Columbine (38 page)

Exactly!
Hare thought. Psychopaths are that different. Eric Harris baffled the public because we could not conceive of a human with his motives. Even Kate Battan would describe him as a teenager trying to act like an adult. But the angst we associate with teenagers was the least of Eric's drives. His brain was never scanned, but it probably would have shown activity unrecognizable as human to most neurologists.

The fundamental nature of a psychopath is a failure to feel. A psychopath's grasp of fear and suffering is particularly weak. Dr. Hare's research team spent decades studying psychopaths in prison populations. They asked one psychopath to describe fear. "When I rob a bank, I notice that the teller shakes or becomes tongue-tied," he said. "One barfed all over the money." He found that puzzling. The researcher pushed him to describe his own fear. How would he feel with the gun pointed at him? The convict said he might hand over the money, get the hell out, or find a way to turn the tables. Those were responses, the researcher said. How would you
feel
? Feel? Why would he feel?

Researchers often compare psychopaths to robots or rogue computers, like HAL from
2001: A Space Odyssey--
programmed only to satisfy their own objectives. That's the closest approximation of their behavior, but the metaphor lacks nuance. Psychopaths feel something; Eric seemed to show sadness when his dog was sick, and he occasionally felt twinges of regret toward humans. But the signals come through dimly.

Cleckley described this as a poverty of emotional range. That's a tricky concept, because psychopaths develop a handful of primitive emotions closely related to their own welfare. Three have been identified: anger, frustration, and rage. Psychopaths erupt with ferocious bouts of anger, which can get them labeled "emotional." Look more closely, Cleckley advised: "The conviction dawns on those who observe him carefully that here we deal with a readiness of expression rather than a strength of feeling." No love. No grief. Not even sorrow, really, or hope or despair about his own future. Psychopaths feel nothing deep, complex, or sustained. The psychopath was prone to "vexation, spite, quick and labile flashes of quasi-affection, peevish resentment, shallow moods of self-pity, puerile attitudes of vanity, absurd and showy poses of indignation."

Cleckley could have been describing Eric Harris's journal. "how dare you think that I and you are part of the same species when we are sooooooooo different," Eric wrote. "you arent human. you are a robot.... and if you pissed me off in the past, you will die if I see you."

Indignation runs strong in the psychopath. It springs from a staggering ego and sense of superiority. Psychopaths do not feel much, but when they lose patience with inferiors, they can really let it rip. It doesn't go any deeper. Even an earthworm will recoil if you poke it with a stick. A squirrel will exhibit frustration if you tease it by offering a peanut, then repeatedly snatching it back. Psychopaths make it that far up the emotional ladder, but they fall far short of the average golden retriever, which will demonstrate affection, joy, compassion, and empathy for a human in pain.

Researchers are still just beginning to understand psychopaths, but they believe psychopaths crave the emotional responses they lack. They are nearly always thrill seekers. They love roller coasters and hang gliding, and they seek out high-anxiety occupations, like ER tech, bond trader, or Marine. Crime, danger, impoverishment, death--any sort of risk will help. They chase new sources of excitement because it is so difficult for them to sustain.

They rarely stick with a career; they get bored. Even as career criminals, psychopaths underperform. They "lack clear goals and objectives, getting involved in a wide variety of opportunistic offenses, rather than specializing the way typical career criminals do," Cleckley wrote. They make careless mistakes and pass up stunning opportunities, because they lose interest. They perform spectacularly in short bursts--a few weeks, a few months, a yearlong big con--then walk away.

Eric spent his young life that way: he should have been a 4.0 student, but collected A's, B's, and C's. He made one yearlong commitment, to NBK, but he had no ambition, zero plans for his life. He was one of the smartest kids in his high school, but apparently never bothered to apply to college. No job prospects either, beyond Blackjack. Despite a childhood of soldier fantasies, a military father, and a stated desire for a career in the Marines, Eric made no attempt to enlist. When a recruiter cold-called him during the last week of his life, he met the guy, but never returned the call to find out whether he had been accepted.

Rare killer psychopaths nearly always get bored with murder, too. When they slit a throat, their pulse races, but it falls just as fast. It stays down--no more joy from cutting throats for a while; that thrill has already been spent.

A second, less common approach to the banality of murder seems to be the dyad: murderous pairs who feed off each other. Criminologists have been aware of the dyad phenomenon for decades: Leopold and Loeb, Bonnie and Clyde, the Beltway snipers of 2002. Because dyads account for only a fraction of mass murderers, little research has been conducted on them. We know that the partnerships tend to be asymmetrical. An angry, erratic depressive and a sadistic psychopath make a combustible pair. The psychopath is in control, of course, but the hotheaded sidekick can sustain his excitement leading up to the big kill. "It takes heat and cold to make a tornado," Dr. Fuselier is fond of saying. Eric craved heat, but he couldn't sustain it. Dylan was a volcano. You could never tell when he might erupt.

Day after day, for more than a year, Dylan juiced Eric with erratic jolts of excitement. They played the killing out again and again: the cries, the screams, the smell of burning flesh...

Eric savored the anticipation.

____

Dr. Hare's EEGs suggested the psychopathic brain operates differently, but he could not be sure how or why. After Eric's death, a colleague advanced our understanding with a new technology. Functional magnetic resonance imaging tests (fMRIs) create a picture of the brain, with light indicating active regions. Dr. Kent Kiehl wired subjects up and showed them a series of flash cards. Half contained emotionally charged words like rape, murder, and cancer; the others were neutral, like
rock
or
doorknob
. Normal people found the disturbing words disturbing: the brain's emotional nerve center, called the amygdala, lit up. The psychopathic amygdalae were dark. The emotional flavors that color our days are invisible to psychopaths.

Dr. Kiehl repeated the experiment with pictures, including graphic shots of homicides. Again, psychopaths' amygdalae were unaffected; but the language center activated. They seemed to be
analyzing
the emotions instead of experiencing them.

"He responds to events that others find arousing, repulsive, or scary with the words
interesting
and
fascinating,
" Dr. Hare said. For psychopaths, horror is purely intellectual. Their brains search for words to describe what the rest of us would feel. That fits the profile: psychopaths react to pain or tragedy by assessing how they can use the situation to manipulate others.

So what's the treatment for psychopathy? Dr. Hare summarized the research on a century of attempts in two words:
nothing works.
It is the only major mental affliction to elude treatment. And therapy often makes it worse. "Unfortunately, programs of this sort merely provide the psychopath with better ways of manipulating, deceiving, and using people," Hare wrote. Individual therapy can be a bonanza: one-on-one training, to perfect the performance. "These programs are like a finishing school," a psychopath boasted to Dr. Hare's team. "They teach you how to put the squeeze on people."

Eric was blessed with at least two unintentional coaches: Bob Kriegshauser, in the juvenile Diversion program, and his psychiatrist, Dr. Albert. Eric was a quick study. The notes in his Diversion file document a steady improvement, session by session.

Oddly, a large number of psychopaths spontaneously improve around middle age. The phenomenon has been observed for decades, but not explained. Otherwise, psychopaths appear to be lost causes. Within the psychiatric community, that has drawn stiff resistance to diagnosing minors with the condition. But clearly, many juveniles are well on their way.

Dr. Kiehl has a mobile fMRI lab and a research team funded by the University of New Mexico. He mapped about five hundred brains at three prison systems in 2008. Because of the skewed sample pool, about 20 percent met the criteria for psychopathy. He believes that answers about the causes and treatment of psychopathy are coming within reach.

While Eric was devising his attack, Dr. Hare was working on a regimen to address his kind. Hare began by reexamining the data on those spontaneous improvers. From adolescence to their fifties, psychopaths showed virtually no change in emotional characteristics but improved dramatically in antisocial behavior. The inner drives did not change, but their behavior did.

Hare believes that these psychopaths might simply be adapting. Fiercely rational, they figured out that prison was not working for them. So Hare proposed using their self-interest to the public advantage. The program he developed accepts that psychopaths will remain egocentric and uncaring for life but will adhere to rules if it's in their own interest. "Convincing them that there are ways they can get what they want without harming others" is the key, Hare said. "You say to them, 'Most people think with their hearts, not with their heads, and your problem is you think too much with your head. So let's change the problem into an asset.' They understand that."

While Eric was in high school, a juvenile treatment center in Wisconsin began a program developed independently but based on that approach. It also addressed the psychopathic drives for instant gratification and control: subjects were rated every night on adherence to rules and rewarded with extended privileges the next day. The program was not designed specifically for fledgling psychopaths, but it produced significant improvements in that population. A four-year study published in 2006 concluded that they were 2.7 times less likely to become violent than kids with similar psychopathy scores in other programs.

For the first time in the history of psychopathy, a treatment appears to have worked. It awaits replication.

Psychopathy experts are cautiously optimistic about coming advances. "I believe that within ten years we will have a much better perspective on psychopathy than we do now," Dr. Kiehl said. "Ideally we will be able to help effectively manage the condition. I would not say that there is a cure on the horizon, but I do hope that we can implement effective management strategies."

41. The Parents Group

F
uselier was sure Eric was a psychopath. But the kid had been sixteen when he'd hatched the plot, seventeen for most of the planning, and barely eighteen when he opened fire. There would be resistance to writing Eric off at those ages.

Three months after Columbine, the FBI organized a major summit on school shooters in Leesburg, Virginia. The Bureau assembled some of the world's leading psychologists, including Dr. Hare. Near the end of the conference, Dr. Fuselier stepped up to the microphone and gave a thorough briefing on the minds of the two killers. "It looks like Eric Harris was a budding young psychopath," he concluded.

The room stirred. A renowned psychiatrist in the front row moved to speak.
Here it comes,
Fuselier thought.
This guy is going to nitpick the assessment to death.

"I don't think he was a budding young psychopath," the psychiatrist said.

"What's your objection?"

"I think he was a full-blown psychopath."

His colleagues agreed. Eric Harris was textbook.

Several of the experts continued studying the Columbine shooters after the summit. Michigan State University psychiatrist Frank Ochberg flew in several times to help guide the mental health team, and every trip doubled as a fact-finding mission. Dr. Ochberg interviewed an assortment of people close to the killers and studied the boys' writings.

The problem for the community, and ultimately for Jeffco officials, too, was that Fuselier was not permitted to talk to the public. Early on, both local and federal officials were concerned about Jeffco getting overshadowed by the FBI. The Bureau firmly prohibited any of its agents from discussing the case with the media. Jeffco commanders had decided the killers' motives should not be discussed, and the FBI respected that decision.

Failure to address the obvious intensified suspicion toward Jeffco. It exacerbated a credibility problem already hovering over the sheriff's department. In addition to
why,
the public had two pressing questions: Should authorities have seen Columbine coming? And should they have stopped it sooner once the gunfire began? On both those controversial questions, Jeffco had obvious conflicts of interest. And yet they charged ahead.