The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience (5 page)

Bob also had a fetish. He liked to be a Peeping Tom, and he collected women’s underwear. After one arrest, the police found over three thousand pairs of women’s underwear in his closet.

Bob described being questioned in his apartment on suspicion of burglary by the cops and sitting there in handcuffs on the couch.

“I warned the cop,” he said, “not to open the closet.”

As the officer unlocked the door, the closet burst open and dozens of pairs of women’s underwear landed all over the policeman (many of which were dirty; Bob seemed to prefer to steal them out of the laundry bags when he broke into a house—or from Laundromats).

I had tears in my eyes at this point from laughing so hard.

“Yup.” Bob laughed along with me. “Even the cop’s partner started laughing. What can I say? I love women’s underwear. All kinds.”

“You know,” he said, “can you tell me if I have ADHD? As a kid I was told that I had ADHD, but I don’t know if I do or not. I mean, do you know how hard it is to hold still sitting in a tree to stare through the cracks in a Levolor blind on a second-floor window for three hours until someone comes into the bedroom and takes their clothes off?”

“Nope,” I said.

“Well, it’s not easy,” he said, sitting back.

After another hour or so of stories, I was getting a pretty good picture of Bob.

“Okay, Bob. We’ve got to talk about your latest crime. What happened?”

“Oh, that. Well, it’s pretty simple really. This girl I was living with, well, she pushed all my buttons. I mean, she hit all three, right in a row and I just got pissed. I ran after her into the bathroom
where she was drawing a bath and pushed her really hard into the wall. She hit her head on the wall and slid into the tub, which was full of water. I just grabbed her around the throat and held her under the water. I was so pissed off. Then ya know, bells go off inside my head … oh, shit. I’m in trouble. Look what I did. I got to clean this up, figure out how to get out from under this crap. I mean, she was such a bitch to me that night.” Bob was animated, laughing at some of the “funny” parts of this story. He used his hands a lot, gesturing about the entire sequence of events.

Across the table, I was feeling nauseated thinking about what he had done. I’d stopped laughing a while ago.

“So I wrapped her up in a big blanket, took her outside [it was dark], and put her in the car. Ya know, it was pretty stupid. I put her in the front passenger seat. Then I drove down the way a bit to a bridge and threw her over into the river, threw the blanket away in a Dumpster, and went out to create an alibi.”

“Where did you go?” I asked.

“I went and ate and drank some beer at my local pub, ya know, to act like nothing had happened. Then I went out and got a prostitute. I wanted to pay with a credit card, ya know, to get a receipt, but she wouldn’t let me, so I had to go and slap her around a little bit, ya know, so she would remember me and stuff since she wouldn’t give me a credit card receipt. It was nothing hard, ya know, but just enough so she would remember me, for my alibi.

“And then I went home. Went to bed. It was a couple days later when things started to unravel. Her mom kept calling, looking for her [he says this with a confused look on his face as if he doesn’t understand why his girlfriend’s mother would worry about not hearing from her daughter], and I told her mom that we had had an argument and she had packed a bag and moved out.

“The police came by and questioned me a bit. I just told them the same story, told them where I was the night she left. Ya know, I went out with a prostitute. Go check it out.

“They [the cops] kept coming back and forth to see me, but I never changed my story. After about a month, the mom was driving the cops crazy and they kept coming back to see me, would handcuff me, tell me they found the body [they were lying], all sorts of
stuff. They even put a camera on me. I played a good trick on the cops, though. When they were recording my interview, I told them I wanted a lawyer, I repeated over and over. And then I could just say, later, ya know, they refused to give me my lawyer.

“I figured that they would find the body someday, and then I would be really screwed. So I figured if I confessed on tape after they refused to get me my lawyer, I might get the case tossed out on a technicality, and then they could never charge me if they found the body and stuff. So, well, I kept asking for a lawyer while the camera was on, and then I finally told them that I did it, that I killed her. But I told them to get me a lawyer. I didn’t tell them where I dumped the body.

“So then they finally get me a lawyer. And I tell him the story about the videotape and failing to get me my lawyer and stuff. It’s like against my rights, eh?

“Well, my lawyer tells me there is no tape the cops have given him, no record of any videotape. So, he says, you confessed. Now tell me where the body is and I will get you a deal. I got so pissed off, ya know? This shit works all the time on television. Anyways, the lawyer got me a deal, manslaughter, and I’ll do a nickel or so and then get parole and it’s all good. No worries.”

Another difference between psychopaths and other inmates is that psychopaths don’t get distressed by being in prison. Most inmates get depressed when they get inside, and they find prison to be a stressful experience. A hallmark feature of psychopaths’ disorder is that they don’t get bothered by much of anything. They don’t ruminate and they don’t get depressed.

Bob scored 35 out of 40 on the checklist, a clear psychopath. I thought about telling Mike what was wrong with his cellmate, but that would break confidentiality. Mike would have to go on wondering.

Five years later, while I was still at RHC prison, Bob came bouncing up to me and said, “Hey, still doing that research? I’d love to do that again.”

I stared at him. “What are you back in for?”

“Oh,” he smiled and said, “another chick pushed all my buttons.
What’s a guy gonna do?” He laughed and walked away. Bob’s buttons? His girlfriend had called him
fat, bald, and broke
. “She hit all three of them,” he would tell me in his next interview, “but I buried this body real good.”

After my first interview with Bob, I headed back to my office. I passed Grant on the way.

“Hey, Kent, things go okay today?” Grant asked.

“Just fine,” I replied.

“Good, glad to hear it, we guys [he’s referring to the regular inmates] like you here. Just be careful around those sex offenders.”

“Sure will,” I answered. I opened the door and locked it behind me with my brass key and headed down to my office.

Something just wasn’t right. I’d been too careful to piss off an inmate, especially one I hadn’t even met yet, someone I hadn’t even challenged in an interview.

I left the facility, taking a deep breath as I passed through the final gate and inhaled my freedom.

After the normal morning commute, coffee distribution, and visit to the printer to pick up fresh copies of my evolving Psychopathy Checklist interview, I headed to the main door to psychiatry and the now-familiar walkway to the inmate housing units. As I shut the door, I noticed a figure at the end of the walkway. He was unmistakable—the large, ominous figure was Gary. He was just standing there, right inside the door from the housing pods. I knew that there were no cameras in this little walkway. I was worried that Gary knew that too. I turned and slowly locked the door with my brass key, trying to avoid him noticing that I was aware of him. I tried to remember any self-defense moves I knew, in case my nemesis attacked me when I reached the end of the hallway. My heart was racing.

Behind me a door opened and I let two inmates pass by. It took me a second to realize that one of the inmates was Grant. He turned, gave me a little wave hi, and kept going down toward the housing unit.

Gary had been staring at me. He was standing up straight to see past the other inmates, keeping his cold stare on me as the other inmates approached him. Grant slowed and took another peek back at me and then at Gary. Grant walked right up to Gary. Gary looked down at him, and a few words were spoken. Gary looked hard at Grant. All this was transpiring as I walked as slowly as possible, while still walking normally. It felt like my life was proceeding in slow motion. Then suddenly Gary turned, shot one more cold look in my direction, and went back into the housing unit. Grant followed him, without saying a single word to me.

A few hours later I was sitting alone in the nurses’ station and Grant appeared at the half door.

“Hey,” he said, “I wanted to let you know that I took care of that little problem with Gary. Seems he wanted to get it on with you this morning, but I told him you were not to be touched or it would be like he had touched me. And nobody fucks with me. I’ll see you later.” With that, he disappeared down the housing unit hallway. I wasn’t even able to choke out a word in reply.

A cold sweat broke out across my forehead. I might have actually been in a fight this morning with an enormous sex offender.

I left prison early that day and drove home in silence, deep in thought. I grabbed my dog, Jake, and went for a run along the beach to decompress. Later, over dinner, I finished reading
Games Criminals Play
. I had an epiphany.

I took a new route to my prison office the next morning, avoiding the common areas where the inmates had free movement. I passed out coffee beans to a couple of other guard pods, receiving smiles and thank-yous. I was smiling too, but I was a little nervous about what I was about to do.

As soon as I was settled in my office, I called over to the nurses’ station. Dorothy picked up.

“Do you have Grant down there this morning?” I asked.

“Hold on,” she said. “Yes. He’s still in his cell. Want me to get him for you?”

“Please. Send him down to psychiatry.”

“Got any more coffee?” she asked.

“Yup. I’ll be right down after this quick interview.”

“He’ll be right down then,” she said.

I went out to the main door and waited for Grant, dangling my little brass key.

Grant appeared a few minutes later and walked quickly up the hallway. He was carrying a folder with paper in it.

“You got more research for me to do?” he said.

“Yup,” I said.
Something like that
, I was really thinking.

“Good. Say, can you do me a favor this morning? I have this folder with my homework in it for group later today, and I need to make some photocopies so I can share it with the other guys.”

“You know you have to order the photocopies and they come out of your personal fund,” I replied.

“Yeah, but we’re friends; I helped you out, ya know. I went to bat for you with that sex offender.” His voice turned a little coarse. “You owe me.”

“Sit down,” I told him firmly. “You and Gary are trying to scam me.”

He stared at me. “That’s bullshit. I don’t work with sex offenders, man. This is the thanks I get for saving your life?”

There was some truth to his statement—violent offenders never associated with sex offenders.

I stared back at him and then pressed him again: “I’m calling you out; you are trying to play me.”

And then he cracked. “Is this conversation still confidential?” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

He fell into a full laugh. “How’d you figure it out?”

“I’m new, but I’m not stupid,” I replied, not mentioning that I had lost quite a bit of sleep this week trying to figure out what the
hell was going on, or that I felt like I had aged a year in only a couple days.

“No hard feelings, right? Ya know, we have to test you. It’s just something we do with all the new guys.” He was smiling ear to ear.

“I can tell ya that we’ve gotten quite a bit of fun out of a few folks before. Gary and I have been perfecting our moves; we thought we had you going pretty good,” he said. “Especially since you told us everything we did with you was confidential. We figured unless we really hurt you, we were golden; you can’t tell anybody about the scam.”

I now had a useful warning to pass along to any colleague working in prison—make sure your inmates don’t use the confidentiality, which is there for the inmates’ protection, to run a scam on you.

“What was the end game?” I asked. “What were you hoping to get out of me?”

“Cigarettes, maybe some pot,” he said, shrugging, “stuff like that. You wouldn’t get in too much trouble if you got caught. We were just trying to enjoy life a little more, make time go a little faster.”

Something told me that Grant and Gary would not stop at a cigarette or other contraband.

“Well, I’ve got to get back to work,” I said. “I’m glad we got this cleared up, and I’ll keep it to myself,” I noted. I wasn’t going to say anything to anybody; I was embarrassed I had been played.

“Okay. I’ll tell Gary that the game is over. Seriously, no hard feelings, eh? I still want to do the research.”

“I’ll be in touch,” I said. “You are an excellent research subject,” I quipped as he stood up to leave my office.

“Oh, and take this to Dorothy,” I said, handing him a bag of coffee. “If it doesn’t get to her, then I know who to come looking for.” He laughed as I led him back into the hallway to the housing pods.

I sat down in my office chair and took a deep breath. I scribbled some notes on my pad,
Prison is never boring
, I wrote. The phrase became one of my favorite sayings to describe the environment in which I was going to spend the greater part of the next twenty years. Prison is never boring.

After reviewing the files of a few other inmates, my interviews for the day awaited. I proceeded down to the housing units to schedule
a few inmates for interviews, and I decided to have a cup of coffee with Dorothy.

We chatted about the ins and outs of the RHC. I picked up details about when new inmates were coming in, the history of the therapists conducting treatment, the procedures to follow to keep the guards from getting angry with you. Essential information for someone rounding out his first week in prison.

Gary appeared at the end of his tier, his familiar stone cold face gone. A small smile crept across his face. He nodded slightly, turned around, headed back down to his cell.