Читать книгу The Killer Across the Table - Mark Olshaker - Страница 14
ОглавлениеOver the first fifteen years of McGowan’s incarceration, the case file showed, and the previously cited appeals court decision confirmed, there were at least eight psychological evaluations in addition to the initial ones conducted by Drs. Galen, Effron, and Revitch in 1974. During this fifteen-year period, McGowan appeared to be a near model prisoner, not getting into trouble and not stirring things up with other prisoners.
The first several evaluations were brief and relied mainly on self-reporting. This kind of examination of incarcerated felons is always problematic for me. When most of us see a doctor, either for a physical or mental issue, our aim is to be cured or helped, so it is definitely in our best interests to tell the truth.
This logic does not always hold up on the other side of the bars. For one thing, the felon is not seeing the psychiatrist or psychologist by choice; the visit is officially mandated. For another, as far as the felon is concerned, the encounter is not designed to help him “get better.” It is to evaluate his behavior, rehabilitation, and potential dangerousness. He therefore has a vested interest not in telling the truth, but in portraying himself in the most favorable light.
On one of his court-mandated visits to a state psychiatrist following his release from Atascadero, Ed Kemper had the head of his latest victim, a fifteen-year-old girl, in the trunk of his car. During that particular interview, the psychiatrist concluded he was no longer a threat to himself or others and recommended that his juvenile record be sealed. That’s why I don’t trust self-reporting.
But that is what the McGowan mental health files from his incarceration amounted to. Three individual reports, generated in January 1987, October 1988, and September 1991, stated that McGowan had admitted his guilt and appeared remorseful about the crime. All three had recommended parole. On the other hand, McGowan had never reached out or attempted to express remorse to Rosemarie or anyone else in Joan’s family.
On October 7, 1993, Dr. Kenneth McNiel, the principal clinical psychologist at the Adult Diagnostic and Treatment Center, met with McGowan. He was there at the request of the New Jersey state parole board. Specifically, the board wanted to assess the prisoner’s “(1) likelihood of violent acting-out; (2) general personality profile; (3) presence/absence of several psychological problems; and (4) treatment program recommendations.”
Dr. McNiel’s findings painted a substantially different picture, not only from the three previous reports, but also from the original ones conducted by Drs. Galen, Effron, and Revitch. According to Dr. McNiel, McGowan denied “any history of sexual fantasies or behaviors toward children prior to or subsequent to his crime.”
McNiel’s report stated that while
Mr. McGowan also denied any dissociative symptoms, his discussion of the present offense was notable for brief moments in which he would blank and look away while discussing the crime, which suggested a dissociative process. [I]t was clearly difficult for him to concentrate on specific memories of his crime.
HE CONCLUDED:
Mr. McGowan has made little or no progress in fully appreciating the extent of sexual deviance and violence that is apparent in his crime. Unfortunately it appears that he continues to primarily manage such negative aspects of himself through denial and repression, similar to the time of his crime.
Like the three previous reports, McNiel found “no evidence to indicate Mr. McGowan is at imminent risk of violent behavior,” but hedged himself by adding, “in a non-structured community setting, his ability to manage anger, rejection and feelings of sexual inadequacy remains open to question.”
Taken together, these reports underscored for me the vagaries of our understanding of the human mind and motivation, or even their relationship to the physical brain. Sometimes we can look at a mental symptom and link it directly to a physical problem in the brain or nervous system, but most of the time we can’t. Or, to take it one step further, sometimes we will say that a particular cruel, antisocial, or criminal action was the result of a mental or emotional disease. In other instances, we’ll say that the perpetrator wasn’t suffering from a mental disease per se, but had a “character disorder,” and therefore is more responsible for what he did. But what is the difference between a mental disease and a character disorder? A psychiatrist reading the DSM can give us a definitional answer, but will it really tell us anything about the distinction?
My colleagues and I on the criminal analysis side of behavior science operate from the premise that anyone who commits a violent or predatory crime is mentally ill. This is almost ipso facto, in that “normal” people do not commit such crimes. But a mental disorder, in and of itself, does not mean the perpetrator is insane, which is a legal, rather than a medical, term that has to do with culpability.
There have been many attempts to define insanity over the years, but in one way or another, they all go back to the M’Naghten Rule, formulated by the British courts in the wake of one Daniel M’Naghten’s attempt to assassinate British prime minister Sir Robert Peel in 1843. Shooting at point-blank range outside Peel’s London house, M’Naghten instead killed the prime minister’s private secretary Edward Drummond. M’Naghten, who suffered from delusions of persecution, was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and ever since, through multiple interpretations and permutations, the basic legal test of insanity in British and American courts has been whether the defendant could distinguish between right and wrong or was acting under a delusion or compulsion so strong that it negated that distinction.
Perhaps the closest we had to a genuinely insane predator was the late Richard Trenton Chase, who was convinced he needed to drink the blood of women to stay alive. When he was placed in a mental institution for the criminally insane and could no longer obtain human blood, he’d catch rabbits, bleed them, and inject their blood into his arm. When he could catch small birds, he would bite off their heads and drink blood. This was not a sadist who enjoyed inflicting pain and death on creatures smaller and weaker than him. This was an out-and-out psychotic, as opposed to a run-of-the-mill criminal sociopath. He committed suicide in his cell at age thirty by overdosing on antidepressant drugs he had saved up.
Still, there haven’t been many killers like Richard Trenton Chase, and this ambiguity around insanity and mental illness highlights one of the early objectives of our project to interview killers. The conversations alone were not enough. We knew that to be truly useful, we would have to find a way to systematize our results: create distinctions that could be applied more broadly, so that there was a vocabulary that extended beyond each individual case. Back in 1980, Roy Hazelwood, our sex crimes and interpersonal violence expert, was collaborating with me on an article about lust murder for the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. For the first time, instead of jargon borrowed from psychology, we employed a series of terms we thought would be more practical for crime investigators. We introduced concepts such as organized, disorganized, and mixed to describe behavioral presentations at crime scenes.
Roy put me in touch with Dr. Ann Burgess, with whom he had done previous research. Ann was a highly regarded author, professor of psychiatric mental health nursing at Boston College and the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, and associate director of nursing research for the Boston Department of Health and Hospitals. Along with Roy, she was one of the nation’s leading authorities on rape and its psychological impact. Interestingly, she had recently completed a research project at Boston College involving the accuracy of predicting heart attacks in men and thought there were interesting similarities in the “reverse engineering” required for her study and what we were aiming to do.
Ann was eventually able to secure a large grant from the National Institute of Justice that allowed us to conduct a rigorous study and publish our results. Bob Ressler administered the grant and served as the NIJ liaison, and with our input, we developed a fifty-seven-page document to be filled out for each offender interview, which we called the Assessment Protocol. There were categories for modus operandi, description of the crime scene, victimology, pre- and post-offense behavior, and how they were identified and apprehended, among many other elements. Since we had already established that neither recording the interviews nor taking notes was a good idea, as soon as we finished, we would fill out the interview document, using the subject’s own words, to the best of our memories.
When we finished our formalized study in 1983, we had thirty-six in-depth studies of offenders and 118 of their victims, primarily women. By this point we had enough experience and sophistication in the Behavioral Science Unit to offer profiling and case consultation on a formal basis. Bob Ressler and Roy Hazelwood continued with their teaching and research and consulted part time as their other duties allowed. I became the first full-time operational profiler and program manager of the Criminal Profiling Program, and eventually created a new unit. My first order of business was to “take the BS out of behavioral science and profiling.” I renamed our group the Investigative Support Unit, or ISU. It encompassed programs in profiling, arson and bombing, the Police Executive Fellowship Program, VICAP—the national Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, which involved logging and comparing cases between jurisdictions—and coordination with other federal law enforcement agencies, including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the Secret Service.
We understood and tried to make clear to potential law enforcement clients that there were certain types of crimes for which our form of criminal investigation was useful and some for which it was not. For example, a run-of-the-mill back-alley robbery or felony murder—a crime of opportunity in which quick profit was the only motive—did not lend itself to profiling or behavioral analysis. It is all too common a scenario, with a predictable profile that fits too many people to be useful. However, even in a case such as that, we might be able to suggest proactive techniques that could help flush out the offender.
On the other hand, the more psychopathology the offender demonstrates, as evidenced by the analysis of the crime, the more we can do in profiling and helping to identify the culprit. But we had to be able to undertake our analyses and consult with local investigators in a context that would use psychology but be effective in crime solving.
In 1988 Bob Ressler, Ann Burgess, and I published our findings and conclusions in book form, entitled Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives. The reception in both the academic and law enforcement communities was gratifying. But we were still working toward the goal of making our studies and research useful in a practical way to law enforcement professionals in the manner that mental health professionals use the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, now in its fifth edition (DSM-5).
We came to realize that truly to understand an unknown subject (UNSUB in our parlance), you had to understand why and how he was committing a particular type of crime. And by the same token, you could classify crimes by motivation rather than simply by result or outcome. This was the challenge I tackled in the doctoral dissertation I was working on: evaluating different ways to train law enforcement officers in how to classify homicides. In other words, I was trying to present this material in such a way that it would actually help solve cases by explaining the behavioral dynamics of the crime.
The ultimate result, growing out of my dissertation research and involving some of the best minds in the FBI and law enforcement, was the Crime Classification Manual, published in 1992, with Ann Burgess, her husband, Allen Burgess, and Bob Ressler. By the time of the Crime Classification Manual’s initial publication, we already had a significant number of profiling victories under our belts, including the Atlanta Child Murders; Arthur Shawcross’s murders of prostitutes in Rochester, New York; the Francine Elveson murder in New York City; the Trailside Killer in San Francisco; and the murders of Karla Brown in Illinois, Linda Dover in Georgia, Shari Faye Smith in South Carolina, and FBI employee Donna Lynn Vetter in Texas. In addition, we were also able to use profiling and behavioral science to help free wrongly convicted David Vasquez, an intellectually challenged individual who was in prison in Virginia. Though he had confessed to several murders under coercive circumstances, we were able to link the crimes to the actual killer, Timothy Spencer, who has since been tried and executed.
Looking back on it, an insanity defense like the M’Naghten Rule was one of the main reasons Ann and Allen Burgess, Bob Ressler, and I set out to create the Crime Classification Manual. From a criminal investigation standpoint, it didn’t really matter to us whether something was a disease, a disorder, or neither. We were interested in how behavior indicates criminal intent and perpetration, and how that behavior correlated to the thinking of the perpetrator right before, during, and after the commission of the crime. Whether that behavior was disordered to the extent that it would militate against guilt (given that legally, each crime is composed of two elements—the act and the criminal intent to act) was something for the jury and judge to decide.
But these reports on McGowan’s mental state made me even more uncomfortable about their role in determining his suitability for parole. If you had severe physical symptoms that definitely indicated something was very wrong and you were examined by four different doctors, each of whom came up with a different diagnosis, you would seriously question the efficacy of their diagnostic protocols. You would, unquestionably, demand a battery of tests to determine what was actually ailing you and wouldn’t be satisfied until blood work and endocrine and imaging studies confirmed a specific cause for your ailment.
In most cases, though, no such tests exist for confirming the correctness of a mental diagnosis. We know the symptom—in this case, the brutal rape and murder of a seven-year-old girl—but we cannot prove the cause. So what concerns me the most is how accurately we can predict future dangerousness. It would be like the doctor saying she couldn’t prove what caused a condition, but she was most interested in whether it would recur. In other words, we can only speculate, only offer an estimation or opinion. But I always start from the same premise, one that I taught throughout my years with the FBI: Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.
In 1998, five years after he first examined McGowan, and again at the request of the parole board, Dr. McNiel undertook another evaluation. Again, denying his earlier admission of rape fantasies and sexual attraction to young girls, McGowan chalked up the murder to a bad confluence of events. In McNiel’s words: “The victim happened to come to his home during a moment of abject despair in which he had been actively planning to kill himself for weeks but had been unable to follow through with his suicide plans.” When Joan showed up at his front door, “he became overwhelmed with unexplainable rage.”
As I read over these reports in preparation for my own encounter with Joseph McGowan, one thing struck me particularly about this latest report: a moment of abject despair in which he had been actively planning to kill himself for weeks.
I wasn’t sure whether or not he had been planning to kill himself, but from the moment I had been brought into this case and then started learning the details, my first questions had been, Why this victim, and why then?
Even if he was sexually drawn to little girls, and even if he was unsure of his own manhood, even if he was under the thumb of a domineering mother, what was going on in his mind at this particular time that led him to the high-risk crime of assaulting and killing a child from his own neighborhood, in his own house?
Dr. McNiel told the parole board that he considered his latest evaluation generally consistent with his earlier one, though in this later report he pointed to McGowan’s “potential for dissociation at times of anger, and also the likelihood of severe sexual pathology involving pedophilia and sexual violence, which he continues to deny.” He also said that McGowan had “paranoid tendencies and significant violence potential,” and that, given “Mr. McGowan’s continued inability to deal with the sexual aspects of his crime, it would appear that he has made very little progress in confronting the pedophilic impulses and sexual sadism that erupted in his crime. As such, he should be considered a poor risk for parole.”
Okay, I said to myself. So even though Dr. McNiel considers his two reports generally consistent, and though the subject had had no serious problems in prison, while once he said he saw “no evidence to indicate Mr. McGowan is at imminent risk of violent behavior,” he now sees “significant violence potential.”
So what was this guy McGowan actually all about? And if I could probe deeply enough, would he show it to me?
