Dancing With Devils

A renowned forensic psychiatrist on spotting psychopaths.

By Anastasia Toufexis, published on May 01, 1999 - last reviewed on July 21, 2009

PD: I was amazed and mystified. I went to my professors in psychology, sociology and anthropology and asked them, "How do you explain this with your theories of group behavior?" They could account for delinquent gangs by pointing to absent fathers but that didn't explain why a woman would flush her infant down a toilet bowl or a man stab his partner 50 times. I thought studying why people did these things would be a lot more interesting than studying calculus or chemistry. I also liked the esoteric quality of it.

AT: What do you mean?

PD: Well, this is perhaps a flaw that I'm confessing, but I like to have success experiences rather than failure experiences. So I'm more likely to compete in things I'm good at, and more likely to spend time on the things I expect to succeed at. And the more esoteric a thing is, the greater your chances of conquering it. There will be fewer rivals and less to learn.

AT: You're almost always identified as a prosecution witness. Do you have a bias against defendants?

PD: No. I don't believe that defendants are automatically guilty. I have been a witness for the defense, but it's rarer. In part, that's because of the way I decide which cases to take. The one rule at our office is that if the client won't agree to show us anything we want to see, we won't work for him. That turns out to be a problem that limits what cases we can take, because the ethics of law are different from the ethics of science or medicine or psychology in that only prosecutors have a duty to disclose everything that helps find the truth.

Neither side in a civil suit has such a duty, and the defense in a criminal case actually has a duty not to do so. Their duty lies with their client only, and where the truth hurts their client, they need to fight to conceal it. So it takes either a genuinely innocent defendant for the attorney to want to share the truth--and that's incredibly rare--or a sophisticated attorney who realizes that he's better off giving his own experts the bad news so they can take it into account and not be surprised and torpedoed in court.

AT: But isn't there a philosophical difference, too? Many defense attorneys argue that sick deeds are born in sick minds, and you have difficulty with that.

PD: With rare exceptions, people are responsible for what they do. Killers seldom meet the legal standard for insanity, which is quite different from the way most people use the word every day. Killers may be disturbed, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they can't tell right from wrong or are compelled to maim or murder.

AT: But what about someone like Jeffrey Dahmer? People say, "If he wasn't crazy, who is?"

PD: He was certainly disturbed, but he knew what he was doing was wrong. He tried to conceal his victims' bodies. He also wore a condom while having sex with the corpses, which indicates that the intensity of his sexual urge was less than many teenagers experience in backseats with their girlfriends.

AT: Still, doesn't that elude the bigger issue, his frame of reference? If I believe that little green men are descending from outer space and the only way to get rid of them is to sprinkle blue cheese on the lawn, and I go out and sprinkle cheese, that would be logical rational behavior given my overarching belief.

PD: And if that were a crime, you'd be insane for it.

AT: But Dahmer doesn't fall into that category? It seems to me that while his separate actions may seem rational, he's operating under the idea that he can turn strangers into companions by killing and eating them. Why isn't that insane?

PD: If Dahmer had had the delusion that he'd have companions for life if he killed them and ate them, and that that was somehow a good thing and not criminal, that would make him insane. But those weren't the facts at all. Even the defense experts agreed that Dahmer knew it was wrong. In fact, Dahmer was so offended by the idea of killing that he had to get himself drunk to overcome his aversion to doing the killing. It's that point that proves that he did not have an irresistible impulse to kill.

AT: What creates sexual killers like Dahmer or sexual sadists like Charles Ng? Is pornography to blame as some killers like Ted Bundy have claimed?

PD: It depends how you define pornography. I do think a lot of sexual violence stems from experiences in childhood or at puberty. Some people become sadistic after suffering early abuse at the hands of parents, relatives or friends. But for others, the seed is planted in the formative years by the conflation of images of violence with those of sexual arousal. Magazines, TV shows and, especially, slasher movies are masters at doing this. You condition a vulnerable boy at puberty to become aroused by brutality. It's the violence, not the nudity. Frankly, I wouldn't mind if every teenage boy had a subscription to Playboy. They'd be looking at attractive naked female bodies while they masturbated, not eviscerated female bodies.

AT: Are there any studies that back you up?

PD: Not yet. One of the problems with studies that examine the effects of violent imagery is that they typically use mentally healthy psychology students. If you want to do a meaningful study, show movies like Body Double and Copycat to a group of sexual psychopaths the day before you release them.