Murderous Minds (34 page)

The persistence of psychopathy in our species is at least consistent with their personality traits not being a disadvantage from an evolutionary standpoint. And they may very well provide an evolutionary advantage. In this view, psychopathy is not a disorder: in many instances, it is an evolutionary adaptation. It only becomes a disorder when the traits are so extreme that they lead to victimization. The disadvantages come when anyone overdoses on these same traits.

We may have to deal with criminal psychopaths because they are outliers set apart from their more clever cousins, the functional or successful psychopaths and those with above-average psychopathic traits. This take on psychopathy is consistent with the popular idea that psychopathic traits and behavior exist on a continuum or spectrum. Some extremely empathetic and thoughtful people are on the far end of the scale. Others are in the middle of whatever psychopathic test they take. And a very few are on the extreme end. It is the degree to which they are present and how much they trouble family members, friends, acquaintances, co-workers, witnesses, and victims that determines when these traits become pathological.

There are other important questions about psychopaths that science cannot answer. This uncertainty provides readers with another opportunity to form their own opinions about the persistent questions anyone who has wondered about the presence of psychopaths in our midst has asked: Did their brains make them do it? Do they have any neurological excuse for their behavior?

From Rap Sheet to Brain Scan

Twenty-four years after Brian Dugan tried to abduct her, Opal Horton’s body prepared her to escape from him one more time. In response to a completely understandable perceived threat, Opal’s sympathetic nervous system stimulated the release of adrenaline into her bloodstream. This was part of her acute stress, or “fight-or-flight,” response brought on by the prospect of facing her attacker once again after nearly a quarter century. The stress hormone released by her adrenal glands caused her muscles to shake as she walked to the witness stand. With the bravery of one who has survived a terrifying trauma and who is about to voluntarily relive the experience to help others, she had agreed to face the man who changed her life forever. She sat just feet from him as she testified against the criminal psychopath who killed her friend and came close to killing her.
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The adrenaline caused her hand to shake as she pointed to a map showing the location of the gravel road in Somonauk, Illinois where Brian Dugan had tried to abduct her. Opal, then eight years old, and her seven-year-old friend Melissa Ackerman, had been riding their bikes there on Sunday, June 2, 1985. Twenty-eight-year-old Brian drove up in his blue AMC Gremlin. He was casually dressed. His long dark hair covered most of his ears and the back of his neck. His mustache barely hinted at the Fu Manchu style of facial hair. It passed the corners of his mouth and started to extend downward but stopped short before it reached the level of his lower lip. He looked young and not particularly threatening. Seated in his car, he asked the girls for directions. Then he got out and walked toward them because, he said, he could not hear them. Opal whispered to Melissa, “We have to go.”
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But before they could go, Brian grabbed Opal by the neck and threw her through an open window of his blue Gremlin. He threw her, Opal testified, “like a ball through a window.” Brian turned toward Melissa.
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Opal tried to open the passenger-side door but could not; the lock had been disabled. Before Brian caught her, Melissa yelled for Opal to climb through the window.
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Opal did and fell to the ground just as Brian returned, carrying Melissa. Opal ran for her life, but Brian had a grip on Melissa which she could not escape.

Opal ran to a nearby John Deere dealership. She spotted a tractor tire and hid in it. When she peeked out, she saw her friend in Brian’s car as it
drove away. That was the last time she ever saw her. When the car was out of sight, Opal ran for several blocks, still trying to keep low, still trying to hide from the man who took her friend and tried to take her. She knocked on the door of one house but felt nervous asking for help from strangers. She ran to the next house, which she recognized. It belonged to a teacher she knew named Charles Hickey. “Someone took my friend,” she told him.
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Charles called the police, but Brian and his captive were gone. Blocks away, at the scene of the crime, Melissa’s abandoned pink bicycle marked the site of the abduction.

An hour later, police officer James McDougall saw Brian’s Gremlin at a gas station. Brian had not been identified as a suspect in the abduction, so when the officer looked in the Gremlin and saw no signs of Melissa, he let Brian go. A few hours after Brian raped and murdered the child, Brian met up with his brother Steven, who had no idea what his brother had just done. They exchanged small talk and Brian mentioned that he had purchased some new plants.
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He gave no indication that he had committed a horrendous crime. But before the day was over, Opal—the girl who got away—had described his car to the police. Law-enforcement officers then linked her description to a car with an out-of-date vehicle sticker a local policeman had recently noted. Brian was arrested the next day as he pulled into the parking lot of the Midwest Hydraulics plant, where he worked as a machine operator.

Once in custody, he was linked to at least one recent rape and quickly became a suspect in the attack on Opal and Melissa. Two weeks later, a deputy sheriff found Melissa’s body, five days after what would have been her eighth birthday. Brian had left his victim in a drainage ditch, covered by rocks. An autopsy would conclude that she had died of either suffocation or drowning. After one of Melissa’s hairs was found on Brian’s sleeping bag, he was charged with her murder. To avoid the death penalty, he admitted raping and killing Melissa and Donna Schnorr, a 27-year-old nurse he had attacked the year before. Brian was sentenced to two life terms. Testimony regarding these crimes, and the equally brutal rape and murder of a 10-year-old girl two years and three months before Melissa died, would bring the technology and implications of fMRI scans before a jury for the first time.

Before Brian faced a jury for the last time in his life, he had compiled a record with all of the hallmarks of the worst of the worst among criminal
psychopaths. His rap sheet included signs of instrumental aggression, impulsivity, recklessness, lack of empathy, and callousness. And he had crossed the line very few psychopaths—even criminal psychopaths—cross: he became a psychopathic serial killer.

In fact, Brian’s personal history includes check marks beside most of the items people associate with criminal psychopathic serial killers. Born on September 23, 1956, he may have become brain-damaged at that time, according to accounts of some family members. As an infant, he reportedly banged his head repeatedly against his crib and experienced headaches and vomiting. As he grew, he soon distinguished himself with signs of conduct disorder with callous and unemotional behavior. He fulfilled the criteria of the Homicidal Triad discussed in Chapter 7. According to FBI files obtained by the staff of the Arlington Heights, Illinois Daily Herald, in his youth Brian tortured animals, was a chronic bed-wetter, and set fires.
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His mother told the FBI that Brian had had a normal childhood spent playing baseball and reading until he began stealing at age fifteen. But Brian’s siblings told a different story. While playing with matches, he and a younger brother burnt down the family’s garage when Brian was eight years old. His brother Steven remembered Brian’s cruelty toward pets. Brian once laughed after pouring gasoline on a cat and igniting it. According to some of her children, their mother was an alcoholic and a disciplinarian who fed hot sauce to, or whipped, Brian and his brother Steven when they behaved badly. She also made Brian sleep on dirty sheets even though he wet the bed. Once, after she found the boys playing with matches, she forced Brian and Steven to each hold a lit match until it burned their fingers. Nevertheless, Brian’s siblings denied being seriously abused by their parents. His traveling salesman father was an alcoholic who died of cirrhosis of the liver when Brian was nineteen years old.

Reporters of the Daily Herald extracted an outline of Brian Dugan’s criminal career from the files of the Illinois Department of Corrections and from court records. It does not include all of his juvenile offenses and convictions. It also leaves out the offenses he committed while he was outside his home state of Illinois,
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but it provides more than enough information to appreciate the extreme antisocial behavior of a rare criminal psychopath like Brian:

Age 15: He was arrested for burglary.

Age 16: Brian fled Illinois after stealing $4,000 from a KFC fast food restaurant. He returned home and two months later vandalized a middle school in Aurora, Illinois. Several months later he was imprisoned for burglarizing several private schools.

Age 17: He burglarized a restaurant in Aurora. Less than a month later, he stopped and asked a 10-year-old girl named Barbara how to get to the train station. He then grabbed her and scratched her in the process. A legal technicality prevented him from being charged. Not long after, he burglarized another establishment.

Age 18: He was arrested for sniffing glue, and charged with resisting arrest and trying to kick out the window of a police car. Nearly 11 months later, he started a fire at an elementary school. The next day he threatened to kill his sister Hilary, break the lights on her car, and “chop up” her son.
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Age 20: Brian abducted and sexually assaulted a school teacher. She escaped and reported that he had threatened to kill her. Twelve days later, he broke into and robbed two churches.

Age 21: He burglarized a private home.

Age 22: He committed another burglary.

Age 25: He assaulted a 22-year-old clerk at a gas station. The charge was dismissed when his brother Steven, thinking Brian innocent, provided a false alibi for his brother.
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Age 26: He abducted, raped and bludgeoned to death 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico. The next month he burglarized a business and assaulted a police officer, but the case was dropped.

Age 27: He claimed he assaulted, raped, and robbed a prostitute. The same year, he noticed Donna Schnorr sitting in her car waiting for a traffic light to change. He followed her, forced her off the road, and beat and raped her. He drowned her in the quarry where her body was found.

Age 28: He admitted that he tried to force a 19-year-old woman he saw walking along a highway into his car. She resisted and escaped. Twenty-two days later, he helped a 21-year-old woman start her car. He admitted that he then threatened her with a hunting knife and bound and gagged her. He drove her to a secluded spot and raped her in the back seat of the car. The woman lived. He also admitted to raping a 16-year-old girl the next day after forcing her into his car. Although threatened with a tire iron and having a belt tied around her neck, she too survived the attack. Four days later, Brian tried to abduct eight-year-old Opal Horton. During the same attack, he abducted, raped, and killed seven-year-old Melissa Ackerman.

Melissa was Brian’s final victim. In 1985, when he was given two life sentences for killing her and Donna Schnorr, he also confessed to murdering Jeanine Nicarico. But he wasn’t allowed to formally plead guilty to that crime until 2009. The delay between his admission of guilt and his indictment for the crime stemmed from the wrongful conviction of two others in Jeanine’s murder and prosecutorial incompetence in correcting the injustice. After evidence eventually showed that those falsely accused and convicted of murdering Jeanine were in fact innocent, Brian was finally charged with her rape and murder.

That crime took place on Friday, February 25, 1983, the day Jeanine stayed home from school alone because she had the flu. Brian kicked in the door of her home with the intention of burglarizing it. Then he saw the child. The prosecutor told the jury that Jeanine struggled so hard, she left scratch marks on a wall of her home as Brian carried her out. He took her into the woods and sexually assaulted her. He told her he would wash the blood off her and drive her home. Then he crushed her skull, killing her.
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He pled guilty. Now he faced a trial to determine whether he would be

executed or sentenced to life in prison. His lawyers hoped pictures of his fMRI brain scans would persuade the jury to spare his life.

Neurolaw

Psychopathy researcher Kent Kiehl testified for the defense at Brian’s trial. He testified that Brian’s psychopathy rating based on his PCL–R score was 37 out of 40.
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That meant he had more psychopathic traits than 99.5 percent of the population. Kiehl told the jury during his more-than-four-hour testimony that Brian’s psychopathic traits developed early and extended through adolescence and early adulthood, a fact borne out by the above summary of his criminal career. “In my opinion,” Kiehl said, “that constitutes an emotional disturbance. I think it’s a matter for the jury to determine how to interpret that data.”
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Kiehl bolstered his opinion by describing what he saw in Brian’s brain scans. They indicated that he had several regions with abnormally low gray matter density, which have been associated with psychopathy in previous studies. Judge George Bakalis, however, would not allow him to show the jury Brian’s fMRI brain scans with its overlaid colors showing regions of increased or decreased blood flow. The prosecutors argued the images would “confuse or mislead” the jury.
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It is possible they suspected that such striking images of Brian’s brain might be interpreted by unsophisticated jury members as more convincing proof of his abnormal mental state than the prosecuting attorney and their experts were willing to admit.