The Amazing Adventures of Phoenix Jones: And the Less Amazing Adventures of Some Other Real-Life Superheroes: An eSpecial From Riverhead Books (5 page)

A free excerpt from Jon Ronson’s
The Psychopath Test
 . . .

It was an August evening and I was drinking with Bob Hare in a hotel bar in rural Pembrokeshire, West Wales. He was a quite feral-looking man with yellow-white hair and red eyes, as if he’d spent his life in battle, battling psychopaths, the very forces of evil. It was exciting to finally meet him. While names like Elliott Barker and Gary Maier had all but faded away, surviving only in obscure reports detailing crazily idealistic psychiatric endeavors from days long gone, Hare is influential. Justice departments and parole boards all over the world have accepted his contention that psychopaths are quite simply incurable and everyone should concentrate their energies instead on learning how to root them out using his PCL-R Checklist, which he has spent a lifetime refining. His was not the only psychopath checklist around, but it was by far the most extensively used. It was the one used to diagnose Tony at Broadmoor and get him locked up for the past twelve years.

Bob Hare saw the Oak Ridge program as yet more evidence of psychopaths’ untrustworthiness. Try to teach them empathy and they’ll cunningly use it as an empathy-faking training exercise for their own malicious ends. Indeed, every observer who has studied the Oak Ridge program has come to that same conclusion. Everyone, that is, except Gary Maier.

“Yeah,” Gary had told me, “I guess we had inadvertently created a finishing school for them. There had always been that worry. But they were doing well in the program. . . .”

They were doing well and then, suddenly, he got fired.

“When they saw their leader be trashed like that, I think it empowered them,” Gary said. “There was like a ‘This is bullshit!’ And we got a rebound.”

Some of the psychopaths, Gary believed, went off and killed to teach the authorities a lesson—that’s what happens when you fire a man as inspiring as Gary Maier.

He sounded mournful, defensive, and utterly convinced of himself when he told me this, and I suddenly understood what a mutually passionate and sometimes dysfunctional bubble the relationship between therapist and client can be.

I had e-mailed Bob Hare to ask if he’d meet me and he’d replied that he’d be teaching his checklist to a group of psychiatrists and brain imagers and care workers and psychologists and prison officers and budding criminal profilers on a three-day residential course, and if I was willing to pay the £600 registration fee, I was welcome to join them, although a copy of the thirty-page checklist wasn’t included in the price. That would cost an extra £361.31. I negotiated his office down to £400 (media discount) and we were all set.

This was the Monday evening before the first day and the attendees were milling around. Some, clearly impressed to be in the same room as Bob Hare, approached him for his autograph. Others looked skeptical from a distance. One care worker had told me earlier that she’d been sent by her employers and she wasn’t happy about it. Surely it was unfair to doom a person to a lifetime of a horrifying-sounding psychopathy diagnosis (“It’s a
huge
label,” she said) just because they didn’t do well on the Hare Checklist. At least in the old days it was quite simple. If someone was a persistent violent offender who lacked impulse controls, they were a psychopath. But the Hare Checklist was much wilier. It was all to do with reading between the lines of a person’s turn of phrase, a person’s sentence construction. This was, she said, amateur-sleuth territory.

I told Bob about her skepticism and I said I shared it to an extent, but that was possibly because I’d been spending a lot of time lately with Scientologists.

He shot me a grumpy look.

“We’ll see how you feel by the end of the week,” he said.

“So, anyway,” I said, “how did all this begin for you?”

He looked at me. I could tell what was going through his mind: “I’m tired. Telling the story will take up a lot of my energy. Does this person really deserve it?”

Then he sighed. And he began.

In the mid-1960s, just as Elliott Barker was first conceiving his Total Encounter Capsule over in Ontario, Bob Hare was in Vancouver working as a prison psychologist. His was the maximum-
security British Columbia Penitentiary. Nowadays it is a prison-themed bar and diner where the servers wear striped prison uniforms and dishes are named after famous inmates, but back then it was a tough facility with a brutal reputation. Like Elliott, Bob believed that the psychopaths in his care buried their madness beneath a façade of normality. But Bob was less idealistic. He was interested in detection, not cure. He’d been tricked so many times by devious psychopaths. On his very first day working at the prison, for example, the warden had told him he needed a uniform and he should give his measurements to the inmate who was the prison tailor. So Bob did, and was glad to observe how assiduously the man took them. He spent a long time getting everything just right: the feet, the inside leg. Bob felt moved by the sight. Even in this awful prison, here was a man who took pride in his work.

But then, when the uniform arrived, Bob found that one trouser leg rode up to his calf while the other trailed along the ground. The jacket sleeves were equally askew. It couldn’t have been human error. The man was obviously trying to make him look like a clown.

At every turn, psychopaths were making his life unpleasant. One even cut the brake cables of his car while it was in the prison’s auto repair shop. Bob could have been killed. And so he started devising tests to determine if psychopaths could somehow be rooted out.

He put word around the prison that he was looking for psychopathic and non-psychopathic volunteers. There was no shortage. Prisoners were always looking to relieve the boredom. He strapped them up, one by one, to various EEG and sweat and blood-pressure measuring machines, and also to an electricity generator, and he explained to them that he was going to count backward from ten and when he reached one, they’d receive a very painful electric shock.

The difference in the responses stunned Bob. The non-psychopathic volunteers (theirs were crimes of passion, usually, or crimes born from terrible poverty or abuse) steeled themselves ruefully, as if a painful electric shock was just the penance they deserved, and as the countdown continued, the monitors revealed dramatic increases in their perspiration rates. They were, Bob noted and documented, scared.

“And what happened when you got to one?” I asked.

“I gave them an electric shock,” Bob said. He smiled. “We used
really
painful electric shocks,” he said.

“And the psychopaths?” I asked.

“They didn’t break a sweat,” said Bob. “Nothing.”

I looked at him.

“Sure,” he added, “at the exact moment the unpleasant thing occurred . . .”

“The electric shock?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Bob. “When the unpleasant thing occurred, the psychopaths gave a response . . .”

“Like a shriek?” I asked.

“Yes, I suppose like a shriek,” said Bob. But the tests seemed to indicate that the amygdala, the part of the brain that should have anticipated the unpleasantness and sent the requisite signals of fear over to the central nervous system, wasn’t functioning as it should.

It was an enormous breakthrough for Bob, his first clue that the brains of psychopaths were different from regular brains. But he was even more astonished when he repeated the test. This time the psychopaths knew exactly how much pain they’d be in when he reached one, and still: nothing. No sweat. Bob learned something that Elliott Barker wouldn’t for years: psychopaths were likely to re-offend.

“They had no memory of the pain of the electric shock even when the pain had occurred just moments before,” Bob said. “So what’s the point in threatening them with imprisonment if they break the terms of their parole? The threat has no meaning for them.”

He did another experiment, the Startle Reflex Test, in which psychopaths and non-psychopaths were invited to look at grotesque images, like crime-scene photographs of blown-apart faces, and then when they least expected it, Bob would let off an incredibly loud noise in their ear. The non-psychopaths would leap with astonishment. The psychopaths would remain comparatively serene.

Bob knew we tend to jump a lot higher when startled if we’re on the edge of our seats anyway. If we’re watching a scary movie and someone makes an unexpected noise, we leap in terror. But if we’re
engrossed
by something, a crossword puzzle, say, and someone startles us, our leap is less pronounced. From this Bob deduced that when psychopaths see grotesque images of blown-apart faces, they aren’t horrified. They’re
absorbed
.

It seemed from Bob’s experiments that psychopaths see blown-apart faces the same way we journalists see mysterious packages sent in the mail, or the same way we see Broadmoor patients who might or might not have faked madness—as fascinating puzzles to be solved.

Thrilled by his findings, Bob sent his readings to
Science
magazine.

“The editor returned them unpublished,” he said. “He wrote me a letter. I’ll never forget it. He wrote: ‘Frankly we found some of the brain wave patterns depicted in your paper very odd. Those EEGs couldn’t have come from real people.’”

Bob paused and chuckled.

“Couldn’t have come from real people,”
he repeated.

My guess was that
Science
magazine behaved coolly toward Bob because they believed him to be yet another maverick psychopath researcher running rampant in a Canadian mental institution in the late 1960s. Those places were the Wild West of psychopath study back then, with lots of big ideas and practically no regulation. It was inevitable that civil rights groups would eventually force a reining in of the experiments. And sure enough, disastrously for Bob, electric shocks were outlawed in the early 1970s.

“Even mild ones,” he told me. He seemed annoyed by the legislation even now, years later. “We could still startle them with loud noises but they couldn’t be anywhere near
as
loud,” he said.

Bob was forced to change tack. How could psychopaths be rooted out in a more hands-off way? Were there patterns of behavior? Would they involuntarily use giveaway turns of phrase, imperceptible to unsuspecting civilians? He devoured Hervey Cleckley’s seminal 1941 book,
The Mask of Sanity
. Cleckley was a Georgia-based psychiatrist whose analysis of psychopathic behavior—how they bury their psychosis beneath a veneer of engaging normalness—had come to influence the field. Bob began quietly scrutinizing his own psychopaths, looking out for linguistic clues.

In 1975 he organized a conference on the subject.

“I invited the top people in the world who might have something to say about psychopaths,” he said. “We ended up with eighty-five people. We took over a hotel in a ski resort near Saint Moritz called Les Arcs.”

It began disastrously, Bob said, with one psychiatrist standing up and dramatically announcing to the group his contention that Bob was himself a psychopath. A ripple of shock passed through the conference hall.

Bob stood. “Why do you believe that?” he asked.

“You’re clearly impulsive,” replied the psychiatrist. “You can’t plan ahead. You invited me to participate as a speaker in this conference only a month ago.”

“I invited you only a month ago because the person I wanted to come couldn’t come,” Bob said.

“Oh, you’re cold-blooded and callous,” the psychiatrist said.

“Did he mean it?” I asked Bob now.

“Yeah, he meant it,” said Bob. “He was a nasty man.”

The purpose of the Les Arcs conference was for the experts to pool their observations on the minutiae of psychopaths’ behavior, the verbal and nonverbal tics. Were there patterns? Did they involuntarily use giveaway turns of phrase? Their conclusions became the basis for his now famous twenty-point Hare PCL-R Checklist. Which was this:

Item 1: Glibness/superficial charm

Item 2: Grandiose sense of self-worth

Item 3: Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom

Item 4: Pathological lying

Item 5: Conning/manipulative

Item 6: Lack of remorse or guilt

Item 7: Shallow affect

Item 8: Callous/lack of empathy

Item 9: Parasitic lifestyle

Item 10: Poor behavioral controls

Item 11: Promiscuous sexual behavior

Item 12: Early behavior problems

Item 13: Lack of realistic long-term goals

Item 14: Impulsivity

Item 15: Irresponsibility

Item 16: Failure to accept responsibility for own actions