THE ANATOMY OF EVIL-Dr. Michael H. Stone

and reality of evil from a new perspective. Basing his analysis on the detailed biographies of more than six hundred violent criminals, doctor Stone has created a twenty two level hierarchy of evil behavior, loosely reflecting the structure of Dante's Inferno. He traces two salient personality traits that run the gamut from those who commit crimes of passion to perpetrators of

the worst crimes, sadistic torture and murder. One trade is narcissism, as exhibited in people who are so self centered that they have little or no ability to care about their victims. The other is aggression, the use of power for another person to inflict humiliation, suffering, and death. What do psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience tell us about the minds of those ascribed as evil and what will that mean for the rest

of us. The book that we're discussing this evening is The Anatomy of Evil with my special guest, journalist and author and professor, doctor Michael H. Stone. Welcome to the program, and thank you for agreeing to this interview. Doctor Michael H. Stone. Thank you so thank you very much for agreeing to

this interview. Now, doctor tell us a little bit about your background and just briefly, and then tell us why you wanted, you were compelled to or why you were very interested in writing this book in particular and creating this hierarchy of level, hierarchy of evil.

of impulsivity and self damaging acts self destructiveness. But then I would be hired to be an expert witness in cases where somebody was considered borderline or maybe antisocial or narcissistic or whatever. And then I got invited to be an expert witness in the murder case that involved Jeffrey MacDonald, the Army Green Brave fellow in the late seventies that

killed his pregnant wife and his two daughters. And I wanted to have some way of showing the jury out in California where that particular crime fit in what I call the grand scheme of man's inhumanity to man, which

I subsequently shortened to just calling it evil. And so I began to say, well, it's a lot worse than Gene Harris when she killed the diet doctor Hermanternauer, who jilted her when she and he were having a love affair that was a crime of passion, but it was not nearly as awful as what Ian Brady out in England was doing with his girlfriend Myra Henley, who were luring young girls and boys to obscure places in the moors in England, strangling them, and then while while Ian

was strangling them, recording the screams on a tape recorder to use later as a kind of sexual aphrodisiac between him and Myron. I thought, well, that's that's about as low as it gets. So that was, at that point the opposite end of the of the scale. But I didn't divide it into so many fractions at that time because I was only just beginning to read and those true crime books at which I've now read even more

than six hundred. So as time went on, I began to see if I could put them in different subgroups. In other words, were the men that killed their wives where they have a different breed than the others? Were the guys that committed mass murder like what we've seen lately last year with the Jared Lufner in Arizona and James Holmes, And were they have a different personality stripe? Did they have different backgrounds. Were they mentally ill? Were

they not mentally ill? And what about the serial killers? So I began then to make these partitions. That's how it got started.

So there was that idea of polarities between good and bad, and bad and evil got used together often in a very similar way. However, the whole topic seemed to be something that was appropriate only to be in the out of the mouths of philosophers and religious adepts, as if they knew or about what evil was, and common people were not considered a reliable source of definition. But as

you know, and that went on century after century. I mean, Saint Thomas had his views, and the great philosophers, and then during the Enlightenment they had their use. They used the word evil, but they were they used it in a rather vague way. They didn't get down to cases. You can read Kant, and you can read Hobbes, and you can read but you don't get down to individual persons who personify the concept they were talking about. So it's kind of an airy concept. But nevertheless, I noticed

that people in everyday life use the word. Journalists use the word. Prosecutors use the word. Judges use the word, and they use it to describe when you think about it and the emotion. It's an emotional word because when you hear about something that horrifies you, shocks you, and makes you sick even to hear about it, you have a tendency to say, oh, and you you're there's a

change in your facial expression. As a matter of fact, I was talking about that with a patient of mind today and I mentioned this case of China Arnold, a woman who when her new boyfriend objected to the mess and bother of the baby she had by a previous boyfriend, so she put it in a microwave. Now it's just he was just aghast at that, and of course the word evil came tumbling out of his mouth. Said, my God,

that's what an evil thing to do. U. So I use that as my way of thinking about evil because that gets down to earth in a very practical way, and it makes it easier for me to talk about it rather than getting all wound up. And if God is good, then how can you allow evil and all that sort of thing that the old philosophers tried to untangle.

social contract permits. So that that idea of over the top is embedded in the word evil. It's something excessive, way way over what would be tolerable.

and the guy got very angry at the referee. So the referee pulled out a knife and stabbed him, and the man died. And when the man died on the way to the hospital, the Avereau family stormed the field and they captured this referee. It was a twenty year old fellow. They beat him, they stoned him, they lynched him, they cut off his legs and arm, then in his head and then that was that. So that is, first of all horrifying. As a matter of fact, I was speechless when I when I saw Usually I'm so used

to hearing about these things. I have some kind of witty gallows humor thing to say, but this one just comes me short. And you can even see the video on the of the poor guy on the gurney in the hospital. It's just awful, So that that is and it's just it's breathtaking, and you wonder how God's name can a person do that to another. So it really fulfills all those criteria that you mentioned.

call humiliation. Now that with the ability with Facebook and some of these things, you know, YouTube or whatever you're going to put yourself on these days to promote your your psychopathic alter ego or your character, or your crimes or the fame that you might derive from it. Do you really think do you think that there has been an escalation and there is an escalation in crime or the sparity of crime.

with about almost sixty slides. And when I called it the New Evil, because I began to notice that the really the particularly gruesome crimes were occurring predominantly from the middle nineteen sixties on, and there were now and then occasionally some pretty grim and gruesome crimes of course before and mind you, we're always talking peacetime criminals, not wartime atrocities.

For instance, in nineteen six is the famous so called crime of the Century case of Chester Gillette that got his girlfriend pregnant and didn't want to be responsible, so he offered her to take her for a ride and the boat and the lake up here in the Adirondacks, and then dumped her in the water and drowned her. And that was pretty awful, but it has nothing to do with decapitating her or gouging her eyes out or

anything of that sort. So what she began to see in the sixties is much more gruesome crimes, and you saw mass murderers. There were always a few mass murderers, and I have a very large excel file spreadsheet of mass murderers, almost three hundred starting from nineteen hundred, but from between nineteen hundred and nineteen ten there's a couple examples,

and then the next decade and so on. But once you get to the late sixties and seventies, it begins to take off at a greater rate than the American population increased. Serial killers again very very rare. A few in the nineteenth century, a few like Albert Fish and they cannibalized and cut up a couple of children. In the twenties, a few other people of that sort. But then it begins to spike in the sixties and peaks

in the nineteen eighties. Now it's maybe even dropped off a bit, and it seems to be a response in the case of serial killers, to the among a number of social factors at the high divorce rate in the sixties in our country, the feminist movement that allowed a lot of women to leave and divorce from men that would be battering them, so that the kind of women that were stuck in the very uncomfortable home situations in

the old days, now they could leave. But that meant that these rather violent and aggressive men lost their woman and they weren't taking it lined down. So some of the serial killers Gary Ridgeway, for example, the Green River killer, had a lot of vengeful attitudes toward women that they took out in these serial rate murders. And then this woman I just mentioned it was stuck in her own baby in a microwave. For God's sakes, I grew up. I never saw stuff like that when I was a kid,

even when I was in medical school. That's to me rather new. And you know, back in eighty seven, there was this woman out in New Mexico that told her boyfriend, you got to marry me because you know, I'm pregnant and so on. But actually she was not. So as the time grew near and he was like, so many men dumb enough not even to notice her belly wasn't getting very big, or she'd even maybe put a little extra maybe a sweater in there, and they could look as if she was having a bit of a tummy.

She went to a obgyn clinic in Albuquerque, and she at gunpoint kidnapped a woman nine months pregnant woman who was coming out of the clinic. She then took her in her car, drove her to a remote spot, and then proceeded to rip open her belly with a key and steal the fetus and then presented to her boyfriend as oci here's the baby. That's It's extremely shocking and it was never any crime like that before nineteen eighty seven, and since there's been a dozen and a half, including

Lisa Montgomery. That was a very high profile case about five years ago in Missouri.

The baby lived, she foisted door, or tried to fool the family and this and a husband and children that this was the baby, and succeeded for a few days. But and you know, when you find out what's really odd is again there's you think that's that's incredible. But oh yeah, there's been a half dozen of them since then.

their kid back. Sometimes they didn't get their kid back, but it was not done in a way with the kind of brutality or the horror that we see now, like with this fellow Ariel Castro in Cleveland that kidnapped those three poor girls for ten years, or Garrito that kept Chasey du guard for eighteen years and had two kids buy her out in California.

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some people are influenced. And I've seen that personally myself, and that some of these guys really look up to them as sort of role models and want that kind of fame for themselves eras.

I suspect you couldn't make up. You wouldn't be novelistic enough to make up some of the stuff that happens out there now on an almost weekly basis.

be part of that regiment or whatever would be told, well, here's your rifle and mould these Jews down. You had even the permission to say, you know, captain, I don't know that I'm up for it, and then they would let you go. But of course a lot of them,

there were very few that opted out. Most of them were perfectly willing to do it because they had and so bombarded with prejudice and the words of the furor and so on, that they're so whipped up with enthusiasm for how these are like vermin that need to be wiped out, that they could go ahead and do it and then go back to their girlfriends or wives or whatever, or certainly after the war and lead very ordinary lives. So they were not arch criminals except for the top people.

They were ordinary folk, the same as happened in many wars and many even gain fights, like between the Crypts and the Bloods out in La So I wanted to focus on people that were warped in some way and personality and perhaps even mentally, who, in peacetime, without any provocation or without being whipped up, you know, by some leader to fight some named enemy, were quite capable of committing atrocities. It's a different group of people.

put weights on top and crush no other way. They would commit atrocities to the soldiers, so that the rage and the outrage of being the victims of atrocity would turn many of the populace into doing equally unspeakable things to their oppressors. And these are not necessarily criminal types.

numbers in between. You go through crimes of impulse and jealousy and rage, then you go to anti social persons. Tell us about crimes of impulse and jealousy and rage, and why some of those can be classified as evil and why some of those can't.

the person imagined that the lover. Well, for example, there was a man recently who thought that his wife was cheating on him. She was not, but he was so enraged that he threw acid in her face and disfigured her for life. And I had these horrible pictures of

that person. So I think anyone looking at the poor woman's face who was just grossly disfigured because of the acid bath that he hurled in her direction would say that that was a terrible evil thing, or because they would feel compassionate and sympathy with the poor suffering wife. And he was of course put in prison for life and so on, and had even a twinge of remore because he had known that he'd done a terrible thing. But that was a jealousy that was going way beyond

the ordinary man. That well, the Raging Bull, that movie where the boxer would maybe assault his wife because his brother would give her a kiss on the cheek when they came home, came over for dinner, and he would think, oh, that's because she wanted him to kill That kind of

pathological jealousy is pretty awful also. But he stopped short of killing the poor woman, but throwing acid in the face of somebody, which, by the way, is a rather common way in some of the Islamic countries, especially Persia or Pakistan, for dealing with women that annoy you. You know, with the wife cheese or you think she cheese or whatever they will, or if a woman that you're trying to get engaged to when she rejects you. I mean a lot of cases where demand will desisure her by

putting bay or acid in her face. And to me that those are really dreadful acts of evil.

then you can describe why these are different. Again, grades of evil different, you assigning different numbers or levels to the these levels of evil itself. So start with the least evil and on your scale, and why you have made why you believe it's this lowest on the scale of evil.

almost be let go. I mean, I think there are some women who have killed husbands in that way. It's considered, you know, it's a bad thing to do. It wasn't right, but it's so under the average person can picture doing something that you could have a fantasy if your wife you've suddenly found your wife in bed with somebody else in Jesus Christ and said, do you want to kill

either her or the sob that was doing it. It's such a natural feeling that comes into us that we might, in some cases, of course, lose our impulse control and do something very violent, but it's more understandable. So the Helois recognizes the kind of evil that's really nicholindime, he was just the lowest of the evil acts. There's a fellow. There's a dancer, Kathy Woods, that a fellow by the name of Paul Cortes was fond of, and when she rejected him, he stabbed her. So that was another crime

of passion. Another number, And I use the number two as the lowest of my scale for evil because the ones I purposely use as self as a justified homicide or self defense homicide, just to anchor the scale so that there's a division between were a killing homicide that's not evil, that's number one versus the two up to twenty two, where the word evil has been applied by some of the people who were aware of the crime.

the mother. So that was a more unjustified, if you will, an example of a murder. It was not a crime of passion, as though the husband, boyfriend, whatever had rejected her, but rather she was responding to the fact that she had when she said she was an incest victim. So that's more indirect than your own lover and chilling you, et cetera. So I think that was why I decided to give her somewhat higher number.

I can put it that way, that's nice. It's not so clear in that particular case why they killed both the Christo Beninda's brothers killed both their parents when the one that they were angry I was more the father for being very critical of Eric and Lyle for being something off their work at school and being failures.

So that was a more serious kind of act, And I put that in number five, the same as I did Mary Bell, who was tortured by her prostituted mother in the north of England and then killed two children, but was actually able to be rehabilitated morally and spiritually as she got older.

with children who kill as we do with adults. Besides which one has great sympathy for the horrors to which she was subjected and forget her mother tried to kill her in a number of ways, and then also would invite her john's and her man that she would be prostituting over and sometimes they would use Mary when she was five or six years old as a sexual object and puts sticks in her vagina. Well, hell, you have to have some sympathy for a girl that's been violated

in that way. And but the main thing is that after she was in reformatories and even prison, you know, for quite a number of years, like ten eleven years, she experienced me more. She showed herself having the capacity you know, to be a good person. She had a moral sense. And she was released in England the course under her false name, and she did marry and have a kid, you know.

you were engaged. Well, there was a pretty girl, Tatana Tarasov over there in California, University of California, Berkeley, and he left her a kind of a scarf I think it was. He had a casual meeting with her at probably some school dance or whatever, and she picked it up. And he was spying on this from across the street, I guess, and she looked at him wondering what the heck it was and dumped it. So that meant that

she spurned his engagement. Well, he became very impressed and also very angry, and he was telling his psychiatrist about that, and the psychiatrist was like dutifully taking notes and didn't do any didn't and he was saying, I'm going to kill that bitch, you know whatever. And the psychiatrists did not do anything, did not warn Tochanda that she was

in imminent risk of being hurt. So he did kill her, and then that gave rise across the family sued, and that gave rise to the famous Terosov decision that if you're a psychiatrist like I am, and I've had it happen three times in my career that if you are in a situation where you have heard pretty convincing evidence from a patient that they mean to kill or hurt

another person, you must warn that person. Or if they're not, I'm going to get a gun and I kill whoever is out the window, then you have to notify the police. Because there's no named victim, there's just a stranger.

But life began to spiral down for him, and there came a point where he killed his wife and his mother and then ascended the towers we all know and shot and killed sixteen people, that's including the wife and mother before the swat team killed him. An interesting thing about the Whitman was, of course, that when he was autopsy, he had brain tumor which may have pressed on the frontal lobes in such a way as to make his impulse control weaker than it would be had he not

had that tumor. So the tumor was a factor, But he was himself a person was smoldering rage, but he was not the psychopath. Really, he was not somebody who had that combination of extreme narcissistic traits that come unto the heading of psychopathy, such as glib speech and superficial charm, and manipulativeness and grandiosity and callousness most particularly, and lack of remorse and exploitativeness. He didn't have those qualities. He

was a better person than that. But he was a very rageful person, and unfortunately, I guess the tumor caused him to flip and lose the ability to control his rageful impulses, which he might have been able to control if that had not been a factor.

He was very irritable. He was the hippie guru that was a counterculture person who was getting on this megaphone out in public and arguing against the Vietnam War. But he had a very beautiful girlfriend, Holly Maddox, and he was very possessive and to the point of kind of just crushing her spirit. So finally she said Basta enough already, and she left. I think she came to New York and then he lured her back out of again jealousy and anger, back to Philadelphia where he then killed her.

And he put her in a steamer trunk and kept her body in a steamer trunk in his closet. And I think it was two years before it was discovered because by that time, the poor soul, her flesh had melted into fatty. At a post tissue and wasting dripping down in the neighbor's apartment below. So he then fled to Europe. He was championed by some wealthy people in

this country, and he married somebody, a Swedish woman. They lived in the south of France, and it took a long time before he was found out, and then the French people were reluctant to extra died him back here, lest be give him the death penalty, so we had to promise, no, we won't give him the death penalty. And now he is in prison in Pennsylvania. I was supposed to speak to him, he was reluctant to speak to me, so that that never quite came off in

the most evil program. But that's he'd also, by the way, been very aggressive and damaging and injurious to a number of previous girlfriends, so that he was a continuously violent man, and therefore different from just an ordinary jealousy case. He had many psychopathic features. So I put him higher up than number nine.

the person is mentally ill. Where I draw attention to the fact that there's a mitigating circumstance that would tend to lower the nature of evil. Because if a person like poor Andrew Yates, for example, who drowned her five children, she was grossly psychotic. She was she probably aware of belted a toin of high school and a good person, the very depressed person, and a lot of the relatives

in her family were also depressed. And this husband of hers, that most of my colleagues and I would have felt was the more responsible party in any ways, forced the poor woman to live in this little hollowed out bust that he made like a greyhound bus that was empty to the seats and turned into a mobile home. And she had the homeschool and home church, the five children, the oldest of which was only seven, and it was way more than her capacity to be a mother and

someone that could handle. So she just, as they say, lost it and drowned the five children. So she was mentally ill. And I can't remember where I put her in the scale, right if I even bothered. But she's an example of somebody you know who had the mitigating circumstances of doing an evil act, certainly, and the whole country was electrified by it, but was not a flat out evil person like Ted Bundy or somebody. Right.

palm up. And you may think, well, so what, But I've been to Japan enough times to know that that's a pretty awful thing for a kid to up, because when people come over in order to give thanks, you have to use those muscles, and people put little things in your outstretched palm, etc. As a gift, and so it's very embarrassing and humiliating if you can't do that. So he became very shy, very much a loner. And he did spend all this time in a room in the big house, so looking at comics and CDs and

so on. But he couldn't establish intimacy with like women his age, so he would lurk around young girls, he became a stalker, and then in then around eighty nine, he kidnapped and murdered several young girls, and he mutilated their body and mailed their severed hands to the parents. Well, I mean, wow, imagine opening a box and there's your daughter's hand, for God's sake, So he committed multiple vicious acts, a kind of a serial killer in a way, as

he really was. But but the again, he was not a psychopath appear and simple so much as a very disturbed schizoid in other words, a loner aloof person that couldn't interact with others who did these terrible things. Uh, they would shock the poor parents of their their missing daughters. So I considered him a schizoid, partly a psychopath or person. He didn't commit other crimes the way so many psychoprists ted.

Bundy committed a lot of juvenile delinquency acts when he was in his teens, But Miyazaki didn't do that, so that it was more the callousness, the unfeelingness that he could do such a thing to a poor child and then horrify the parents by mailing their hands to the parents.

stolen anything. He never robbed anybody, didn't He had a clean record up to the time. Then he began luring those those children. I think one could argue with Wisney seventeen. Maybe one can make an argument for that, for reasons that seemed fairly convincing to me at the time. I put him one little.

the dental impressions in her arm. But he was this legitimate child, and there's even the possibility, it's never been I think confirmed or totally disproven, that his grandfather may have also been his father, But that man wasn't violent in any case, and the mother moved from Vermont I think it was to Washington State in Seattle, I guess, and married this fellow, John Bundy. Tacoma actually was where they moved. And he was often bullied when he was young.

He was shy, but he didn't engage in like peeping tomism. He may have heard or even dispatched a little eight year old girl when he was fourteen. But he could be, as we all know, charming and sociable, which is the more classical psychopathic qualities. He had that gunn and the smile, and he could be very charming too in an outward

way to people. He actually, as you know, worked on a suicide prevention radio program with Anne Rule, the famous true crime writer before he Yeah, and then he had his first love woman from a higher social class, which was something very important to him to kind of move up socially. But this girl, Stephanie Brooks, rejected him, and that was when he began luring and raping and killing at least two dozen and a half girls en route from Washington to Florida, and he also engaged in having

sex with the corpses necrophilia. He escaped from prison in Colorado and Bonnie was apprehended from the bite marks. As I mentioned back in seventy eight. Now he had gone to law school. All we dropped out. But of course he tried to extend his life by saying, if you let me live a little bit longer, I'll show you some more bodies with the more places where the bodies. But they said enough already, and he was executed as

you know, in nineteen eighty nine. But nevertheless, some judge and I'm glad I don't know his name because I would feel like hitting him, allowed him to marry in prison and have conjugal visits. So he gave he's the father of some some out there somewhere, Yeah, which I think it's ridiculous.

kids will do. He wore them, sometimes his mom's shoes, but he was roundly scolded by his mother as though that was being a pansy or whatever, so she humiliated him for doing that, Whereas I think most boys at one point will try to see what it's like when they're five years old, to see what was to walk around a high heels and see what that's like. So he developed a shoe fetish when he was by ten already,

which also extended to women's underwear. So eventually he would follow and stalk women, especially if they had pretty shoes and whatever, and he would break into woman's house to steal the shoes he might rape her. That was in his late twenties. Then he murdered someone and kept the woman's foot in the freezer as a fetishistic object. Then he raped half a dozen more women in the early

seventies or late sixties. His wife divorced him meantime after he was arrested, and there's that typical psychopathic lack of remorse. Reporter once asked him of Jerry, now that you've been in prison a while and you've had the chance to look back on your life, do you feel anything about what you did in those women? And he rolled up a little piece of paper into a paper wad, which he flicked onto the floor, and he said, I feel as much for those women as I do for that

lot of paper. So that extreme contempt was something that was characteristic of Jerry. But the level of torture was modest, if one can speak of modest respect. The torture in comparison to some of the worst people. So I left him at eighteen.

He seemed to be sexually inadequate, although he did have a wife and children, but he was a friendless, loner sort of a person. And then he developed this the terrible paraphilia of raping and killing, eviscerating and actually eating some of the parts of his victims. So he was captured about thirteen years ago and executed back in ninety four.

from those whole couples or couples with the kid. His main victims were women, but he did kill a number of their husbands or boyfriends too, using as his accomplice. And he would tie up victims. And for instance, let's say a woman was tied up and she would be begging for let me see my baby, and you said, you know, you'll see your baby when we let you out,

but had already killed a baby. And he would tell the woman, you know, who's being tied up in a chair and beaten, so that you're a sexual slave where the masters, and we can screw you when we want, we can hit you when we want, so that the master slave mentality that Roy Hazelwood from the FBI writes about, that was very much the type of murderer that Leonard Lake was. However, when he was apprehended for I think a parking ticket, they thought he thought, maybe wow, they.

in the most unspeakable ways. I mean, she actually had her son, after torturing one of the daughters out, take her out to a remote place in the San Francisco Bay area and pour accelerant over her and burn her to death alive, and so that her body was not recognized for a long time. And when one of the surviving daughter that tried to run into the police and say what happened, the police didn't believe hers And what mother would do that?

person might turn out bad. But what's fascinating is that there's a small number of the serial killers, including in a way Bunda himself, who did not experience from the parents humiliation, neglect, beatings, nothing he didn't fall on his head. The had injury is a factor in a number of these men. So when nothing of the usual environmental stresses is present in a particular case, you have to think

about something genetic, something or something constitutional. And then constitutional would mean what happened during the nine months of pregnancy. Did the mother abuse drugs? Was the birth process difficult? Was the baby kind of blue and had a low oxygenation when it came out? But the most interesting are

the ones where there isn't even that factor. And so you have to think about the possibilities, and since personality is half under genetic control, that some of these people are really like the traditional idea of bad seed, that they're born with the predisposition to be low in empathy, so much so that they're capable of doing terrible things that you and I would consider terrible. That they have no more feeling about then, as if they were whittling a piece of Wood.

was in San Diego for a number of years. Now he's in Pennsylvania and he's done very major work in magnetic residence imaging of criminals, both antisocial men who don't have all the psychopathic features, the kind of men to get involved in barroom brawls or batter their wives or cheat on their child support or whatever, who are antisocial

but not necessarily psychopathic. And then that if you think of a prison having a certain population about many of the men are antisocial but only a fourth of them also meet criteria for psychopathy with the callousness of remorse and grandiosity and super narcissism and all the rest of it. But Adrian has shown that some of the hot headed were the barroom brawl type. I use that as an example.

They have certain areas of light up in their brain when you give them certain tests under the influence of magnetic residence imaging, UH, and they are hot headed. They're their emotionality shows up in various places in the brain in a particular way. If you look at the cold psychopath, however, they're they're different there. They are not full of emotion

and rage. Often when they do they're they're killing. They're methodical about it, the same way that you might be if you were a hunter trying to go out in the fields and kill deer for supper. So they're of a different brain change stripe than the antisocial men. And

that's very interesting. So that and of course in all of these people, UH, there's certainly some changes, usually in the part of the frontal lobe that mediates emotion and social planning and making right decisions that makes us human as opposed to just like their ordinary animals, and that there's the def that's in some of the key areas in the frontal lobes and also in the more primitive so called olympic system underneath that that cause the person

to have poor control over impulses that are an ordinary socialized person is able to control, So that things that you and I would maybe think of doing if we're jilted or fired from a job or whatever, or the our car is upended by some road rage guy, we think of maybe momentarily kill that SOB, but we don't. These people do so Adrian has done a lot of important work in that area.

that they have now turned into psychopaths. In other words, these the callous unemotional youth is usually male, are psychopaths in embryo. If you will, they're going to evolve as psychopaths. They When I was doing my program, actually the woman down in Texas phoned me because she was very worried about her son. Interesting thing was, she had this son by a guide that she was having an affair with in another southern state before she left him and moved

to Texas. She found out after a while that the man that she was living with and who was a biological father of her boy, was an exicon, and so that she felt this is not a marriage made in heaven or even an affair made in heaven. So she left and she went to Texas and married a nice man and had a daughter by the husband. But the boy meantime became unmanageable. He would steal things from the father, and he would set fires in the house all over the place. So that they had an a fire extinguisher

in every room. He also tortured animals. He would kill cats in a terrible way and other animals. He would bully kids in school, and he tried to strangle his sister. So she was wondering what had to do with him. And I have some colleagues down in the Houston area that I've talked to about this case. I said, you know, he's been evaluated by a psychologists or a psychiatrist down there that doesn't seem to quite grasp the nature of

the situation. Can't we get him into a kind of a reformatory or some kind of institution where he can be kept, looked at, study treated to what extent he can be treated, but at least rescued, airlifted out of that family so the family can can continue as a unit, because he was really tearing apart of the family that they couldn't live knowing that they had to be buying their fingernails every minute, wondering whether he's going to kill their their daughter.

his violent impulses. So I think there's some ray of hope that at least a percentage of callous unemotional use can be identified by the nature what they've done in the twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years, and some of them can be treated in such a way that the tendency to do terrible things can be minimized. I don't think one can quote secure all of them. I think some of them are going to remain beyond a successful treatment and always be worrisome.

twenty two level higherarchy of evil? Do you think people understand it that you've done the interviews with has been accepted by your colleagues. Tell us about this acceptance.

this coming Friday. No, I'm sorry, this coming Saturday about another dreadful man who killed his wife in an awful way, Richard Sharp, the doctor so and I'm also trying to get another like a sequel to the Most Evil going, which I'm going to call the New Evil because it's focusing on the kind of things you and I were talking about in the beginning, about the coursening in the culture that has led to a lot of increasingly gruesome crimes in the recent years, and some I think the

people in my field, of my colleagues, especially my forensic colleagues, are more comfortable with the use of the term evil, as I expect it as an emotional word, not as a pronouncement from on high, et cetera, so that it has some currency there. Although the publishing house Prometheus, it was not like publishing a double day or something, so that the total sales was rather short of what I

might have hoped. But those that have read it and reviewed it have been, I would say, for absolutely the most part, quite enthusiastic about it.

I answered them as best I can. But I had a few what I call Lindsay lohand moments when I was in another very famous person. I had a few moments of feeling like a celebrity down in Mexico because many people wanted to have their picture taken with me, which was not something I'm used to. Yeah, so that I felt that I was having the kind of life that Lindsay Lohan was having without even having to get drunk.

that are really really, really been competitive. But overall, we don't really know that much. And we and I think countries outside of America look to America for true crime. It's not like they're the only country that has these crimes, but America has done a a good job of not shying away from them and basically regard them as history.

And nobody winces. And eventually any program or pardon me, any murder case, murder trial, whether it's gruesome or not, eventually reaches the public, who is a demanding public, a discerning public, and an interested public in these kinds of cases, and even the like you say, the analysis that you do is much different than a true crime book, which is for the most part, you know, for fairly formulaic, and then when you do these analysis that some people

might think that on the surface might be dry. There's a huge audience for the psychology of these killers God tried on today. Of course, they read the true crime books, they love them, but they want to know why, and that.