Murderous Minds (18 page)

Fearlessness may be one reason some psychopaths do extreme things and take dangerous risks. Those whose emotional life is very empty, who
feel little except anger, may seek extraordinary experiences just to feel something more than the emptiness that comes with an innate inability to feel many emotions the rest of us take for granted. For psychopaths, Hare wrote, “Fear—like most other emotions—is incomplete, shallow, largely cognitive in nature, and without the physiological turmoil or ‘coloring’ that most of us find distinctly unpleasant and wish to avoid or reduce.”
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Richard said he had gotten a bit of a thrill from sex, but not much else.

Resorting to murder at least six times might suggest that he may have also experienced some stimulation from planning, executing, and getting away with the act. In some cases, it is conceivable that the act of murder was a response to someone who angered and/or disrespected him. He was subject to violent outbursts of anger, according to his wife and children. Dietz himself saw the anger start to build when he questioned Richard about the appropriateness of killing three men he claimed to have killed in South Carolina after a car they were riding in cut his car off. After some tense moments followed by some gentle questioning, Richard attributed his anger to Dietz’s appearing to speak down to him, as his abusive father Stanley Kuklinski had half a century ago.
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Although his claims of being a hit man extraordinaire are suspect, few question Richard’s claims that he had a horrible childhood. His wife and children attested to it. His father Stanley was known as an abusive alcoholic who beat his children and wife. Richard said he always regretted not adding him to his list of victims. But “Richard sometimes thought his mother was even meaner than his father—no small thing,” his biographer wrote, “Anna tried to stop Richard from stealing, hit him with most everything she found in the house: shoes and broom handles, hairbrushes, wooden spoons, pots and pans. She often hit him on the head—this even after [Richard’s other brother] Florian was killed that way [by his father]—and knocked Richard out cold. She’d come up behind Richard and strike him when he didn’t expect it.”
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Besides being inhumane and illegal, abusing children this way may have blowback that the abusers never imagine, if they even care. Psychologists have been gathering data for years that suggests that mistreatment of children can have severe consequences. It has been linked to drug abuse, depression, and suicide, as well as antisocial behavior. Several studies
suggest that psychopathy can be added to that list. It is possible that the stress accompanying abuse in susceptible people alters the development of their brains as they grow and mature.

The Widening Circle of Abuse

Back in 2002, a trio of Swedish psychologists led by Britt af Klinteberg of the Karolinska Institute ventured into the files of a group of 199 males from a bad neighborhood in Stockholm.
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They all had criminal records. Researchers had kept track of these boys from the ages of 11 to 14 years until they were adults, 32 to 40 years old. The authors found that children exposed to a high level of victimization were more violent and had higher psychopathy scores on the PCL test than a control group of 95 children from similar backgrounds who were not victimized as children.

Children who were exposed to lower levels of abuse had no, or only minor, histories of violence and lower PCL test scores. The Swedish study replicated the results of a similar study completed six years earlier involving 652 neglected and abused children living in a metropolitan area of the United States Midwest.
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These results indicated “a clear connection between early childhood victimization and psychopathy,” according to the authors of the U.S. study, Barbara Weiler and Cathy Widom, Ph.D. They also suggested that the connection between childhood abuse and later violence in some individuals might be traced to the presence of psychopathy.

A decade before this study, criminologists and psychologists recognized that having a father like Richard Kuklinski’s father, a father who was an alcoholic, a psychopath, or who displayed antisocial behaviors, was one of the best predictors of future psychopathy in a child.
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Although it is clear that childhood abuse or victimization is a risk factor for the development of psychopathy, it is not necessary for the development of psychopathy. Eric Harris, for example, was raised by decent parents who never abused him. He was raised in the same household as his psychologically healthy brother.
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It appears that it is possible to be born, as forensic psychiatrist Michael Stone, M.D., of Columbia University says, a “bad seed.”
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The expression of an unfortunate combination of still unidentified genes may be enough to produce a criminal psychopath without the unwanted and unwarranted addition of beatings or other mistreatment.

While it is true that abuse is not necessary to bring out psychopathic traits in some individuals, it is also true that abusing children does not guarantee that they will grow into adults who can fake but not experience the feelings and emotions that allow humans to care about others. Without a predisposition to psychopathy, it is not at all certain that psychopathy will follow abuse. Other emotional and psychological damage from childhood abuse, though horrific, would not be the same thing as clinical psychopathy.

DNA’s Contribution

Despite the rare exceptions, there are strong indications that genes influence the development of personality traits that set criminal psychopaths apart from non-psychopaths in many cases. In fact, the heritability of psychopathy is estimated to be around 50%, a respectable contribution.
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This does not mean that half of a person’s psychopathy can be attributed to his or her genes. In fact, it tells us nothing about any particular person, whether it’s Richard Kuklinski or Richard III. Heritability applies only to populations. It means that around 50% of the individual differences in psychopathy observed in a population can be traced to genetic variations. (Choosing the word “heritability” to describe this concept has unfortunately led to confusion with the word “inherited,” which does apply to individuals. The two words are not the same, despite their seeming linguistic similarities. Sadly, this is one of many instances where the public’s difficulty understanding scientific concepts can be traced to poorly chosen and unnecessarily obscure jargon.)

Scientists redeem themselves from poor word choices, however, when they devise elegant experiments. A good example is when they compare traits in identical and fraternal twins. Identical or monozygotic twins inherit the same DNA. Fraternal, or dizygotic twins, are like any pair of non-identical siblings; they have about half of their genes in common. By comparing the frequency with which traits show up in identical-twin pairs to the frequency with which they show up in fraternal-twin pairs, researchers can estimate the influence of genetics on a trait in a population.

There are some assumptions associated with twin studies that need to be considered. For example, do identical and fraternal twins really share the same environment? Or do people treat identical and fraternal twins
differently? And, do some parents choose each other as mates because they have similar traits? If so, their fraternal twins might have more than half of their genes in common.
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But twin studies still provide some of the most valuable and revealing insights into the relative contributions of genes and environment to behavior.

For example, a study of 838 identical and 1,360 fraternal twins points to the existence of a psychopathic personality factor that is highly heritable.
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The results derived from a self-report questionnaire indicated a strong genetic influence in the development of psychopathic traits in 16-to 17-year-old Swedish twins.

The genes that might influence psychopathic behavior have not been identified. In fact, even mental disorders that have received years more research time and billions of dollars more in funding—disorders like schizophrenia, major depression, bipolar disorder, autism, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder—have not been linked to “disease-causing” genes. Instead, clusters of genes appear to influence the development of these illnesses.

Multiple genetic variations in these genes are now known to increase the risk of developing these disorders. In fact, some of the same genetic variations show up in all five of these serious psychiatric conditions.
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Interestingly, some of these variations involve genes that affect how brain cells communicate by regulating the movement of calcium into and out of cells. Calcium’s importance in biology extends to a lot more than bone health; it is a very influential factor in nerve-cell function and, seemingly, in achieving mental health.

If psychopathy is indeed a mental disorder, as many experts believe, then psychopathy research too might benefit from being included in genetic studies like those that have already linked five major mental disorders (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, major depression, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) to each other through the genetic variations they have in common. Psychopathy may share some biology with them, just as they appear to share some biology with each other.

Above Genes

For many criminal psychopaths, part of the answer to the question “How could someone be so evil?” may lie somewhere in the genetic material the
perpetrator came into the world with, his genome. Another part of the answer apparently lies above his genome, in his epigenome. (Epi in Greek = “above.”) There is, it turns out, much more to genetics than DNA.

The key is what turns genes on and off. Environmental factors can influence how genes are regulated. It is now commonly believed that environmental influences can play a part in the development of mental disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression. Stress, which victimized children experience in abundance, is one such environmental factor.

Canadian researcher Patrick McGowan and his colleagues reported in 2009 that childhood abuse leaves an epigenetic mark on the brains of those who endure it and then take their own lives.
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They detected evidence of epigenetic changes affecting the function of a stress hormone receptor (a glucocorticoid receptor) that is found specifically in neurons. People who took their lives but who were not abused did not show these changes. This study linked findings in rats with those in people, since rat pups who fail to receive normal attention from their mothers have similar epigenetic changes in their brains.

There are different ways environmental factors like the stress produced by physical abuse may tell genes what to do. They may lead to the modification of DNA itself by adding a methyl group (a carbon atom bonded to three hydrogen atoms) to a specific site on the giant molecule. The addition of this chemical tag to just the right spot in DNA on or near a particular gene can change the way that gene is expressed. There is a virtually unlimited supply of tags like these in the body, ready to respond to events that originate far from the cell’s nucleus where DNA is stored.

Events and things you encounter in your environment can also cause chemical tags to attach to proteins called histones. DNA doesn’t routinely hang around in the nucleus fully extended like a string floating in water; it is wrapped around histones and so condensed to save space and regulate access to the genes it contains. Adding a methyl group to a histone can make it harder or easier for DNA to be read or accessed by the cellular machinery that turns its encoded instructions into amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Adding an acetyl group (that’s a methyl group with two additional atoms, another carbon and an oxygen) often
makes it easier for a gene’s encoded information to be converted into a protein. Removing an acetyl group often has the opposite effect.

RNA, a molecule similar in structure to DNA and involved in many crucial cellular processes, including turning DNA’s coded instructions into functioning proteins, can also affect gene expression. It can also turn genes off by interfering with several of the processes that read the message encoded in DNA. It might also promote the addition of methyl groups to DNA and the modification of histones.
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The pattern of use of these chemical tags creates an epigenome. Diet, smoking, exercise, infection, toxic chemicals, and many other things you encounter in your day-to-day life can affect your epigenome. It is highly likely that the stress of being terrorized as young child does the same. The epigenomes of middle-aged identical twins don’t look much alike despite their identical genes, because experience has changed the factors that control the expression of those identical genes.

“We’ve got to get people thinking more about what they do,” epigenetics authority Randy Jirtle, Ph.D., of Duke University asserted in 2010. “They have a responsibility for their epigenome. Their genome they inherit. But their epigenome, they potentially can alter, and particularly that of their children. And that brings in responsibility, but it also brings in hope. You’re not necessarily stuck with this. You can alter this.”
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Epigenetics is a potentially game-changing avenue of research for behavioral geneticists. It may help explain why it is so difficult to find genes involved in complex disorders and to identify the factors that explain complex behaviors like those associated with mental diseases and psychopathy.