Guilty by Reason of Insanity Read online

  “EXCELLENT INSIGHTS …

  Lewis has clearly seen and heard a great deal, and she’s unsparing in the details of what makes a child violent.… She finds that poverty and abuse are strong indicators of a tendency toward violence, and she writes movingly of one little girl who became a murderer after her family repeatedly ignored her cries for help.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “[Lewis] shares, in sometimes horrifyingly graphic detail, the stories of abuse these prisoners suffered at the hands of others.… Using such stories, Lewis builds a case against the death penalty, expressing her frustration at a judicial system that, she contends, puts punishment before comprehension.… By book’s end, Lewis makes sure readers are asking themselves whether an eye for an eye is the proper standard by which to approach killers.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A fascinating glimpse into the world of psychiatry and violent crime … Lewis concludes that ‘given certain neurologic and psychiatric problems, any of us could be a killer,’ which is frightening, perhaps controversial, and always interesting.”

  —Booklist

  “COMPELLING …

  In reading Lewis’s book, it becomes clear that she already has some clues as to why some people kill. And she lays those clues out for readers, not with ponderous legal arguments, but by telling the killers’ stories, with a clarity unusual in the academic world.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “The most terrifying passages in Dr. Lewis’s book deal with what she describes as the unearthing of multiple-personality disorders.… Lewis powerfully [states] the … belief that no excessively violent crime is committed without good reason.”

  —CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT

  The New York Times

  “Although these are tales of depravity and murder, they are told by a gifted physician, whose literary talents and compassion are manifest in every line. In her hands, they become spellbinding narratives in which a skilled teacher takes us on a voyage of discovery, in order to share her insights and understanding of minds so disordered that they are capable of conceiving the vicious acts described here.”

  —SHERWIN B. NULAND, M.D.

  “REMARKABLE, FASCINATING, OPINIONATED, COMMANDING, RIVETING …

  This is the book of this decade. It is a book that speaks to crime and murder uniquely. It details savagery, sexual acts that are revolting and bordering on the unimaginable, brutality that makes you cry, people who scare you half to death and make your skin crawl. It is a book that every criminal judge, lawyer, and cop should read. So should every social worker or therapist. And every politician, because the laws and the penal system need to get another look.”

  —The Sunday Republican (Waterbury, CT)

  “After years of interviewing and studying some of the most heinous killers on death row, Dr. Lewis reveals startling truths, some of them shocking and some tragic. I like her style; she has stepped down from the ivory tower of forensic psychiatry and writes with the compassion, humor, and insight of a real person. Guilty by Reason of Insanity will prove fascinating to every student of the psychopathy and/or organic brain dysfunction that drives killers to do what they do.”

  —ANN RULE

  An Ivy Book

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1998 by Dorothy Otnow Lewis, M.D.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Simon & Schuster and A. P. Watt Ltd. for permission to reprint excerpts from “The Second Coming” from The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume 1: The Poems, revised and edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright © 1924 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed 1952 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster and A. P. Watt Ltd., on behalf of Michael Yeats.

  Ivy Books and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.randomhouse.com/BB/

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-60214

  eISBN: 978-0-307-55655-4

  First Hardcover Edition: April 1998

  First Mass Market Edition: May 1999

  v3.1_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  When defendants rely on the insanity defense, they open up their entire psychological state to public scrutiny. Where a defendant is requesting that the judge or jury show leniency in the trial or sentencing because the defendant claims to be insane, the State (as representative of the general public) is entitled to examine thoroughly the basis for that request. Invariably the request is grounded in a defendant’s psychiatric, medical, and family history. Thus, the records of interviews with defendants, their family members, friends, associates, and doctors are all part of the inquiry into the defendant’s psychological state. As such, those records are made a part of the public record, and can be used by the prosecution or the defense in support of or in opposition to the defendant’s position. Thus they are in the public domain.

  Actual names of defendants were used in this book where the defendant’s insanity defense or clemency appeal was part of the public record. Pseudonyms, and changes in geographic locale, were used in a limited number of instances, such as cases involving juvenile defendants, or in instances when I felt that privacy interests needed to be respected.

  The case studies described in this book are true, and are based upon my own evaluations. In addition to my own records, I have, when available, consulted the public record, including police reports, newspaper accounts, defendants’ statements, witnesses’ statements, psychiatric and medical records, and reports of other examiners.

  PROLOGUE

  I never planned to work with violent people, certainly not murderers. I went through medical school in order to become a psychoanalyst. Psychoanalysis, it seemed to me, brought together the most intriguing aspects of art and science; it was the best of two worlds. As a psychiatry resident, when I pictured the future, I saw myself in a private office, seated behind a supine patient, listening and commenting as he struggled to resolve the violent internal conflicts between his id and his superego. That was about as violent as I expected my practice to get.

  I never did become an analyst. Instead, a series of unexpected events and serendipitous observations drew me deeper and deeper into the study of violence. And I, neither willing nor able to navigate those depths alone, pulled my dear friend and colleague, Jonathan Pincus, in after me.

  Jonathan, a neurologist and my partner in crime for the past twenty-five years, like me, never intended to work with violent patients. When I met him he was a junior faculty member at Yale, dividing his time among teaching, research, and patient care. He had every expectation of continuing his traditional academic way of life. Had anyone told him that twenty years hence he would find himself behind bar
s at San Quentin in the company of me and a sequence of serial murderers, he would have dismissed the prediction at best as fantasy, at worst, delusion. In fact, when in the late seventies I first convinced Jonathan to examine a group of violent adolescents, I had no idea that the two of us would someday wind up together on death row.

  When Jonathan and I began our collaboration, no one thought that neurologic impairment or severe psychopathology contributed significantly to violence. Furthermore, the study of the effects of child abuse was in its infancy. This book tells the story of how Jonathan and I gradually came to recognize the kinds of neuropsychiatric and environmental ingredients that go into the recipe for violence.

  Every so often, usually after we have heard that a colleague has pooh-poohed our work, Jonathan will say, “Dorothy, you ruined my reputation.”

  My response? “I didn’t exactly ruin it, Jonathan. I just changed it.”

  CHAPTER 1

  The secret of working with violent people is knowing when to end an interview. Then again, in certain situations that is not an option. Occasionally, in spite of what seem to be adequate precautions, I find myself alone in the company of a very dangerous person. For example, several years ago I was locked in a room with Theodore Bundy. I had not planned it that way.

  The very best setting for interviewing a potentially violent prisoner is one where guards can see everything and hear nothing. Indeed, when I began my interview with Mr. Bundy, that was the setup. He and I were locked inside a room, adjoining the administrative area of the Florida State Penitentiary at Starke. One side of the room, the side with the door through which we entered, had a large pane of soundproof glass that looked like a picture window; the other three walls were solid concrete. A guard was posted just outside the glass where we could see him and he could see but not hear us. He stood in a common area, surrounded by two or three administrative offices and another glassed-in interview room. The doors to the offices were open, and I could see people inside, working behind their desks. I was perfectly safe. Every so often someone came into the common area to fill a mug from a coffee urn, which was always full and hot.

  The room, small to begin with, was further cramped by the presence of a rectangular wooden table that filled almost the entire space. Mr. Bundy and I sat across from each other, our chairs pushed up against opposite walls. He had taken the chair nearest the door and had managed to angle his seat so that he could keep an eye on me and also keep track of the guard’s movements beyond the glass. I was obliged to take the one remaining chair jammed up against the far wall of the cubicle. I would have felt trapped were it not for my clear view of the guard and his clear view of me. There was nothing to worry about. I relaxed and focused my attention entirely on Mr. Bundy and the task at hand. Once an interview is under way, I am oblivious to my surroundings.

  We had been talking since nine o’clock and, in spite of the deliberately fat-filled, death row breakfast that I try to consume in order to keep going for hours, my stomach had started to rumble. This tendency of my gastrointestinal tract to make its needs known has been an embarrassment since high school. I looked at my watch. It was a little after twelve noon. Time for a candy break. (Jonathan and I have learned the folly of leaving prisons in order to get lunch. It can take hours to get back inside.) I turned from Mr. Bundy, on whom my attention had been riveted, and tried to catch the eye of the guard to unlock the cubicle so that I could get to a candy machine. The guard was gone. Not only was he gone, but everyone else who worked in the surrounding offices had also disappeared. They had all gone to lunch. It took me a few seconds to realize that I was alone, locked in a soundproof room, with a man who had murdered more than two dozen women. I was not happy.

  I turned my attention back to Mr. Bundy. “You were saying?” To this day, I do not recall much of what he was saying; I do remember trying to remain calm and appear attentive. If Mr. Bundy knew the guard had left, he kept the knowledge to himself. I have no idea exactly how long I was alone with Theodore Bundy. It could have been an hour; it could have been a few minutes. I never saw the guard leave. I do know that, during the ten or fifteen minutes between the time I looked up and realized that the area was deserted and the time the guard ambled back to his position on the other side of the glass, I was a very good listener. I limited my responses to nods, friendly grunts, and the occasional monosyllable necessary to help the conversation along. Only one of Mr. Bundy’s statements during that period of time remains with me: “The man sitting before you never killed anyone.” During a previous interview with him, Theodore Bundy had described to me in detail several of the murders he had committed. I made a clinical decision: I chose not to point out the discrepancy between our two interviews. Alone in a room with a serial killer is neither the time nor the place to quibble about inconsistencies.

  I used to be relatively fearless. I did not think twice about interviewing violent people all by myself. I figured, if I didn’t threaten them, they would not hurt me. As I reflect on this patently idiotic assumption, I like to think that it is experience and not just middle age that has made me more cautious. I have learned a lot from the rogues gallery Jonathan and I have seen. Books can tell you how to interview, what kinds of questions to ask; supervisors and instructors can provide advice; but there’s nothing quite like delinquents and criminals to teach you about talking with violent people. Timing matters.

  I remember one of my first teachers. He was neither a serial murderer nor even an adult. He was a repeatedly assaultive adolescent boy who, because of his violent acts, was incarcerated in the secure unit of a juvenile correctional institution in Connecticut. The two of us were alone in a small room, just off the main corridor of the unit. There were no guards or picture windows. I don’t recall exactly what we were discussing—whatever it was seemed to be making the boy increasingly agitated. Nothing I said made him comfortable, and long silences made things worse. When he could no longer sit still, he began to walk back and forth along the far wall of the room, opposite the door. My chair was nearest the exit. As his pace quickened, he mumbled to himself and began to punch his right hand into his left.

  I rose from my chair and scooped up my papers. “I think we’ve talked enough for one day. Let’s stop now and talk again tomorrow. Maybe next week.” I tried to sound casual as I slowly inched my way toward the door. I turned the knob gently, opened the door, and slipped out. The boy followed me. I could feel him behind me. The next thing I knew, I heard a sharp crack behind me, like the sound of a thick branch splitting. I wheeled around in time to see another inmate, who had been walking down the corridor, minding his own business, and who happened to be passing our way, fall to the floor. I was dumbstruck. Had I not ended our meeting when I did, I surely would have been the one on the floor with a broken jaw. When I was able to speak, I asked simply, “Why did you do that?”

  “He called me a motherfucker,” came the instantaneous reply.

  No one had said a word. Nevertheless, the boy was convinced he had been insulted. In this case (as subsequently with Theodore Bundy), I did not challenge his perception. With any luck, I would have time later on to explore what had happened and why. Jonathan and I have learned never to argue with paranoid misperceptions. It doesn’t work. Paranoia—the unwarranted sense that one is being threatened, endangered, disrespected—is probably the most common symptom fueling recurrent acts of violence. Jonathan and I have found that this is as true of violent juvenile delinquents as it is of violent adult criminals. This does not mean that most violent people are schizophrenic. As Jonathan and I teach our trainees at Georgetown and Bellevue, paranoia is characteristic of almost any neuropsychiatric disorder: schizophrenia, mania, depression, brain damage, seizures, alcoholism, senility, and more. It can emerge whenever something goes awry in the brain. Paranoia must have strong survival value. Doctors who fail to appreciate this basic psychiatric truth get hurt; some wind up dead.

  Fortunately, most prisons allow lawyers to sit in on diagnostic intervie
ws with inmates. The presence of another person in the room, while not diminishing paranoia, helps keep rageful feelings and violent behaviors in check. There are other advantages than just safety to having a lawyer at interviews. Jonathan and I insist that the lawyers with whom we work observe what happens in our interviews: what we do, what we say, what we see, and what we hear. Some of the phenomena that come to light are so unusual, so bizarre, that they must be seen to be believed.

  Prisons in Georgia, we have discovered, are different. In Georgia, defense lawyers are not allowed to be present during psychiatric evaluations of inmates. At least that has been our experience at the state penitentiary.

  Once, when I came to Georgia to examine a young man on death row, although the lawyer was not allowed to join me, the prison offered to station a guard inside the room during the interview. This was obviously unacceptable. No inmate will tell you much about his feelings or symptoms, much less about a murder he may have committed, with a prison guard breathing down his neck. On that occasion I decided to ignore my own basic rule of safety, and I met alone in a locked cell with the condemned boy. The inmate had been a juvenile when he was tried and sentenced to death. His victim, as I recall, was a violent, abusive relative. Otherwise, compared to most of the death row inmates we have seen, the boy’s record was pretty clean. People who do in family members tend, for the most part, not to be indiscriminately violent. In fact, it was hard to understand why this particular young man had been sentenced to death in the first place. I had seen far more dangerous delinquents at the correctional school in Connecticut. It would take me years to appreciate the fact that the trial lawyer has lots more to do with who gets The Chair than does the nature of the crime. Anyway, I felt pretty safe with the young inmate; therefore, with only mild trepidations, I met alone with him.