The Anatomy of Violence (17 page)

Jolly Jane liked to live life to the full. Like many serial killers, she enjoyed experimenting in her modus operandi and exploring her life-or-death power over others. Like many modern-day female offenders, she particularly took pleasure in experimenting with drugs—but in an unusual way. One of her greatest excitements in life was to see life itself slowly sucked out of the patients she cared for. She would first inject them with an overdose of
morphine. She would then sit patiently with them, gazing into their eyes almost like a lover, observing the moment when their pupils contracted and their breath shortened.
⁷⁵
Just when they were about to sink into a coma, Jane would revive them with a jab of
atropine—an alkaloid extracted from deadly nightshade. It blocks the activity of the
vagus nerve. This causes the contracted pupils to dilate, the slowing heart to beat rapidly, the cooling body to sweat, and shaking spasms to overcome the patient. Eventually they would die, but not before Jane had her high from observing their eyes dilate and watching their bodies contort in a slow death.

As with Randy Kraft, the only insight we have into what else Jolly
Jane would get up to during these
murderous moments comes from the dramatic testimony of the one individual to survive an attack.
Amelia Phinney was a thirty-six-year-old patient hospitalized with a uterine ulcer in 1887. Jolly Jane attentively floated around her like Florence Nightingale. The good nurse gave her patient a drink purportedly to help her pain—to Amelia it tasted bitter. Then Amelia felt her throat dry up, her body turn numb, and her eyes become heavy. She felt herself sinking into sleep.

At that point she became aware of something unusual—Jane was pulling back the bedsheets and getting into bed with her. Jolly Jane stroked her hair, kissed her face, and cuddled up to her. After a period of carnal embraces, Jane jumped onto her knees to peer deeply into her patient’s pupils. She then gave Amelia another drink—presumably atropine to reverse the physiological symptoms of morphine. At that critical point, Jane abruptly disengaged. Amelia was aware of Jane dashing quickly out of the room—presumably because she heard someone approaching.

So Amelia Phinney lived to tell the tale, but not immediately. To this patient, the experience was so utterly bizarre that it must surely have been a dream during her ill state. Like
Joey Fancher, who only testified a long time after his attack, in the court case of Randy Kraft, Amelia kept her bizarre story to herself. It came to light fourteen years later, after Jolly Jane’s arrest, in 1901.
⁷⁶
As with Randy Kraft, a serial killer who could have been caught, she continued on her killing spree.

Unlike many other female serial killers, who frequently kill for monetary gain, Jane was not profiting from her murders. The killings did, however, give her what she herself termed
“voluptuous delight”—a shorthand nineteenth-century term for a
sexual turn-on. Today she would be called a
lust serial killer—which is very unusual for a female. Yet while Jane needed her sexual turn-ons, as a nurse aren’t there other ways of getting such worldly pleasures? How could she morally justify her actions given the awful loss of innocent life?

It seemed almost motiveless malignity. It doesn’t morally make much sense. And in fact, this is essentially how Jane herself sums it all up:

Jane could never understand herself. Nor could those who knew her. After her arrest a deluge of letters were received attesting to the fact that she was a compassionate, dedicated, and caring professional. She could not have committed these heinous deeds. If you look at her picture, in
Figure 3.6
, and peer into her eyes, can’t you too see a gentle, kindhearted, motherly nurse?

Jane racked her mind for the cause of her crimes. She could gaze longingly into the eyes of her dying victims and experience her voluptuous delight while watching their agony. She knew what she was doing. She knew she was killing. Jane was utterly perplexed when at her trial in 1902 she was found not guilty by reason of
insanity. To her mind, she could not possibly be insane because she knew full well what she was doing.
⁷⁸
She truly could not make sense of it.

But I feel I can. And I literally mean
feel
. Jane knew cognitively what was
moral behavior and what was not. Of course she could tell right from wrong at a thinking, cognitive level. But she did not have the
feeling
of what is moral. She could not empathize
emotionally
with the human suffering that resulted from her actions. She couldn’t grieve or even feel sorry for her victims. I strongly suspect it was because she had a defective amygdala and
ventral prefrontal cortex. She lacked the feeling for what is moral.

Figure 3.6
   Jane
Toppan

That moral feeling, centered on the
amygdala and prefrontal cortex, is the emotional engine that translates the cognitive recognition that your act is immoral into behavioral inhibition. It holds you back from committing an immoral act, even though a part of you wants to move forward to gain your voluptuous pleasure. I submit that this emotional brake on immorality functions much more poorly in psychopathic individuals like Jolly Jane.

Jane could look into her victims and literally see them suffer. But what she could not see was her functional brain scan. There I believe she would have seen the faulty emotional wiring of her immoral brain that contributed to her killings. Jane died at the age of eighty-one, just before the outbreak of World War II, so of course I cannot test my theory. Yet if we look back at Jane’s history, we can at least recognize the many social and psychological trappings of a psychopathic personality.

Jane was born into a desperately poor family of Irish immigrants. Her mother died when she was only a year old, and she
clearly suffered from the type of
maternal deprivation and breakage of the mother-infant
bonding process found in the backgrounds of psychopaths.
⁷⁹
Add to this a poor father who was
mentally ill and could not care for his family, and a grandmother equally destitute and unable to care for the children. Jane was institutionalized until the age of five, and passed off as an Italian orphan because of the shame of being Irish. She was “adopted” into a home where she was treated as a servant girl.
⁸⁰
With an
early
environment like this, the seeds of psychopathy grow rapidly.

The young Jane duly went on to exhibit the psychopathic traits of being sociable and
charming, developing the reputation of being the life and soul of the party. She evidenced pathological
lying and deception, weaving fanciful stories of her father living in China, her sister marrying an English lord, and the czar of Russia offering her a nursing position. She was a
stimulation-seeker who also committed acts of
petty theft against other nurses and patients. She conned and manipulated her hospital superiors. Among her victims were her own stepsister and her stepsister’s husband. She was essentially superficial, with her surface joviality hiding a more disturbed, deep-seated personality disorder.

All of these
characteristics are features of psychopaths,
⁸¹
and psychopathy provides a fertile ground for serial killers. While Jane gave detailed confessions on thirty-one murders, she claimed before she was locked away, in 1902, “It would be safe to say that I killed at least 100
persons.”
⁸²
Unless you are like Randy
Kraft, who used a scorecard to keep an accurate tally, it’s easy to lose count.

So Jane was a psychopath. But would she have the type of brain functioning that might explain her
moral insanity? While we cannot scan Jolly Jane’s brain, we can scan the brains of her fellow psychopaths today and put them through the same moral
dilemmas given to normal people.

This is exactly what my gifted graduate student
Andrea Glenn did. We’d discovered that
temp
agencies are home to higher-than-normal numbers of psychopaths, a point we’ll discuss in greater detail in
chapter 4
. Just like
Josh Greene, Andrea confronted our subjects with personal,
emotional, and moral dilemmas that involved harm to other people: Should you smother your crying baby to save yourself and other townspeople hiding from terrorists who would otherwise hear the sound and kill you all? We also presented subjects with less emotional, impersonal moral dilemmas: Should you keep money you found in a lost wallet?

Andrea found that individuals with high psychopathy scores showed reduced activity in the
amygdala during emotional, personal moral decision-making.
⁸³
While the amygdala, the neural seat of emotion, shows a bright glow in normal people when faced with emotion-provoking moral dilemmas, this emotional candle is barely flickering in highly psychopathic individuals.

Findings demonstrate that amygdala functioning is disrupted during moral decision-making in psychopathy and seems to be at its core. Without such amygdala activation, individuals may not think twice about conning and manipulating others. Just like Jane, they happily live out their immoral lives without feeling guilt or remorse. So when Jolly Jane manipulated others, stole their possessions, or thought about killing someone for frivolous reasons, she did not have that amygdala activation firing inside her to hold her back—no sense of shame.

Indeed, Jane’s emotions were almost dead. Like a pathological
stimulation-seeker, she was so removed from her natural feelings that she had to go to very extreme lengths to register a tangible feeling of “
voluptuous delight.” Consider the killing of Elizabeth, her sister-in-law. Jane confessed that she had deliberately prolonged her life so that
she could witness more of her suffering: “I held her in my arms and watched with delight as she gasped her life out.”
⁸⁴
Cuddling and groping in bed with Elizabeth in the moments of her sister-in-law’s death was just about the only way Jolly Jane could apparently be truly happy, and experience some sense of emotion in her life.

We know the amygdala is centrally involved in responding to cues of distress in others, thus guiding individuals away from antisocial behavior,
⁸⁵
and we also know from work by the leading psychopathy researcher
James Blair that psychopaths are less capable of recognizing negative emotions—including fear and sadness—in others’ faces. So when Jane with her malfunctioning amygdala peered with intense curiosity into her victim’s hapless eyes and felt their bodies, I think she was trying to register an emotion in the face of her victim. Was her patient experiencing fear? Was it sadness? Or perhaps it was pleasure? Jane’s emotional brain and amygdala were desperately stumbling around, trying to work it all out. That voyeuristic experience piqued her curiosity while, simultaneously, she was devoid of any natural feeling that could give her cause for moral concern at what she was doing.

Andrea Glenn found that the medial prefrontal cortex, the
posterior cingulate, and the
angular gyrus were also dysfunctional
in psychopaths during moral decision-making and were particularly associated with interpersonal features of the psychopath—superficial
charm,
lying and deception, egocentricity, and manipulation. These brain areas are also part of the neural circuit of moral decision-making and are involved in
self-reflection, emotion perspective-taking, and integrating emotion into social thinking.
⁸⁶
In turn, we can certainly see that Jane’s social thinking was very disturbed. She could not take the emotional perspective of her victims. Try as hard as she might, she could not reflect and understand emotionally even her own behavior—she could not integrate emotion into social thinking. This partly explains her perplexing, psychopathic behavior. And given our brain-imaging findings on psychopaths, I suspect that Jane’s aberrant behavior can be explained by a fundamental failure in the neural circuitry of morality. That’s what I believe was egregiously wrong with Jane’s psychopathic brain.

We have seen in this chapter that the violent brain functions very differently from yours. If we had to pick the area of primary difference,
it would be the pre
frontal cortex. We’ve seen how
impulsive,
reactive aggression can result from a lack of normal regulatory and inhibitory functioning. We have witnessed this in the reactive, impulsive, hot-blooded homicide committed by Antonio Bustamante. Being more
regulated and controlled,
proactively aggressive murderers do not have that same degree of prefrontal dysfunction, but like their reactively aggressive counterparts they do have a mass of
limbic activity bubbling over in their brains that fuels violent, aggressive outbursts follows their careful planning.