feature of the genre is the trial scene...
...In May 1977, 20-year-old Colleen Stan was kidnapped while hitchhiking in northern California by Cameron and Janice Hooker, in order to fulfill his fantasy of having a young woman completely in his control...
...Unable to pay, he started blowing up people...
...The World Is Yours" flashes a sign in Howard Hawks' Scarf ace, inherently mocking the film's antihero...
...Much of the treatment she endured replicated The Story ofO, including a labial ring that Hooker attached to her genitals...
...Writers & Writing THE APPEAL ?F ??E PSYCHOPATH BY BARRY GEWEN The psychopath may indeed be the perverted and dangerous front-runner of a new kind of personality which could become the central expression of human nature before the twentiethcenturyisover...
...At this point, the audience has conceded that civilization can no longer be held in check, that even in fantasy it must inevitably triumph...
...who prosecuted the captor of the 'girl in the box.' " Noteworthy, too, is the fact that in the weakest book of the lot, Appointment for Murder, the information is skimpiest and the recounting most superficial, demonstrating that the demands of accuracy do not conflict with the demands of formula...
...The restraints of morality, of right and wrong, are for others to obey...
...In Warshow's view, these movies convey "the modern sense of tragedy...
...I've known him all my life...
...Three of them proclaim "A True Story of...
...The gangster is the urbanite/wexcellence, the man of the city driven by the need for success until it kills him...
...In this genre, the criminal does not exist outside of society like the gangster...
...After selling some of his creations to the Mormon Church, his crooked wheeling and dealing grew with centrifugal speed, until he was in debt to trusting investors for over $1 million...
...You don't read Agatha Christie," Edmund Wilson once wrote dismissively, "you run through it to see the problem worked out...
...Psycho is relevant here...
...We can begin by noting what it does not tell us...
...Throughout this century, individuals have worried about the growth of the bureaucratic, technological society, the spread of rationality into every facet of our lives...
...They are awesome manipulators who exercise extraordinary control over their acquaintances, especially women...
...esthetically, because any other approach would do violence to their subject...
...In other words, they are psychopaths...
...The message is no more true for him than for the members of the audience, who have the gratification of watching him clamor to his doom...
...He is beyond the control of the computer, he cannot be put into the iron cage...
...When his misdeeds are brought to light, his friends, neighbors and family frequently react with disbelief...
...Human beings are merely objects to be used and, if necessary, destroyed...
...The Mormon Murders: A True Story of Greed, Forgery, Deceit and Death (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 458 pp., $19.95) by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith...
...In the first three weeks of her captivity, Stan was kept naked and bound in a three-foot square container with a sensorydeprivation box over her head...
...They are, in short, vade mecums of original sin...
...Glennon Engleman, the dentist in Appointment for Murder, killed seven people, mainly by persuading women to marry men he selected and murdering them for the insurance...
...A consequence is that evil must be seen to be lurking everywhere...
...Typical is Bitter Blood, where Fritz Klenner, the son of a prominent physician and nephew of the chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, hatched his schemes with his first cousin Susie Lynch, with whom he may have been carrying on...
...These readers are Empiricists—in contrast to the mysteries' Platonists...
...In an extreme example, the murderous dentist explained that he could not be kept in prison because he had the ability to transport himself mentally to wherever he wanted to be...
...During that time, she was chained, beaten, forced into lesbian acts with Janice Hooker, repeatedly raped, stretched on a rack, suspended by her arms and whipped, dunked in water and strangled until she passed out, shocked with electrical wires, and burned with matches...
...For another, accomplices up to their necks in blood frequently get off with relatively light punishments in exchange for their cooperation...
...It sets a man apart from his fellow man if he can kill...
...The Westerner may save the territory for the farmers, but at the end he rides off into the sunset in search of new frontiers and new adventures...
...This should not be interpreted as a call for the death penalty...
...He received multiple sentences totaling 104 years, to be served consecutively...
...While on trial, he may smirk or rave or yawn...
...For one thing, the severity of the sentence never matches the atrocity of the acts...
...By demonstrating unpredictableness, the psychopath undermines the religion of rationality...
...A year later, he was visiting six days a week and helping her and her pimp / boyfriend to maintain their $800-aday drug habits...
...Then she was transferred to a double-walled coffin-like construction...
...For this reason, too, thefocusofthenarrativeisthecriminal, not the detective or the police...
...As the girl friend of one explained: "It was as if he thought, 'I've got this special relationship with God and I don't have to follow the rules everybody else does.' " These people are beyond good and evil, contemptuous of all trust and sincerity...
...Mysteries are contrivances, puzzles that propel a plot forward to the conclusion, where all of the pieces are at last fitted together...
...Even in defeat, they are laughing at us...
...For the psychopath is only their most immediate focus...
...When the police started closing in, he— probably with her complicity—shot her two young sons before blowing the four of them up in his car...
...For her sake, he killed her mother- and sister-in-law, then her parents and grandmother...
...Still, for all their sensitivity, they behave as if no one else exists...
...It is impossible to deny that the audience for true-life crime stories derives a certain chilling satisfaction from the horrors on the page...
...Psychopathic crime further reminds us of the contingency of our social forms: Things are not simply what they appear to be...
...Westerns and gangster films are not very popular these days (except for self-conscious, highly stylized homages to the past...
...The appeal of these books might be considered a quieter kind of protest, a personal validation for the reader of his individuality...
...While social forms are invariably reasserted with the conviction of the defendant, a reader seldom feels that justice has been wholly served...
...True-life crime stories derive their energy from the character of their villains and the iniquity of their deeds...
...It is as if a hole has been opened up in the universe and a patch applied...
...In reality, however, they stand at opposite poles from one another, and it is my impression that they appeal to entirely different sensibilities...
...There, in keeping with the drawing-room ambience of the form, arrest signifies the restoration of order, the quashing of an aberration and return to a benign status quo...
...Later, she spent three years in a box under the Hookers' waterbed, being let out only to eat and satisfy his demands...
...There is always a quality of mayhem to the crimes in this genre, asenseof things spinning out of control...
...Cameron Hooker spoke of kidnapping other girls when the thrill from his first captive began wearing down...
...One might more appropriately say that truth is one of the conventions of this particular genre...
...In thus revealing the unfathomable and the unreachable in human nature, he represents not only the darkness of the soul but also the freedom at the core of every one of us...
...Even Bitter Blood, where the killer destroyed himself and his cousin in crime, contains one...
...WThy, then, this fascination with the true-life crime story...
...Yet it is striking how similar, almost formulaic, the titles are...
...The judge declared: "I consider this defendant the most dangerous psychopath that I have ever dealt with...
...The point is that the deeds are beyond any possible retribution...
...This is something that people obviously want and need to be reminded of...
...Identifying with his goal if not his methods, they are vindicated, purged, by the overreaching that leads to his demise...
...Those occasions when he settles down with the schoolmarm are subliminal defeats, generally signaling— as in the case of High Noon—the decline of the genre into its late, postclassic phase...
...The audience for true-life crime stories, on the other hand, wants no artifice, only facts and more facts...
...Not everyone has the strength, the guts, to kill...
...The Mormon Murders describes Mark Hofmann, a collector of Mormon memorabilia at 13 and a forger of historical documents by the time he was in college...
...The interest is fundamentally voyeuristic, residing in the nature of the crimes themselves...
...Alan Canty, married, middle-class and seemingly stable, picked up a young prostitute in 1983 and was soon giving her small gifts...
...Both deal with breaches of the law, usually murder, and both involve a process of uncovering that normally results in the arrest and conviction of the culprit...
...What does the genre tell us about ourselves...
...where indignation or outrage is intimated, it is directed away from the criminal and his atrocities...
...Masquerade: A True Storyof Seduction, Compulsion and Murder (Doubleday, 343 pp., $18.95) by Lowell Cauf fiel...
...If prevention were possible and men perfectible, true-life crime stories would probably engender a paranoid view of the world...
...Rarely if ever does he show remorse...
...The more the authors can tell us about them—how they were carried out, what impact they had on the victims—the better...
...Said the psychiatric evaluation of one: "He can make people feel at ease and has developed the ability to ascertain people's needs and exploit them by fulfilling these needs...
...Protesting students in the '60s carried signs proclaiming that they were human beings, not to be folded, spindled or mutilated...
...We have to assert the human consciousness and will behind the external institutions, to insist that the fixities are not so fixed...
...What the enthusiast of this form admires is the artificiality, the elaborate conceit that the author has constructed in his head...
...The Mormon Murders, for instance, bristles with anger at the Mormon Church for its attempts to cover up its relationship to Hofmann, not at the fact that innocent people died from Hofmann's bombs...
...Yet as the evidence accumulates, it becomes clear that the person they think they know has been leading a dual existence, upstanding in public, depraved and chaotic in private...
...One man, who seemed to be murdering because of his indebtedness, had an orgasm at his trial while listening to a police report about the condition of a victim...
...But, again, the trial scene differs radically from the apprehension of the culprit at the end of the mystery novel...
...The central figure is the detective who, through deduction and ratiocination, arrives at the solution...
...At first glance, these two genres would appear to be closely related...
...The one book that does not involve the taking of alife, Perfect Victim, tells of a crime so horrific it is almost unbearable to read about...
...But based on her testimony and that of his wife, Cameron Hooker was convicted on October 31, 1985, on 10 felony counts, among them kidnapping, rape and sodomy...
...Often he is a figure of genuine repute in his community...
...Intellectually andesthetically, the authors must remain unemotional—intellectually, because no one has a cure for the kind of compulsive criminality they deal with (psychiatrists normally come off very badly in these volumes...
...Five current examples of the breed, picked at random, are: Bitter Blood: A True Story of Southern Family Pride, Madness and Multiple Murder (Dutton, 468 pp., S19.95) by Jerry Bledsoe...
...The gangster film, as that pioneer critic of popular culture, Robert Warshow, long ago indicated, is immersed in civilization and a reflection of it...
...This can better be seen by comparing the true-life crime story to the mystery novel...
...Hollywood is largely preoccupied now with the vacuous magic of technology...
...Their larger theme is the inexplicable, the fundamental unknown that is always in our presence...
...Another, Perfect Victim, has emblazoned across its cover: "A true story of riveting psychological intensity by the assistant D.A...
...Despite their sensationalism, these books inspire acceptance of a sort, the tolerance to go on living without perfectionist dreams, even after acknowledging the worst that people are capable of...
...When she finally got away and told her tale, it sounded too bizarre to be credible...
...Enclosed in his own world of fantasy and desire, he seems essentially untouchable, invulnerable...
...She was kept as their slave for over seven years...
...Once set in motion, they kill or brutalize in a repetitive manner, often at an accelerating rate...
...These individuals are congenital liars whose hold on their emotions is such that they are capable of fooling lie detectors...
...The Jekyll and Hyde analogy is a staple of the genre...
...It refrains from suggesting what can be done to control psychopathic rage or protect prospective victims...
...And although their stories are true, the archetype of the genre in which they have the leading roles is Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho...
...It closes with an arid explanation by a psychiatrist, the reassertion of rationality, but the underlying truth is revealed in the film's final shot—Norman Bates' mad face overlaid with a death's head smile...
...He excites anxiety and wonder too, perhaps even exhilaration...
...An acquaintance, a friend, anyone, may turn out to be a psychopath leading a secret, demented existence...
...Instead of High Noon and Scarf ace, we get Star Wars and Who Framed Roger Rabbit...
...Although the acts may be carefully plotted, they are not " rational," that is, not committed for reasons we can understand, like money or position...
...The arduous grinding of complex legal machinery is implicitly set against the psychopath's spontaneous, wantonchaos, and the two do not mesh...
...Such individuals are frightening because of their compulsive natures...
...There is rarely any puzzle to be solved because the perpetrator is identified early on...
...Motives are wilder, more elemental—the assertion of will and identity—not so much antisocial as nonsocial...
...As it is, since psychopathic crime cannot be forestalled or eradicated, what they convey is the message that the psychopath is one side—as well as the price —of human freedom...
...But genre continues to thrive in the publishing industry, and to judge by its latest lists none has a larger following at present than the truelife crime story...
...and Perfect Victim (Arbor House, 381 pp., $18.95) by Christine McGuire and Carla Norton...
...The Western movie reveals America's commitment to rugged individualism and personal freedom, its love of nature and the natural, and its fundamental ambivalence toward restrictive routines...
...The ubiquitous trial of the true-life crime story, by contrast, is disquieting, not calming...
...Appointment for Murder: The Story of the Killing Dentist (Putnam, 286 pp., $18.95) by Susan Crain Bakos...
...But the money was really secondary...
...He couldn't be the one...
...Because all of these are nonfiction works concerned with actual events, the question immediately arises whether it is fair to bunch them together as a single type...
...After pleading guilty, Engleman explained: "I like to kill...
...After Canty had spent $140,000 on the pair, exhausted his savings, and gone $25,000 into debt, he was killed and dismembered by the boyfriend, himself diagnosed as a "textbook psychopath...
...Sexuality is never far from the surface...
...Ultimately, though, the problem lies with the psychopath himself...
...Genre, after all, is a term of art suggesting the predominance of formula over content, whereas the first obligation of nonfiction is to be accurate...
...These books do not prescribe, they narrate, coolly, candidly, objectively...
...As the author points out, he could have made more if he had applied himself to his dentistry...
...Max Weber wrote about the "iron cage...
...Of the five volumes mentioned above, four deal with murder, generally of the multiple kind...
Vol. 71 • September 1988 • No. 15
