Truly evil premeditated acts: Do you deal with the perpetrators of such?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve had a run of a particular type of patient lately. Committers of horrific premeditated murders, makers of pre-adolescent porno, inflictors in sexual torture, serial killers. This is not a new experience for me; I’ve been serving a population of troubled individuals for a while now and such extreme cases, while uncommon, are sadly not rare.

Most of my typical patients are lost souls, or poor decision makers, or folks who grew up in such impoverished environments that it’s a wonder they could even feed themselves much less be expected to be functioning citizens. That last class can be easy to spot, as their dysfunction is often writ large in their mannerisms and demeanor. They act out emotionally and impulsively and violently in ways that often horrify them quickly afterwards. Or at least cause some genuine remorse.

But this latest run of men who did long-planned truly evil acts has given me pause to reflect on these extreme cases that I’ve encountered over many years. I will not name names, nor further describe their crimes. But what struck me was how damned ordinary they all were, in presentation, speech, demeanor, responses. Yet these were not the Eichmann types of banal evil-doers; the bureaucrats who went along to get along, performing their tasks without malign intention. I’ve seen enough of those types. The type of which I write now were not cogs in a vicious machine but rather chose their actions because that’s what they wanted to do.

I don’t delve into their psyches, fortunately. I deal with their physical health, and treat them as any other patient. And if not for their notoriety, I’d not know what crime they did as that’s not part of our conversation. Nor would I be able to differentiate them from most of my other patients, nor the typical man on the street or neighbor I’d loan my chainsaw to (which would be a big mistake in these specific cases). They’re just so damn ordinary. Which makes me ponder, and is why I’m writing my random maunderings on the topic here.

This is certainly not a new revelation. I’m not gonna trumpet that “I’ve discovered that ‘nice’ people do horrible things, and we must alert the Press!” Legit researchers have explored this topic much better than I ever will.

I am a bit surprised I’m not grinding my teeth in rage at these folks, nor imagining myself inflicting my vision of justice on them, with hot and pointy and heavy things. I used to have such strong responses in the past (to the point where my dentist told me to knock it off or I’d need major reparative work), but now I tend to just feel sad for their victims and content that these particular patients of mine will never be free again. And I continue to ensure they get the appropriate necessary care they need medically.

But I won’t loan my chainsaw to just anybody who asks for it anymore.

Anyone else had to reflect on this rather morbid topic due to these sorts of second-hand experiences/interactions? I don’t really want to open a discussion on the nature of evil so much as hear how others with some experiences in their lives view this issue.

I also don’t mean to call on the victims or family/friends of victims of such individuals here to dredge up their feelings and recollections; I can’t imagine dealing with it from that point of view.

Thanks for listening to my blather.

2

When I hear of some heinous committer-of-crimes being sent to prison in Wisconsin I invariably think of you, Dr. Mercotan, because I know that shortly you will be meeting that person in person and I’ve often wondered what that is like from your point of view. Not that I’ve ever asked, or even feel I have a right to ask, but since you more or less volunteered…

As some folks may know, I worked at an inner city clinic for four years. By “inner city” I mean literally across the street from Cabrini-Green, a public housing project that no longer exists but was infamous in its time.

It is even possible that some of the people I knew then are now in the care of Dr. Mercotan. After all, Chicago is not that far from Wisconsin. I don’t think either of us had the (dis)pleasure of meeting the infamous Mr. Dahmer, but he’s definitely an example of a very bad - dare I say evil? - person who crossed state lines. Also an evil person covered with a veneer of pleasantness.

Yes, I, too, have encountered the banality of evil in the guise of a very ordinary person who did extraordinarily bad things. Not just ordinary, but sometimes even charming, personable… someone you might open up to, become friends with. That, of course, is how some of them get away with terrible things, they can gain the trust of others and maintain until a final betrayal. Others are genuinely ordinary people who conceal a nasty rotten spot, a series of crimes, and so forth.

If I may diverge - that is where strategies to find terrorists and other savages before they commit a crime fails. There is no mark of Cain, no quirk of personality, no lump on the skull, no hairy palms, no stigmata of evil until evil is committed. The truth is we are all capable of horrible things, physically able to perform evil acts, and what separates us from the horrible criminals mentioned in the OP is nothing more than our own choices. Good people choose to do good every day and refrain from evil. Evil people choose to do evil. Quite a few people, most of them, lie in between the extremes, having done some good and some bad and, judging by the fact civilization endures, the balance seems tipped towards good behavior rather than bad, regardless of what the evening news or other media would have you believe, because if everyone acted as badly as the truly nasty people society could not continue to function. Those who feel a need to control - either themselves or others or both - are terrified by this notion, because what if other people make evil choices? Well… that’s a risk we take, every day, but the vast majority of us continue on with our lives, continue to Do The Right Thing, and thus civilization exists.

But yes, it used to amaze me how I could sit down and have a conversation with someone who had murdered someone else, or stolen large amounts of money, or deliberately hurt others, or sold their children’s bodies for money for drugs, or just for money. Outside of their crimes yes, they were very ordinary.

Which might be why, although I despise their actions and certainly support some people being removed from society for life I also feel that we must treat them humanely, whatever their crimes, because really they ARE human beings. I don’t see them as an Other. I think many do, they find it comforting, as if to say the ordinary can’t be that, because they have some mark, some stain, some thing distinguishes Them from Us. Um… no, they don’t. They’re just as human as the rest of us. Scary thought, isn’t it?

No, I wouldn’t lend my chainsaw to just anyone - if I had a chainsaw. The very ordinariness of evil is why I’m cautious about letting people, even people I think I know well, into my home, or telling them much beyond a certain amount, my public persona. It’s how I learned to trust less, to be more suspicious. I am still open to being open… but not so quick to open the door as when I was younger and less informed.

It’s why, when Dr. Mercotan invited me into his home I first did a little checking on him under his real name, told someone where I was going and when, and when I would check back with them. I’m pretty sure Dr. Mercotan understands why I did that and would not/has not held it against me. I surely would not hold it against him if he did the same when visiting my home, at least for the first time. Most people ARE good people, most ordinary people are just that, ordinary without lethal secrets in the basement or under the rose bushes… but a few of them aren’t. And you can’t always know the difference at first meeting or by surface impressions. Or even after years of knowing someone.

3

My mother was pro-life and working in the OB-GYN unit of one of the area’s largest hospitals when Roe v. Wade was decided. Suddenly the unit was dealing with patients who wanted elective abortions. My mother’s solution, which the hospital went along with, was not to participate in their pre-operative treatment, but to care for them post-operatively as she would any other patient.

Take from that what you will.

4

I have experienced three such people, one of whom devastated my life and continues to do so. I won’t go into the evil details as you rightly say that’s not relevant to how you experience such people. One thing I would think we share is the terrifying knowledge of how good their daily masks can be. I have a lot of training in body language and spotting deception, and this guy got past every skill I possess.

The experience left me unsure of my ability to get to know anyone. I’m constantly aware of the gap that exists between how we experience others - how we draw meaning from their words and actions - and who they really are inside. We simply can not know. I think of all the people who vociferously defended Jerry Sandusky. They were utterly convinced the man was an angel helping those boys.

Once you are forced to see that, how do you ever trust anyone? I’m down to a few very close friends, whom I have either lived with, or known since childhood. I know full well that the conscienceless types are a small segment of the population. Widely quoted statistics are 5% of men and 1-3% of women; I think even that maybe a bit high. But even highly trained professionals can’t necessarily figure out which ones they are. And even when they walk into a situation knowing the diagnosis has been reliably made, they can still walk away thinking “What a great guy! I’d love to go have a beer with him!”

If you haven’t read it already, “The Mask of Sanity” is a great book on the subject, with some very practical advice.

5

I ran into more than a few of those. People who seemed perfectly ordinary until they said something and you realized they were living in some different world.

I posted this story one time. I was watching a group of prisoners who were watching the news on TV. There was a story about how some guy who had been robbing fast food restaurants had been arrested. There was a mention of how some of the people who had been in the restaurants had provided information to the police.

And one guy in the crowd said, “That’s why you always kill any witnesses.” And he was very casual about it, as if he was saying you should always make sure you have your keys in your pocket before locking your front door. In his mind, committing murder was just a job tip.

6

What gets me are the “parents” you read about often enough in the news that systematically abuse, torture, and starve their own biological child. I mean I can’t fathom how anyone could hurt any child, but how could you do that to your own flesh and blood? And how can a child process and come to terms with the person that was supposed to love and care for them more than anyone treated them like an object to be abused?

It’s not a psychological phenomenon I would want to delve in too deeply, some things are too damaging to my one’s own soul to ask those questions.

7

This thread reminds why I found the movie Psycho to be creepier than the slasher films I grew up watching in the 80s. Compared to Jason Vorhees or Freddy Krueger, Norman Bates just seems like a normal guy from the outside with his psychosis hidden undernearth. He could be anybody I see when I am out grocery shopping. I think that’s a problem I have with a lot of modern horror films —they tend to use gore more instead of trying to create a sense of dread or terror.

8

I went to a small, Catholic, all-boys high school; about half of our instructors were priests (and there were also a few seminarians who worked as associate teachers). I later learned that one of the priests, and one of the seminarians, had both sexually abused students at our school, including several classmates of mine.

My sister met him, briefly. She and her roommate were living in Milwaukee in the early 1990s, and were working for Manpower, doing temporary-labor jobs. The two of them were sent to the Ambrosia Chocolate Company, to help clean up the production lines prior to a health inspection. While in the lunchroom, they noticed a quiet guy who sat by himself, and stared at people – my sister and her friend teased each other by saying, “Hey, that’s your boyfriend over there!”

A couple of months later, my sister was in their apartment, when the phone rang – her roommate was on the other end of the line. “Oh my god! Turn on the television! Remember the boyfriend from the chocolate factory? He’s a mass murderer! He EATS PEOPLE!” :eek:

9

I think that instead of trying to understand evil, we should try to understand good.

I mean, why *not *kill all the witnesses? It’s the logical thing to do. And yet people like us - what we refer to as “normal people” - won’t do it, thanks to morals, empathy, guilt, principles, ethics and a thousand other essentially illogical mechanisms that compel good people not to do what they want and to do what they should. Evil is simple. It’s boring. Good, on the other hand, is the most wonderfully complex thing in the universe.

So maybe the OP shouldn’t be thinking about what’s wrong with these people. Maybe he should be thinking about what’s right with him.

10

I can’t say that I’ve ever met anyone that reaches the level that would put them in the care of QtM or his peers but there are a couple of people I’m not sure of.
I have spend a lot of time thinking about the suffering in the world and how so much of it is caused by so few.

My thoughts and feelings about it mesh with Alessan’s and help form a significant part of who I am.
Nevermind what I put in my sig, thats just for fun, my motto, the words I live by are these
Laugh with full joy and mirth, first at yourself then the world because the alternative is too grim

11

I just listened to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History episode on Painfotainment, a description of torture through the ages as a way of amusing the crowds.

I fear that doers of evil acts are not aberrations from the norm. They are part of the normal behavior distribution in the human species. :frowning:

I never met Dahmer, but a friend of mine was his physician. My friend described him as very ordinary also.

I also talked to a few people who had known Ed Gein. Now he was rather weird, I’m told.

Broomie, I’ll lend you my chainsaw any day.

As that late, great Philosopho-magician Sir Terence D. J. Pratchett suggested (and I paraphrase), to be human, we need to perceive a place where the falling angel meets the rising ape. Life would be unbearable if we just saw what life is like, without believing in things like justice, mercy, and duty.

12

That depends on whether you’ve killed someone already or not. If you’ve already committed murder, there’s very little reason not to kill all the other witnesses - the penalty for killing a single person is bad enough that the penalty for killing a bunch of people won’t be a huge difference, so the risk/reward ratio is pretty good at that point.

But if you haven’t committed murder yet, the penalty for being caught is much lower if you don’t commit murder in the first place, so you’re better off not killing the witnesses, even if it would reduce the chance to get caught. Because it increases the penalty for being caught so much.

Of course, this also applies to other crimes for which the penalty is high enough that adding on murder and/or other crimes becomes relatively irrelevant. Once you cross that line, there’s no reason not to keep doing whatever crimes will reduce the chances of your getting caught, since there’s no meaningful increase in the punishment you will potentially receive if you’re caught.

13

That’s an excellent demonstration of the mindset the OP was referring to. Thanks.

14

This reminds me of a speech Obama made while in Germany several years ago. It was an anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz if memory serves. He said something to the effect of “It’s important to remember the victims” (everyone says that), but then he followed it with “and it’s equally important to remember the perpetrators, because that capacity for evil lies within each and every one of us.”

15

I’ve talked about the Grandfather from Hell before. He counts as both first- and second-hand; I actually came out light, compared with what he did to one of my brothers and to both my cousins, to the female prisoners he “guarded” during the war, or to my Crazy Aunt :frowning: That Crazy Aunt and my mother are both wrong in the head is no kind of surprise once you realize their parents were a paranoid woman married to a man who couldn’t even be trusted when you had him in plain sight.

People who haven’t actually read The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde often think of Hyde as a large, hideous monster; the Hunchback of Notre Dame’s bigger, uglier, evil twin. In the novel the transformation is completely psychological, it’s all about demeanor. Most people who ever told me they knew my grandfather would say so in wonder at what a nice, kind, helpful man he was; his pals/accomplices would say it with a sneer. A few times I met someone who said it in a little voice, and when I said “ah, I see you’ve met Mr Hyde” their response was “yes! How did you know?!” “dude, he’s my grandfather, I met Mr. Hyde a long time ago… :p”

16

OOT: I think that’s the reason I’m not particularly impressed by some depictions of movie psychopaths that people who haven’t met Mr Hyde find impresive and which to me just look clownish; also why I’ll never be interested in reading scary novels. When you grew up with monsters walking down the hallways of your home, there is no need to picture them inside the closet or under the bed.

Some learn to copy the behavior, some get to believe that it’s what we deserve. Other people are worthy of love, but we are not; not necessarily because of anything we have done, it can be because somehow we don’t do enough, or because we were born the wrong sex, the wrong shape, the wrong color, or because we appear to be uncapable of reading the minds of parents who expect us to know what is it they want and do it instant and perfectly, without them ever needing to explain and teach.

17

Some people are just broken. We can’t fix the design, but sometimes we can put the wheels back on and hope they stay on the road.

18

I think most people never truly make a conscious choice between Good and Evil; I did. Everybody I know who falls mainly on the side of nasty hurts first and foremost themselves. Complete inability to trust, expectation that any and all people will be looking for a space to slide a dagger into, incapacity to accept a good deal because if it seems good it’s got to be simply that they haven’t seen the trap yet… Those who fall on the side of good will begin by assuming that people they’ve just met are also some shade of “decent”, they can change their mind later if that person turns out to be a jerk; those who fall on the side of evil refuse to accept there is such a thing as “decent”. “Stupid” they can believe, “decent” no. To me, evil seems like a much more tiresome choice.

19

Yes. I represent parents in juvenile dependency proceedings, which means I sometimes defend child abusers in court. My own reactions have often surprised me. The cases one might reasonably call the worst aren’t necessarily the ones that get to me.

For example, one thing that consistently breaks my heart is the rare parent who doesn’t care about getting their kid back. In one sense they’re the easiest clients because I don’t have to do much for them, but it’s somehow harder to deal with than the person who beat their kid and is screaming at me to get them back. It also chills me when I see kids who don’t want to reunify with their parents, because most kids do, even when they’ve been severely abused or neglected. (I’m not saying the kids are wrong not to want to go back for seconds; my discomfort is more about wondering what the hell kind of horror these parents inflicted to turn off the spigot of usually unconditional love from their children.)

One thing I came to believe after working at this job a few years is that people can change. At least some of them. One of my first clients was a woman who had pretty much tortured her kids; she hadn’t inflicted any permanent physical disfigurement, but there was physical abuse as well as psychological abuse over many years. She was an extremely difficult client, calling me repeatedly to demand copies of documents that either didn’t exist or I had already provided, and complaining to my supervisor that I didn’t return her calls or send her the documents (I did, of course, repeatedly.) She was one whose kids didn’t want to go home. But they were too old to be adopted, so the case stayed open for years. During that time my client got on meds and began seeing a therapist, and although it took some time, she really transformed. She hasn’t just stopped doing bad things; she takes responsibility for her prior actions and has taken on a mentorship role with other parents who have mental illness. I got promoted and another attorney took over her case, but I later came back to cover for the day and couldn’t believe the person I met wearing her face. Her children saw it too; two of them willingly returned to her care and are now thriving in her home.

I tend to think a person can be evil, or mentally ill, or both, but that one has nothing to do with the other. But sometimes I wonder if the people we see as evil just have an illness we can’t yet recognize or treat. What if we’re not all capable of the same things? What if we’re punishing people for things they can’t control?

20

I know the victims, so I get accounts of these people second-hand, and fwiw I don’t believe that they are ordinary at all, but they are skilled in passing as harmless for a certain amount of time, or through one performance at a time. It’s what they do. They’re very skilled.

On the flip side, one young person I know sincerely thanked her captor, after his arrest, to his face, for sparing her life when he seemingly had every reason not to. She will pray for him. It is humbling. Any notion I once had that I was a good person…{poof} it’s gone.

I’m somewhere in the vast middle and I strive toward the good. That’s it.