Interview with Michael H. Stone, MD
Photo used with written permission. All rights reserved.
This exclusive interview with forensic psychiatrist
Michael H. Stone, MD was conducted by Nicola Linza and Cristoffer Neljesjö in
New York, New York during January 2014.
What was the
primary reason or interest that caused you to enter forensic psychiatry?
The primary
reason for my going into forensic psychiatry was my fascination with the
extremes of personality abnormalities and aberrations. I had specialized for
years in Borderline Personality Disorder ever since I finished my psychiatric
training at New York State Psychiatric Institute (1966) and my psychoanalytic
training at Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute (1971). In the early 1980s I
began to get requests to serve as an expert witness in various law cases –
often involving contentious custody cases where one spouse (usually the
husband) accused the other (usually the wife) of being “borderline” – and
“therefore” unworthy as a parent. These cases were often frivolous, since the
wife was usually a quite competent mother, irrespective whether she were
“borderline” (as to personality) or not. Other kinds of cases began coming my
way also: ones involving testamentary capacity, malpractice, violent crimes,
PTSD, workplace discrimination, and so on. Some of the persons I was called
upon to evaluate were highly narcissistic, some were antisocial; some were even
psychopathic. The latter two were at the far end of the personality-abnormality
spectrum: especially, those committing murder or even multiple murder. For most
people (myself included), serial killers are more fascinating than credit-card
fraudsters – so I gradually became acquainted in a first-hand way – first with
persons of severe narcissism; later, with even more extreme types that people
ordinarily call “evil.”
How did you
develop your scale of depravity, your now well-known 22-point "Gradations
of Evil" scale? And why does it end at 22?
As I steeped
myself in the literature on violent crime, I began to formulate the concept of
“evil” along the lines of everyday parlance, rather than along the hitherto
customary lines of religious and philosophic essays on the subject. I have a
very large library of philosophic works by the major philosophers, and I have
other tomes on Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, and Zoroastrian
conceptions about good and evil. These works almost never get down to actual
cases. But when people in the street, or when journalists, lawyers, judges,
family-members of murdered victims hear about ghastly crimes – such as those
committed by men who torture
their victims in excruciating and prolonged ways – the word “evil” pops out of
the mouth: OMG! that’s pure evil !!! So I use that as my definition: evil is a
word conveying an emotion of horror, repugnance, disgust, shock of a kind that
takes one’s breath away. Examples need not end in murder: I think of the man in
Boston who poured boiling water on his son’s penis and then exploded the boy’s
puppy with a fire-cracker…or…another man who was carrying on an incestuous
relationship with his little niece: he took her down to the cellar of her house
and proceeded to toss the girl’s cat, and then the kittens, one by one, into
the furnace, telling her: if you breathe a word to your mother of what we do,
I’ll toss your mother in the furnace, and then you! You get the idea.
Is abnormal visual
tracking a potential indicator of any pathologies?
When I wrote my
book called Abnormalities of Personality (1993), I began fashioning a scale –
the Gradations of Evil. I started the project in 1987 when I was expert witness
on behalf of author Joe McGinnis, who was being sued by Jeffrey Macdonald for
calling him (in the book Fatal Vision) “narcissistic” and “antisocial.”
Macdonald was already in prison at the time (for killing his pregnant wife and
their two daughters) – but he was even so suing McGinnis for not giving him
half the royalty money and also for “defamation of character.” The trial took
place (where else?!) in California. I wanted to show the jury where, along a
spectrum of inhumane acts, the Macdonald murders were situated. It was not as
bad as the Ian Brady serial torture-murders in England – but it was worse than
Jean Harris’ shooting her lover Dr Herman Tarnower to death in a
jealousy-murder, after she caught him cheating on her. I began reading True
Crime books, by way of adding to my own familiarity with the subject. I now
have read over 800 such books.
I divided the
crimes, and the criminals, focusing just on killers and rapists in peacetime
(war and gang-warfare being a different form of behavior: even pretty normal
people can do horrible things in times of group conflict) – into various
categories, each one being a bit “worse” (more callousness, more pain to the
victim(s), etc) than the preceding. I used Category #1 to represent “Not Evil”
– just to give a meaningful endpoint to the Scale. A woman who kills a
battering husband is not a murderess; she is committing a homicide in
self-defense – which is not murder (murder signifying the unlawful taking of a
life). Category #2 was Jealousy Murder (such as that of Jean Harris) – since
almost anyone can identify with such a crime: it seems, albeit “wrong,” very
understandable. People with marked psychopathic traits begin around Category
#9. Spree murderers, like Charles Starkweather, I put at #15. Multiple Vicious
Acts (including multiple rapes and also mass murder) I put at #16. Sexual
crimes with murder and varying degrees of torture I put at #17 on up to #22
(depending on the nature and degree of suffering inflicted on the victim(s)).
My understanding of
abnormal visual tracking is as a correlate usually of schizophrenia.
Schizophrenics are more apt to be violent than people in the general
population, but only by a small increase in risk: 4 to 6 % as opposed to 1% in
the general population. Manic persons are also more violent – to about the same
4 to 6%. The mass murderer in Washington DC’s Navy Yard last year (Aaron
Alexis) was a paranoid schizophrenic. James Holmes (mass murderer in Aurora CO)
was schizotypal in personality (in the penumbra of schizophrenia); Jared
Loughner (who tried to kill congressman Gifford) was psychotic on drugs (and
was called “schizophrenic” – but he made himself appear that way because of his
heavy use of marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, Ecstasy, Angel dust, etc etc
). Adam Lanza in Newtown CT was autistic – though ordinarily autistic persons
are not very prone to violence.
In MRI testing do
violent neural landscapes create any concern for potential dangerous straits?
MRI testing can
show how various areas in the frontal lobes, amygdala, and other parts of the
brain – appear to be too small, too under-developed or hypo-functioning, or
otherwise abnormal – in certain kinds of perpetrators. Antisocial men,
psychopaths, for ex., may show such abnormalities (as identified by Prof.
Adrian Raine and others in recent years). But the correlations are not so
foolproof as to allow us to say that Mr X (before he has even done any crime) is
at high risk to be a violent criminal.
In childhood are
their known indicators that at that hold potential for sociopathic and serial
killer tendencies?
In childhood there
are certain patterns that crop up again and again in the lives of those who go
on to commit violent crimes. Men, thanks to their testosterone and other male
attributes (including brain differences from females) are far more likely to
engage in violent crime than are women (about 5 or even 8 to one ratio). Many
serial killers (I speak of men committing serial sexual homicide – like Ted
Bundy and David Parker Ray and Leonard Lake – have had miserable childhoods
(parental abuse, humiliation, neglect…) – which play a role in their becoming
abnormal in personality. But some were never abused or neglected: Ted Bundy and
Larry Bittaker had childhoods that were all right. So in their cases, we look
for inborn brain abnormalities that predispose to the development of
psychopathy. In adolescence, many such men could be identified as “callous unemotional”
youths. Serial killer Mike DeBardeleben, in contrast, was more typical: both
his Texan parents were extremely abusive and threatening.
But one must
remember that some children who have been treated as outrageously as he was or
as David Parker Ray was – go on to become harmless, at times, even, model
citizens. David Pelzer, in his book: A Child Called “It” – sketches how his
mother tortured him for years, yet how he became a highly medaled soldier and
fine young man despite it all. Mental illness plays a role in some cases of
violent crime: in my series of over 300 mass murderers over the last century
(1913 to 2013) about 22% of these killers were mentally ill, in the sense of
suffering from some sort of psychotic condition. But the majority of mass murderers
are disgruntled workers who’ve been fired from a job (like the postal worker
Patrick Sherrill, or the Xerox employee in Hawaii, Brian Uyesugi) – and have
some paranoid traits and are quick to take offense – but who are not
certifiably “mentally ill.” George Hennard, of the Luby Cafeteria massacre in
Killeen Texas was an example: an angry, hot-tempered and embittered man who
hated the idea of women attaining positions of prestige in our society – but he
was not psychotic.
What percentage of
potential serial killers function in society undetected, without ever
committing crimes?
As to the
percentage of potential serial killers who might function undetected without
ever committing crimes – this is an unanswerable question. I did once supervise
a psychiatric trainee who was treating a 19 yr old fellow with worrisome
attitudes. He had been severely neglected by his mom, and terribly humiliated
by his gymnast-father. The young man had fantasies of killing women, and when
he was being treated (for over two years) on our unit at Psychiatric Institute,
the girls called him “Little Jeffrey” – referring to Dahmer, who had just been
arrested (this goes back to 1991). Little by little, the patient got over his
murderous fantasies, and made a good adjustment. He was released from the
hospital and shared an apartment with another former patient. He has never been
in trouble with the law, never committed any act of violence. So how many such
persons (treated and untreated) are there in society? There is no way of tabulating
such persons and of coming up with a percentage.
In brief, what are
major differences distinguish John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein?
As for serial
killers: Gacy, Dahmer, and Gein – they are very different in many ways. Gacy,
for ex., was bisexual, was personable enough to become an alderman in Chicago
and have his picture taken with First Lady Roslyn Carter. He had been severely
abused physically by his father. His penchant was for picking boys up from the
Greyhound station and bringing them to his home – where he would proceed to
have sex with them and then kill them, and bury them under his porch. Gacy had
strong psychopathic personality traits. Dahmer was unable to connect up with
people or make friends, and came across as an Asperger Syndrome case in many
ways (what with his lifelong preoccupation with the insides of animals and his
lack of empathic connection with others). Some colleagues say he didn’t have
the Asperger picture. Be that as it may, he was a loner – and was gay – with
sexual “hang-ups” like public lewdness (masturbating in public in Milwaukee),
before he embarked on his career of seducing young boys and men.. He would get
them drunk and unconscious after sex, via alcohol and Xanax, and then strangle
them, whereupon he would try to “preserve” them, saving pieces of them in the
fridge or in oilcans in his apartment. He tried a few times to make “zombies”
out of them by injecting hydrochloric acid into their brains, hoping to make
them into sex-slaves he could then keep. They of course died, so he gave that
practice up. When finally caught, he did have some remorse, so he was not a
clear-cut psychopath the way Bundy was. Ed Gein was schizophrenic: he was
abnormally attached to his mother, and when she died, he took to doing such
things (besides killing a few people) as digging up the bodies of women from
the cemetery – and decking himself out in the skins of the women, as though
“wrapping” himself up in his mother’s body, by way of denying the death and
loss of her. So he was quite crazy, in comparison to Dahmer or Gacy (or Bundy
or Ed Kemper or Lake or Ray etc etc ).
In your opinion who
is the most evil serial killer of all time, and why?
The most evil
serial killer of all time? I think the “gold star” should go to the man who
inflicted the most awful torture on the greatest number of victims over the
longest period of time before finally killing them. In that sense, David Parker
Ray, with his “Toy Box” (a large mobile home he converted into a torture
chamber in the small New Mexico town where I visited) is the best contender for
this most revolting of prizes. Leonard Lake, with his younger sidekick Charles
Chitat Ng, who tortured their victims over prolonged periods (but perhaps not
as long as did Ray) would get 2 nd prize. John Ray Weber in Wisconsin tortured
his 15 yr old sister in law in the most nauseating imaginable fashion – but he
may only have killed one other woman – so his record is more meager (as to
victim-count) than that of either Ray or Lake.
It seems like the
general public are becoming more insensible to empathy and life, does this mean
there will be an increase of serial killers and brutality of their crimes in
the future?
As to whether the
public is becoming more insensible about crimes of this sort, and less empathic
– and less compassionate -- toward their fellow-man, I do think this is
happening, during the past 50 years. We are now seeing horrific (evil!) crimes
of a sort that were very rare before the mid 1960s. But serial sexual homicide
– which peaked in the 1980s – has declined a bit lately. I think the feminist
revolution of the late 60s played a role: women were now able, as never before,
to divorce from cruel battering husbands and to support themselves via work, in
ways that were less available before. So some men (mostly working class and
otherwise not very successful men economically) resented their wives’ ‘freedom’
– and some became vengeful and sadistic and even murderous. But the big wave (of
serial sexual homicide) may have passed. We are still seeing other forms of
“evil” crimes, however – including the rape of a Marine cadet by Sedley Alley
who killed her by thrusting a tree branch in her vagina on up to her diaphragm.
I could find no crime so gruesome in the period before the 60s. I made a Power
Point presentation recently of some 60 crimes that I characterized as partaking
of the “New Evil.” There seems to be an increasing degree of emotional
insensitivity of late…as if some people have begun to make little distinction
between real human beings and the little figures one manipulates in the violent
video games to which many young persons have in recent years become addicted.
The number of men committing serial sexual homicide may continue to decrease a
bit – but the occurrence of other variety of crimes involving unusual brutality
may be on the rise.
The above interview
with Michael H Stone, MD 2014 © Manner of Man Magazine. All rights reserved.
Reproduction is strictly prohibited without written permission from the
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