The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience (28 page)

Upon his return to Illinois, Brian was arrested on suspicion of burglarizing a store. Just before his eighteenth birthday, Brian was arrested again and charged with resisting arrest, aggravated battery, criminal damage to property, and unlawful use of an intoxicating compound. Brian got in a fight with police on the way to lockup and was treated at a local hospital for a broken nose. Released just after his eighteenth birthday, he traveled to Arizona and California for several months, eventually returning to Illinois, where he was arrested for burglary and possession of marijuana. Between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, Brian had spent more time incarcerated than on the streets.

By the age of thirteen, Eric had been charged with thirteen separate offenses, including possession and trafficking of marijuana, two counts of battery, two counts of arson, weapons charges, and several auto thefts. He was on probation when he was caught in a car he had stolen. One week later, he got into a fight with another boy at school and pulled out a gun. While those charges were being processed, he was placed in a foster home; he immediately ran away. Once apprehended, he was moved to a more secure group home. He ran away from there five times in the first month and became well known to the police. In his fourth month at the secure group home, he attacked another boy during an argument. When he learned he
would be charged with assault and battery, he set fire to the group home. Around the time of his fifteenth birthday, he was sentenced for three years to a maximum-security state corrections institution for boys—a sentence reserved for only the most severely disruptive youth. The prosecutor argued his violent temperament, prolific use of weapons, especially handguns, and inability to learn from experience put Eric on a trajectory to commit violent crime and claimed he must be incarcerated for the safety of the public.

Eric’s behavior was no better in juvenile prison. He argued and swore at staff, made sexually crude comments to female staff, got into fights with other youth, and destroyed property. Over the course of his first year in the institution, his situation deteriorated steadily. In one two-month period he accumulated forty-nine institutional infractions, including two for manufacturing weapons and two for battery. (The penalty for these infractions was typically to spend several days in “security” isolation.) Staff reports described him as having a “very explosive temper.” The staff took several steps in an effort to control his aggressive behavior, but all met with more aggression. He was eventually placed in an isolation cell for twenty-three hours a day. Even in this setting, he threatened and swore at staff and pounded on the steel door of his room for hours at a time. During his hour outside his cell, he would repeatedly threaten staff, destroy common area property, and refuse to reenter his cell. After three months in an isolation cell, he was transferred to another, smaller, “supermax” facility designed to manage the unmanageable.

When he arrived at the supermax facility, he was calm and cooperative according to the initial assessments. During the intake interview, he seemed to enjoy being the center of attention. He explained that none of the things he had done were that bad and that none were felonies (his record actually showed six felony charges), and he blamed the two boys who were with him when he stole his last car. He admitted that he knew he was not living the way he should, that he should listen to his mother and go to school, but he found that too boring. He claimed that the first time he was in lockup was the worst time of his life. Still, he said that he could not ever recall feeling depressed for more than a few hours. Although he knew his
life was not going well at the moment, he was not worried about his future. He didn’t consider himself to have failed at anything in his life. “I’m too young to have failures,” he said. He claimed he was almost always happy, and he rated his self-esteem as a 10 (highest) out of 10. One psychologist noted his arrogance and narcissism were pathological.

On his admission testing to the supermax facility, Eric was scored as being free of emotional distress. Yet he endorsed questions that reflected the attitude that others could not be trusted and generally held malicious intentions toward him. He agreed with questions that described violence as a necessary part of life and agreed that a person had to use violence from time to time to keep others from taking advantage of him.

When asked about school, he admitted that he had been suspended or expelled many times for disrupting class or selling drugs or cigarettes, but mostly for fighting. Eric estimated that he got into a fight at least once a week in school. He said the fights were always provoked by other kids who “got in my face.” But he later admitted that he usually threw the first punch. Eric was several years behind in school, but he had average intellectual abilities and no learning disabilities. He said that he had spent most of his time in “security” in the previous institution he was confined to because he kept “blowing up and cussing at staff.” He attributed these problems to “staff antagonizing me.”

The first evening at the supermax facility he complained about the food and then destroyed all the items in his cell. When allowed a phone call with his mother, he pulled the cord out of the wall after she told him to stop swearing at her. His temper was rated as one of the most explosive in the history of the facility. Eric’s level of aggression even surprised the experienced staff.

Eric particularly disliked being told what to do. He continued to get institutional infractions for disrupting groups or destroying property. He would spend the remainder of his adolescence in the supermax facility. He was due to be released just after his eighteenth birthday.

The supermax psychological assessment team completed a battery of tests on Eric. One of the tests, the Hare Psychopathy
Checklist-Youth Version, was used to help understand Eric’s risk for recidivism and treatment amenability. Two psychologists independently rated Eric as having a score of 34 out of 40 possible points, placing Eric high in the test range.

The Psychopathy Checklist is a potent predictor of recidivism in populations of incarcerated adult males. Inmates who score high on the Psychopathy Checklist are four to eight times more likely to commit new crimes upon release than inmates who score in the low range. Nearly all adults with psychopathy that I have interviewed had criminal charges and convictions as teenagers. And those who didn’t have criminal charges as teenagers readily admit to significant interpersonal conflicts, and impulsive and poorly planned activities, often of a severe antisocial nature.

It is these findings that have led a steady stream of researchers to develop procedures for early identification of those teenagers on a trajectory toward psychopathy. One goal of this work is to identify high-risk youth so that they can be targeted for interventions.

The most significant attempt to develop a valid and reliable clinical assessment of psychopathic traits in youth and teen years has been the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Youth Version.
⁴
The Youth Psychopathy Checklist is based on the original adult version of the Psychopathy Checklist. Like its adult counterpart, the Youth Psychopathy Checklist has 20 items, each of which is scored on a three-point scale (0 if the item does not apply to the individual, 1 if the item applies somewhat, and 2 if the item definitely applies to the individual). The resulting scores range from 0 to 40, and, as in adults, the cutoff of 30 is used to indicate high levels of the traits.

But the academic field tries not to label teenagers as “psychopaths.” The word
psychopath
is a heavily loaded pejorative, and researchers do not want to prejudice a teenager with such a label. Instead, the affective symptoms of psychopathy in youth and teenagers are referred to as
callous and unemotional traits
. Teenagers who score high on the Youth Psychopathy Checklist are commonly referred to
as “callous conduct disordered youth.” This label is designed to be less stigmatizing than the term
psychopath
. The traits and behaviors that constitute callous conduct disorder as assessed by using the Youth Psychopathy Checklist are listed in Box 4.

A considerable amount of research suggests that the affective and interpersonal traits of psychopathy are relatively stable from adolescence to adulthood. The best evidence of this comes from longitudinal studies of high-risk youth.
⁵
These studies find that, without intervention, CU traits remain relatively unchanged from teen years through early adulthood.

Studies have also shown that Youth Psychopathy Checklist scores accurately predict future violent and antisocial behavior.
⁶
The Youth Psychopathy Checklist has been proven, over and over again, to show better predictive utility than other risk factors for violent outcomes. Youth with high CU traits are more violent, begin offending earlier, and have a greater number of police encounters than low-risk peers.
⁷
Indeed, within the legal system over the last decade, the single biggest increase in the use of psychopathy evidence in youth proceedings has been in violent risk assessment.
⁸

Forensic clinicians, prosecutors, and ultimately judges are increasingly called to make predictions of future adolescent violent behavior. Given that research shows that CU traits predict future violence, it seems prudent that these traits be accurately assessed in high-risk youth.

However, decision makers in the youth forensic arena must continue to follow the best measures for quantifying CU traits, and be aware of the strengths and limitations of the instruments and their predictive utility for the context in which they are being applied. Youth Psychopathy Checklist scores do not accurately predict future behavior in every context and for every type of youth offender. For example, in teenage girls there is not currently enough peer-reviewed evidence that Youth Psychopathy Checklist scores reliably predict future violence.

These traits are not based upon a single act or a single area of someone’s life. The trait must be present in the majority of the individual’s life—at home, work, and school and with family, friends, and neighbors. It is only when the trait typifies the majority of someone’s life that we score the item high. Indeed, when working with a teenager who has committed a crime, psychologists are asked to ignore the index offense when scoring the Youth Psychopathy Checklist. The assessor should get nearly the same score without taking into account the index crime. Ignoring the index offense will ensure that one serious crime does not create a halo that impacts the scoring. Psychologists are assessing traits, not just individual bad acts. A case in point is that of Chris Gribble.

Chris Gribble was a nineteen-year-old first-time offender who participated in one of the worst crimes in New Hampshire history. Chris and three other boys (Steven Spader, William Marks, and Quinn Glover) broke into a home in the middle of the night. Spader, the mastermind, had convinced the three other boys to target a rural home, break in and rob the place, and kill anyone they encountered. It was a quest to commit a thrill killing.

On the fateful predawn morning of October 4, 2009, the four boys broke in through the basement window of the Cates family home in rural Mont Vernon, New Hampshire.

As the two other boys searched the house for things to steal, Spader and Gribble made their way to the master bedroom where forty-two-year-old Kimberly Cates and her eleven-year-old daughter, Jamie, were sleeping. David Cates, the husband and father, was away on business.

Spader viciously attacked Kimberly with a machete while Gribble used a knife to repeatedly stab Jamie. Kimberly succumbed to her wounds, but Jamie miraculously survived by playing dead. Despite more than a dozen serious wounds, Jamie managed to call emergency services and make her way to the front door, where the first responder, veteran police sergeant Kevin Furlong, applied first aid and called for an ambulance.

The horrific, senseless crime shocked the community.

The four boys were quickly arrested the following day after tips poured in to police.

Donna Brown, a seasoned public defender, was assigned to Gribble’s case. Donna was familiar with my research and called me to consult on the case. She felt that something was wrong with Chris, but she was not sure what, if any, illness he might be suffering from. Donna also wondered if we should get an MRI of his brain to rule out any clinical abnormality, like a tumor.

Gribble came from a very unusual background. He had been home-schooled by his mother since childhood at their rural home.
He had very few social experiences as a child or teenager as he rarely left the home.

The Gribble family was devoutly Mormon and Chris’s limited social experiences occurred in that venue. As a teen he dated a girl for two years whom he met at church. The two never kissed, but rather held hands while they walked the church grounds on Sundays. The girl would describe Chris as very socially awkward.

Chris used no drugs. He tried to drive his car fast a couple of times but got scared and slowed down. There was no history of his lying or being manipulative.