The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience (35 page)

I looked over at Greenberg. He volunteered that he’d taken care of “a little arrest for her cousin.”

As Greenberg explained the mitigation strategy, we were frequently interrupted by people walking along the street stopping to acknowledge Greenberg, thanking him for fixing this problem, thanking him for his advice about that problem. He always concluded each brief meeting with a hearty handshake.

Eventually, Greenberg stood up and moved chairs so that his back was toward the street, hoping to be less recognizable to the throngs of people walking by.

As our appetizers arrived, several NBA players were seated at an adjacent table. As if on cue, one of them leaned over to Greenberg and I heard him say, “Thanks for taking care of that little problem for me.”

A bottle of wine arrived at the table. The waiter poured three glasses. Greenberg raised his glass to one of the NBA players in thanks.

Despite his prominence, Greenberg was a down-to-earth guy. I liked him immediately.

By the time our steaks were consumed, we were all on a first-name basis. And Steve had regaled us with too many stories to remember about the legal battles in the Dugan case. It was an epic saga that had brought the worst and best out of every aspect of the legal system.

Ezra knew several colleagues at Northwestern Law School who
had been involved in getting the two men who were wrongly convicted off death row.

After an evening of stimulating conversation and a large steak dinner, I said good night and retired to my hotel room to read the latest mitigation evidence. My first interview with Dugan was scheduled for Sunday morning.

As I reviewed the details of Dugan’s crimes, I realized that it was going to be a tough interview. He had, at least three times, abducted females in broad daylight and taken them to a secluded location where he raped them and then murdered them by blunt force trauma. Two of the victims had been young girls; the other was a twenty-two-year-old nurse. They were the worst crimes imaginable.

I awoke early, grabbed a quad espresso from the local coffee shop, and drove to the DuPage County Jail, where Dugan was being held. As I worked my way through security, I rehearsed several questions in my head that I wanted to ask Dugan during the psychopathy interview. I was placed in a comfortable interview room, and then the correctional officer left to retrieve Dugan.

The correctional officer returned with a middle-aged, gray-haired inmate dressed in a bright orange jumpsuit and white tennis shoes. He looked a little pale, but otherwise appeared to be in good shape. The officer removed the leg and arm cuffs, without asking me if I wanted the prisoner unshackled.

Once the officer left the room, the prisoner stood up and extended his hand across the table.

I stood and shook his extended hand and said to him, “Mr. Dugan, my name is Dr. Kiehl, and your defense team asked me to interview you.”

He sat down and said, “Please, call me Brian.”

I spent four hours with Brian Dugan during our first interview. We started by reviewing all the different facets of his life leading up to the time he was sentenced to life in prison for two of the murders he committed.

From his home life to his schooling, to his work history, to his romantic relationships, Brian’s life before prison, as you have seen from previous chapters (yes, this is the Brian you first met in
Chapter 6
), was a mess, as corroborated by the reports I’d read from family, teachers, employers, and former girlfriends.

After covering all the basics, I had a pretty good idea that Brian was going to score very high on the Psychopathy Checklist. The traits were present in all aspects of his life. Brian was a textbook example of a psychopath.

But I wanted Brian to tell me why. Why had he committed those murders?

I had reviewed the different theories on why people commit sexual-based murders. By studying Brian’s motivations and methods, I hoped to be able to help law enforcement catch other serial killers. I’d already identified a number of important clues from Brian’s background information, and I was hoping Brian would reveal additional details that would provide insights into his methods and thinking.

One belief commonly held by psychologists is that adults who commit sexual-based crimes were once victims of sexual abuse as children. That is, there may be a cycle of offending when it comes to sexual-based crimes. While it’s almost impossible to calculate the impact early trauma may have had on Brian or the thousands of other sexually abused children, it’s hard to imagine that being sexually abused as a child would not impact some aspect of a person’s constitution.

After covering the different areas of Brian’s life, we had established a good rapport during the interview. So I started to ask him the tough questions about his sexual abuse as a child. But the questions ended up being harder for me to ask than for Brian to answer.

“Brian, the reports indicate that, as a youth, you were abducted by a man and forced to perform sex acts.”

“Yes. As a kid I got picked up by this guy driving a construction truck. He drove me out to a secluded area and made me give him a blow job,” Brian stated. “Then he drove me back into town, gave me $20, dropped me off at a gas station, and took off.”

Brian almost chuckled when he told the story. The oddness of his behavior derailed my train of thought. Deviating from my list of questions, I asked, “Did that experience bother you?”

“No, not really. I mean, it wasn’t a big deal. It didn’t take very long and I got $20,” Brian said as he shrugged his shoulders.

The event didn’t seem to have any impact on him emotionally, at least not in a way that he could articulate. He actually talked about it with some fondness, almost smiling. It was bizarre.

“And you identified the guy later from an article in the newspaper?” I asked.

“Yes. I told my boys’ home supervisor about the incident when it happened, and then later I pointed out the guy from the picture in the newspaper when he was arrested for other crimes. Nothing ever came of it, though. The police never came, and no charges were ever filed.”

“You know who it was, though, don’t you?” I asked.

“Yes. It was John Wayne Gacy. That’s what I learned from reading the papers as the case developed. He killed lots of boys. So I guess I got lucky,” Brian said with a slight smile on his face.

John Wayne Gacy sexually assaulted and murdered at least thirty-three teenage boys in Illinois in the early 1970s. Brian was fourteen at the time of the reported incident. He described his assault by John Wayne Gacy as if he was telling me a story about putting his shoes on in the morning—with a complete lack of affect. His lack of emotion was as profound as I’d seen in any inmate I have ever interviewed.

Brian also admitted he had been sexually assaulted as a youth in the Menard Correctional Institution for boys.

“Did those experiences change your life in any way?”

Brian looked confused.

“Why would those experiences cause me problems?”

I inquired: “Do you think those experiences had anything to do with the murders you committed?”

“Nope,” he replied.

He looked at me as if I was asking stupid questions. He had no conception that those early traumatic experiences might have influenced his adult behavior.

There are several ways to look at Brian’s flattened affect. On the one hand, Brian may have just been resilient to his childhood experiences. After all, the vast majority of youth who go through similar experiences don’t end up becoming criminals, much less serial killers. Most people recover from, or are resilient to, early life stressors and do not develop severe mental problems as adults. It’s how we survive. We cope and move on.

On the other hand, Brian might simply lack insight into how those events impacted his development. He definitely lacked insight into many domains of his life. But whether the lack of insight is a psychological mechanism for coping with the trauma, or a preexisting neurobiological fault, remained to be determined.

The latest science would suggest the answer to this riddle is some combination of the two. According to genetics studies, at least 50 percent of Brian’s constitution was established at birth. This high genetic loading for psychopathic traits, including lack of affect, may be the result of an underdeveloped paralimbic brain system, which put him on a steep trajectory toward becoming a psychopath as an adult. Moreover, the sexual abuse trauma he went through likely further dampened an already atrophied paralimbic circuitry, which made Brian even less able to experience emotion in a normal way.

The mitigation team had compiled a complete history of the emotional and behavioral problems Brian exhibited from a very early age. A flat, emotionless affect typified Brian’s life from childhood through adolescence. And it was abundantly clear that the fifty-two-year-old man in front of me was completely lacking affect. Brian suffers from a chronic inability to appreciate the significance of his behavior on others or their behavior on him.

In fact, Brian’s affect was so stilted that it took me a little by surprise.
He was one of the rare inmates who appeared to be unable to appreciate or understand emotion on any level.

After I finished madly scribbling notes on my pad of paper, I moved on to my next line of questions, the planning for the murders. If his sexual abuse as a child was unrelated to why he committed the murders, then perhaps something else motivated his desire to kill.

“Did you plan out your crimes?” I asked.

“No, not really,” he stated. “I never really planned any of them.”

“What about carrying duct tape, a tire iron, and a knife?” I asked. Many serial killers kept a kill kit containing items they would need to abduct and murder the victim. Reports indicated the police had found those items in Brian’s car when he was arrested.

“Oh, well, yeah. I had those things with me in case I needed them for burglaries, but I never really planned to kill someone; it just kind of happened,” he stated. “And the duct tape was just for repairing the seats in my crappy car.”

Brian’s words were consistent with the files. He appeared to be unable to plan any aspect of his life, including his criminal behavior.

“So when you attacked women or tried to abduct them, you just picked them at random?”

“Yes. I used to drive around a lot looking for places to break in to do burglaries. I would smoke pot and then drive for hours. Sometimes I would not find a place that I liked and I would just go home. Other times I would hit five or six houses. But if I happened upon someone that I liked, then sometimes I just grabbed them and had sex with them.”

I’d prepared for this interview for weeks, but my mind kept racing ahead to new and different questions.

I found myself wondering which was more scary—worrying that someone is stalking you or knowing that there are people out there who will snatch you up completely at random.

Brian continued: “Once I grabbed them, I would drive to a secluded place, have sex, and then take them home and let them go. One of the women called me to go out on a date again.”

I was dumbfounded. Did he really think that a woman would want to have a relationship with him after being abducted and
raped? Moreover, I just could not believe he would offer up his name and his phone number to someone he just raped.

“Brian, you gave the women you raped your phone number?” I asked incredulously.

“Yes. I would often give them my name and tell them to call me,” he said. Then he added, “Seems kind of silly now, but at the time I thought we were having fun.”

Brian just didn’t understand. I suspected he might set a new record for impaired emotional intelligence.

And then we got to the murders.

“Brian, why did you kill those girls?”

He looked up at me, shook his head, and said, “I don’t understand why. I wish I knew why I did a lot of things, but I don’t.” It was a completely unsatisfying answer.

But there it was. I had spent all this time planning to probe into the depths of his psyche, to try to find the events in his life that led him to rape and kill, to find out what motivated him. It had never occurred to me that he didn’t know why.

I’d interviewed dozens of murderers, and many of them were serial killers. They all had reasons for killing. Their typical responses were
I was angry, I was after revenge, I was covering up a crime, I had to eliminate a witness, I killed because someone paid me
, or
I just wanted to see what it was like
. Some serial killers also murder because it turns them on. In fact, many serial killers are sadists in addition to being psychopaths. Sadism is a sexual-based disorder, or paraphilia. People who are sadists get sexually aroused by inflicting pain on others, and sometimes even causing death.

Brian was the first murderer I’d met who had no answer for why he killed. He didn’t try to offer an excuse. He didn’t try to blame anything or anyone else. He just didn’t know why he did it.

“Brian, did you kill those girls because you wanted to eliminate them from being a witness against you in court?” I asked.

“No,” he said, shaking his head, “I wasn’t thinking about eliminating witnesses.”

He seemed to be telling the truth. After all, Brian had raped many more women than he killed. If he killed to eliminate witnesses,
there would be a lot more dead victims. Instead, as perplexing as it was to me, Brian thought that the women he raped enjoyed it.

“Did you kill them for excitement?” I asked.

“No. I just did it quick as I could, I don’t know why, it just kind of happened,” he repeated with a shrug of his shoulders.

His murders were motiveless. It made it harder to understand, and even more senseless. I took a break from the interview and excused myself to use the bathroom so I could splash some cold water on my face.

While I was staring at my face in the prison bathroom mirror, I was reminded of the seminal book on psychopaths that Dr. Hervey Cleckley had written called
The Mask of Sanity
. I mentally rehearsed the symptoms Cleckley had identified that characterized psychopaths. One of the most perplexing symptoms Cleckley named was
Inadequately Motivated Antisocial Behavior
.