Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior (19 page)

Psychiatrist Michael McCullock, 41, decided to treat a 38-year-old paranoid schizophrenic man with a long history of violence as an outpatient in his private office in Portland, Oregon. He did so despite evidence that the man had made threats to kill a philosophy professor while he had been in college and despite the man’s several previous involuntary hospitalizations. The psychotic patient had developed the delusion that Dr. McCullock was torturing him with a brain-stimulating machine and that the only way to stop the torture and pain was to kill the psychiatrist. Barging into Dr. McCullock’s office one day and pulling a shotgun from under his raincoat, the patient shot McCullock dead at close range. He then waited calmly for the police. Later, when interviewed, the patient was without remorse. Because of his delusions, the patient believed that he had been justified in killing his psychiatrist.
Similarly, Dr. Wayne Fenton, 53, a prominent psychiatrist, associate director of a division of the National Institute of Mental Health, and an expert on schizophrenia, agreed to do a consultation on a Saturday in his private office with a young man known to be paranoid and psychotic, who was unaccompanied by his parents. Shortly, police were notified by the patient’s father that his son had returned from that appointment acting strangely and with blood on his pants and shirt. The police went to the office, found that Dr. Fenton had been murdered. They were soon able to apprehend 19-year-old Vitali Davydov and charge him with the crime.

Today most emergency rooms in hospitals, in addition to handling emergency cases, also function as outpatient clinics, which treat a variety of chronically ill people. In recent years, disgruntled patients who have not found relief for their pain, or who think they have been badly treated, have come back to kill emergency room personnel. That is why most emergency rooms now have security personnel and equipment to detect the presence of firearms.

Doctors may also be the victims of politically motivated attacks, as has been made clear by recent violence against abortion clinics and against doctors who perform abortions. Some antiabortion extremists have become terrorists willing to kill to prevent women from being able to have abortions. Michael F. Griffin, age 32, was found guilty of the first-degree murder of Dr. David Gunn, a physician who performed abortions at Pensacola Women’s Medical Services Clinic. Griffin, an antiabortion zealot, shot Dr. Gunn three times as the physician arrived for work during a protest. Antiabortion activist Paul Hill shot and killed Dr. John Britton and his unarmed escort outside The Ladies Center clinic in Pensacola, Florida. John C. Salvi, age 22, opened fire at two abortion clinics in Brookline, Massachusetts, killing two women and wounding five other people. Medical personnel in many abortion clinics are working under a state of siege.

Hospital Killing Grounds

Finally, hospitals and nursing homes have been used as killing grounds by murderers who have access to them and their vulnerable patientresidents. Ex-Marine Donald Swango managed to graduate from Southern Illinois School of Medicine with a medical degree, but his fascination with dying patients was noted. At Ohio State, nurses on the floors that Swango worked on as a surgical intern noticed more patients dying than usual, and one saw Swango give an injection to a patient who soon sickened. He was cleared by an investigation but resigned and became an EMT in Quincy, Illinois. After paramedics noticed people getting violently ill in the office when he was around, he was arrested in possession of arsenic and other poisons, convicted, and sentenced to five years in prison. After his release, he forged documents to reestablish himself in West Virginia and then, under an alias, in South Dakota. Discovered there, he found his way to Stony Brook in New York State. In every location, patients died for no apparent reason. Only when a former employer in South Dakota called Stony Brook was he exposed and a warning about him sent to all the teaching hospitals in the United States. Swango moved to Zimbabwe, where he killed more people but escaped before being tried. He was on his way to a job in Saudi Arabia when he chose a flight that gave him a layover in Chicago, where he was arrested. He pleaded guilty to three killings of patients, and—nearly 20 years after he began to harm patients and coworkers—received a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Donald Harvey, a nursing assistant known as the Angel of Death, may have killed as many as 100 victims in healthcare settings. He worked as a nursing assistant in various hospitals. He confessed to killing 15 patients at Marymount Hospital in London, Kentucky, and 15 more at the Cincinnati Veterans Administration Medical Center. While working at Drake Memorial Hospital from 1985 to 1987, when he was arrested, he allegedly killed 21 additional infirm and chronically ill patients.

Harvey at first claimed that he was committing mercy killings, but his real motivation came out later as he told how he obtained great satisfaction from being able to fool “know-it-all” doctors who would assume that their patients had died from natural causes. Psychiatrists described Harvey as a compulsive man who murdered because it gave him a sense of power. He had also killed for revenge after having been homosexually raped. Harvey was not a subtle mercy killer, as his methods of murder also revealed. He thrust a straightened-out coat hanger into the abdomen of a restrained and confused old man, puncturing the man’s bowel and causing him to die of peritonitis two days later. For others, he cut off the oxygen supply, suffocated them with plastic bags and pillows, injected syringes full of air, and mixed arsenic and cyanide in patients’ food.
Other so-called mercy killings have taken place with some frequency in hospitals, institutions, and nursing homes. Few of these murders have anything to do with compassion and pity for the victim. Most echo Harvey’s incentive to kill in order to exercise total power and control over the victim. Motives of nurse-killers or bedside-killers have included the thrill of creating medical emergencies, appearing heroic, enjoying watching patients as they die, and putting patients out of their misery. The most common method of killing is injecting a prescribed drug in amounts that are known to be lethal. Charles Cullen, a nurse, was charged with the murders of at least 40 seriously ill patients. He injected patients with drugs, mainly digoxin, used in cardiac care units, ostensibly to end their suffering. Similarly, Harold Shipman, a British physician, was convicted of killing 15 patients, although a government investigation concluded that he had killed at least 215, making him the most notorious of all medical serial killers.

Patients in nursing homes are sometimes killed by physical abuse. It is my belief that some serial killers work in facilities that take care of the elderly and the very infirm—killers who change jobs frequently and whose crimes are only discovered in the wake of heightened patient mortality rates that are otherwise inexplicable.

It was not until after the death of Dr. David J. Acer, a dentist practicing in Florida, that the workplace violence he allegedly committed was discovered. Dr. Acer had died of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AI DS). He had contracted the human immunodeficiency virus (H IV) years earlier but continued to practice dentistry—and did not inform his patients of his condition. The first of his patients to develop AI DS and die was young Kimberly Bergalis. Dr. Acer himself died before he could be questioned about Kimberly’s treatment. At least five other patients became infected. It was only possible to test 700 of Dr. Acer’s 2,000 patients for HIV. Questions have been raised about whether Dr. Acer might have deliberately infected his patients. His former lover has been quoted as saying that Dr. Acer did do so in an attempt to “prove” that AIDS was not just a disease limited to the population of homosexuals. If Dr. Acer did deliberately transmit the fatal disease to his patients, he would have to be considered a serial murderer. It may be years before the full extent of the damage he allegedly wrought can be tallied. I say
allegedly
because a new scientific study may cast doubt on the original findings that implicated Dr. Acer.

Vigilante Justice in the Courts

As the introductory vignette about Gian Luigi Ferri’s murderous assault on the law firm of Pettit and Martin makes clear, lawyers, law firms, and the courts are fast becoming targets of violence. Bad feelings toward lawyers and the court system are today epidemic and are reflected in the current abundance of uncomplimentary jokes about lawyers. Ferri was reported to have laughed himself to tears, a few weeks before the massacre, when told the following joke: “If you were locked into a room with Saddam Hussein, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and a lawyer, and you had a gun with two bullets in it, who would you shoot? The lawyer—twice.”

Lawyers are advocates who work within an adversarial system, one that leads directly to the polarization of positions and to the evocation of strong emotions. The courts deal with difficult, contentious, and momentous decisions, sometimes of life and death; stresses on litigants, lawyers, judges, and juries can be extremely high. Letter bombs have been sent to lawyers and judges, injuring some recipients, killing others. Gun-wielding litigants seeking their own immediate brand of justice have killed several lawyers and judges. In one notable rampage, Kenneth Baumrock brought two handguns into a divorce hearing in a Clayton, Missouri, courtroom and killed his wife and wounded four court officials. On the same day in Grand Forks, South Dakota, a similar event occurred in a family court, in which a gunman severely wounded the family court judge.

Lawyers can turn lethal as well. Attorney George Lott began a shooting rampage in a court, killing a defense lawyer and a prosecutor, and injuring two appeals judges. Lott’s complaint was that a family court justice had improperly favored his former wife in a child custody hearing. Violent outcomes are not unusual in divorce and custody actions because the litigation process fans intense hatreds.

Death in Familiar Places

Restaurants and financial institutions are increasingly becoming venues for violence as a result of revenge motives acted out in locations where many people are likely to be present. Only a few of the locations have been specifically connected to the perpetrators’ grudges against society. In one of the most awful incidents, George Hennard crashed his truck through the front window of Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, injuring several customers in his path. Hennard then jumped out of the truck with a gun in his hand and systematically killed 23 lunch customers and employees. Hennard killed mostly women, especially those who had made eye contact with him. He wounded 22 others and then took his own life. It was the nation’s worst firearms massacre. Hennard had fired a total of 96 bullets in a few minutes. Of the 136 survivors who were psychologically examined after the rampage, 20% of the men and 36% of the women were found to have posttraumatic stress disorder.

Hennard had no real connection with Luby’s Cafeteria, but many other mass killers have targeted restaurants because they once worked in those particular locations or because they believed they had been insulted there. There is a high turnover of employees in the restaurant industry, and often robberies are executed by former employees of a restaurant who are familiar with its operation. In Queens, New York, two men entered a Wendy’s restaurant, displayed their guns, took 7 employees, 3 of them known to one perpetrator, into a basement freezer, and shot them in order to rob the eatery of $3,200. Two of the 7 who were shot survived and identified the killers.

Workers at financial institutions are also at risk during robberies. Furthermore, they are targets for disgruntled employees and customers, especially during hard financial times. A disgruntled former employee of the Firemen’s Fund, 33-year-old Paul Calden, went to the Island Center Building in Tampa, Florida, killed three of the Fund’s supervisors while they were eating lunch, and injured two women. He then drove away and was found later in his car, 12 miles from the site, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. It was learned that he had been dismissed from a job with Firemen’s Fund 8 months earlier and that he had been mentally disturbed, troubled by a preoccupation with extraterrestrial contacts.

The General Motors Acceptance Corporation office in Jacksonville, Florida, repossessed a two-year-old Pontiac Grand Am from James Edward Pough, 42, a few months after Pough’s wife had left him. He could not pay the debt of $6,394 out of his low hourly laborer’s wages. Six months later, Pough walked into the office, killed eight people, wounded four others, then ended his own life with a .38-caliber revolver.

A disgruntled, disabled electrician named Jim H. Forrester drove his Chevrolet Suburban into the office of the State Industrial Insurance System in Las Vegas and went on a shooting rampage through the first floor of the building. In this incident, although no one was killed, about 25 employees later filed claims for stress and for injuries, and many of the 400 employees later received individual and group therapy.

The annals of workplace killers are heavily weighted toward lowerrank former employees, but one of the first such killers to come to the public’s attention was a former IB M executive and engineer, Edward Thomas Mann. He had resigned, rather than be fired, after his performance ratings had slipped. Mann charged that he was a victim of racial discrimination. He traded in his white shirt and other appurtenances of IB M life and donned an olive-drab fatigue jacket and ski mask. Then, in pseudocommando style, Mann crashed his bronze Lincoln Continental into the lobby of an IB M office building in Rockville, Maryland. He leaped out of the car with two loaded rifles, a shotgun, and a pistol, using these to kill two people and wound seven more in a long siege, at the end of which he surrendered to police. Two years later, in prison, he hanged himself.

Most perpetrators of workplace violence are white men, but occasionally they are women. In every setting except where women are acutely psychotic, men have a higher incidence of violent behavior. Gail Levine, age 62, was convicted of sabotage against the Pepsi-Cola company by a federal jury in Denver. She had placed a syringe in a Diet Pepsi can during the tampering scare—as delayed vengeance against the company that had fired her husband 18 years earlier. In a rare case of workplace violence perpetrated by a woman, 30-year-old industrial engineer Elizabeth A. Teague attempted to set the Eveready Battery plant in Bennington, Vermont, on fire by detonating several homemade black powder and gasoline bombs. Before the bombs went off, she shot and killed the plant manager and wounded two coworkers at the plant where she had worked. Captured, she complained to the FB I of racial harassment at Eveready, that her home phone had been tapped by the company, and that coworkers had stolen and sold company secrets. Police also found at her home some media accounts that had fueled her vengeful feelings: stories about the Luby’s Cafeteria massacre and about Anita Hill’s sexual harassment charges against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.