Dancing With Devils

A renowned forensic psychiatrist on spotting psychopaths.

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

AT: You've been highly critical of the entertainment media -- as well as the news media for its crime coverage -- contending that it can recite people to copy crimes like product tampering, yet you serve as a consultant for movies and TV programs, most frequently Law & Order. Isn't that a contradiction?

PD: I try to pick the projects carefully and to make sure that they don't perpetuate common misperceptions. For example, I consulted on Primal Fear. I felt that the original ending, which had the Edward Norton character suffer from multiple personality disorder and stalk his lawyer Richard Gere, was unrealistic. It made more sense to make Norton's killer a malingerer who was faking having multiple personalities. And one of the reasons that I'm willing to lend my name and energy to Law & Order is that they never show the murder itself. The story opens with the corpse. The rest of the show is process, and it's accurate.

AT: Law & Order features a forensic psychologist who assesses many of the accused and testifies at trial. In the real world, there's been a lot of criticism of psychological expert witnesses, that they're simply guns-for-hire. Is that a valid criticism?

PD: Our job should be like any other forensic scientist's -- we should be truth seekers who are not partisan, who do not have any interest in the outcome, who call it as we see it no matter the consequences. But it seems a lot easier for chemists and anthropologists and pathologists to take that neutral role than it does for psychiatrists.

AT: Why is that?

PD: The innocuous reason is that psychiatrists are usually very well imbued with the clinical role, where helping the sick person is the goal. And that's quite incompatible with the truthseeking role. That's probably true of the other fields, too, but maybe more so of the personalities that gravitate toward psychiatry. They tend to care about people and wish to be helpful.

An embarrassing reason is that at least the old school of forensic psychiatrists includes a lot of people who wish they'd been lawyers and want to do some of the lawyering because they have an amateur interest in it. That fact is one of the reasons I discourage students from pursuing a law degree if they're going to do forensic psychiatry.. It just encourages that kind of behavior.

AT: A lot of your work is sort of after the fact, after a crime has been committed, but you're also involved in trying to prevent crimes.

PD: Yes, it's actually the reason I started TAG. I felt we could do more to help avoid harm being done to people. We've been particularly involved in the areas of stalking, workplace violence and product tampering.

AT: What advice do you give celebrity clients about being stalked?

PD: I can't go into details, but, in general, one of the biggest mistakes celebrities make is being overly friendly. They allow photo shoots in their homes, even their bedrooms and bathrooms; they send fans autographed pictures. All that serves to support viewers with a delusional relationship with the celebrity. One of the interesting things we've discovered is that, counter to the public's thinking, the celebrities who attract the largest number of stalkers -- and typically it's not "if" a celebrity has a stalker, it's "how many" -- are neither the most glamorous nor obnoxious, but rather the ones who seem the sweetest and most wholesome. They appear approachable.

Celebrity stalkers also are not necessarily fixated on one person as the public thinks. Rather, they tend to switch targets, going from, say, an athlete to an actor to a politician. Hinckley, for example, also stalked President Jimmy Carter in addition to Ronald Reagan and Jodie Foster. And here's another common fallacy. People think Hinckley tried to assassinate Reagan to impress Jodie Foster. What he really wanted to do was become famous. I spent 23 hours interviewing him and he came across as just a smart-mouth kid who was proud of what he'd done. The ultimate brat.

Publicity is also a common motive of mass murderers. They want to have the biggest body count in history. I interviewed one who was furious that his gun jammed and he couldn't set a new record.

AT: What do you think of Hinckley getting out of the hospital on supervised visits? Do you think he still a threat?

PD: The best indicator of future behavior is prior behavior. And on those grounds, I wouldn't want to see him out.

AT: What sort of workplace cases do you deal with?

PD: The cases that come to us are a third verbal threats that a current employee has made to co-workers or supervisors. A third are cases in which the fear is that the employee's abusive lover is going to harm her in the workplace, and perhaps others who are in the vicinity. And a third are a mixed bag of bomb threats, product tampering threats, anonymous letters, psychotic letters, consumer threats, vandalism, sabotage, suicidal behaviors in the workplace, bogus threats in which people send themselves threat letters or animal parts in order to gain attention and the benefits of being a victim.

AT: That's quite an assortment. How do you decide what to do?

PD: What's done depends on which of those kinds of cases it is. But it's gotten fairly simple. Most of these cases require one to two hours of expert time to totally resolve the problem.

AT: How can it be that simple?