The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (11 page)

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Authors: Jon Ronson

Tags: #Social Scientists & Psychologists, #Psychopathology, #Sociology, #Psychology, #Popular Culture.; Bisacsh, #Social Science, #Popular Culture, #Psychopaths, #General, #Mental Illness, #Biography & Autobiography, #Social Psychology, #History.; Bisacsh, #History

BOOK: The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
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“That does sound unpleasant,” I said. “Oh. I’ve just found a video interview with him.”
PETER WOODCOCK: I regret that children died, but I felt like God. It was the power of God over a human being.
INTERVIEWER: Why was that important to you?
WOODCOCK: It was the pleasure it gave me. I got very little pleasure from anything else in life. But in the strangling of children I found a degree and a sensation of pleasure. And of accomplishment. Because it was such a good feeling I wanted to duplicate it. And so I went out to seek duplication.
INTERVIEWER: People would be horrified to hear you view it as an accomplishment.
WOODCOCK: I know, but I’m sorry, this is not meant for sensitive ears. This is a terrible recitation. I’m being as honest as I can.
—
The Mask of Sanity
(BBC DOCUMENTARY)
 
 
“Why were you strapped to Peter Woodcock?” I asked Steve.
“He was my ‘buddy,’ making sure I got through the drug trip safely.”
“What did he say to you?”
“That he was there to help me.”
That was all Steve said about his time with Peter Woodcock. He depicted it as a fleeting hallucinatory nightmare. But a few months later, in March 2010, when I e-mailed Steve to ask if he’d heard the news that Woodcock had just died, he replied: “That makes my skin crawl. God damn! You see, I have a deep but unwanted connection with that monster. We had matching small flower tattoos on both our right forearms. We did it together—typical jailhouse tattoos.”
Getting a matching tattoo with a multiple-child-killer was just the kind of twisted thing that happened inside the Oak Ridge Capsule, Steve said, where nothing made sense, where reality got malformed through LSD, where psychopaths all around you were clawing at the walls, where everyone was suffering sleep deprivation, and Elliott Barker was watching it all from behind a one-way mirror.
But then, as the weeks turned into months, something unexpected began to happen. The transformation was captured by a CBC documentary maker, Norm Perry, who was invited into Oak Ridge by Elliott in 1971. It is an incredibly moving film. These tough young prisoners are, before our eyes, changing. They are learning to care for one another inside the Capsule.
“I love the way you talk,” one prisoner tells another. There is real tenderness in his voice. “You just let it flow from you as if you own all the words in the world. They’re your personal property and you make them dance for you.”
We see Elliott in his office, and the look of delight on his face is quite heartbreaking. He’s trying to conceal it, trying to adopt an air of professionalism, but you can tell. His psychopaths have become gentle. Some are even telling their parole boards not to consider them for release until after they’ve completed their therapy. The authorities are astonished. Patients never request
not
to be let out.
 
 
By the mid-1970s, the milieu at Oak Ridge became, if anything, a little
too
beautiful. This was when Elliott—tired and a bit burned out and wanting a break—stepped down for a while and a prodigy, a young psychiatrist named Gary Maier, took the helm. Oak Ridge staff were quite taciturn on the subject of what had occurred under Gary Maier’s stewardship. “He was no Elliott, that was for sure,” e-mailed one staff member, who didn’t want to be named. “Whereas Elliott to all appearances was a conservative-looking fellow in spite of the outlandish treatment ideas, Gary was a long-haired, sandal-clad hippie.”
Nowadays Gary Maier lives in Madison, Wisconsin. He’s semiretired but still practices psychiatry at two maximum-security prisons there. When I met him for breakfast at the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Milwaukee, he told me how he first heard about Elliott’s program. It was at a government-sponsored recruitment seminar for psychiatry graduates. Barry Boyd, who ran Oak Ridge, was one of the speakers. He eulogized Elliott to the audience and recounted the program’s many success stories.
“Like Matt Lamb,” Gary said. “This Matt Lamb fellow had apparently killed people.” (The nineteen-year-old Matt Lamb had been hiding behind a tree near a bus stop in Windsor, Ontario, in January 1967, when a group of young people walked past. He jumped out from behind the tree and without saying a word shot them all. Two of them, a twenty-year-old girl and a twenty-one-year-old boy, died.) “And when they asked him what it was like to kill those strangers, he said it was like squashing bugs. He was one of Elliott’s . . . I wouldn’t want to say
all-stars
, but he had about as cold a personality as psychopaths have and he really seemed to warm up and benefit from the program.”
When Barry Boyd recounted the Matt Lamb story at the recruitment seminar, some of the psychiatry graduates gasped to hear that he was now a free man, declared cured in 1973, a Capsule success story, and was living with Elliott and his family at their farm, spending his days peacefully whitewashing fences and pondering his future. He had stayed trouble-free, but the consensus was that psychopaths invariably lapsed into chaos. Inviting Matt Lamb to live with him was a huge leap of faith, like a liontamer sharing a house with his lion.
But Gary didn’t gasp. He clasped his hands in delight. At the end of the night he approached Barry Boyd.
“If there’s ever a job going at Oak Ridge . . .” he told him. As it happened, Elliott was searching for a collaborator, and a few weeks later they offered the job to Gary.
That evening Gary had a spontaneous out-of-body experience. He took it as a sign that it was
right.
“And how did you feel on your first day at work?” I asked.
“I felt like I was
home
,” Gary said.
 
 
Gary has the thick, muscular body of a prison guard but the goatee and kind eyes of a sixty-seven-year-old hippie. He said he saw the men at Oak Ridge back then as searching souls with kind hearts, just like he was. He gazed into their eyes and he didn’t fear them.
“When you gaze into the eyes of another person, you can only see as far as his closed door,” he said. “So take it as an opportunity to knock on that door. If he doesn’t want to open the door, you bow to him and you say, ‘That’s fine. When you’re ready.’ ”
“What would be behind their closed doors?” I asked.
“Freedom,” said Gary.
 
 
And there
was
freedom at Oak Ridge, Gary said, freedom everywhere: “One guy had a real liking for another guy who lived in a different ward. He’d see him in the yard. So he’d simply leave his body, walk through the walls, make love to the guy, and then come back to his cell. We all said he should feel free to continue to do it as long as he was gentle. He kept me personally apprised of their lovemaking. I have no idea what that other fellow experienced.” Gary laughed sadly. “I haven’t had that memory for a long time,” he said.
 
They were the best days of Gary’s life. He knew how to make these men well.
“I honestly believe I was doing a job that most Canadian psychiatrists couldn’t do,” he said. And the hospital administrators had faith enough in him to allow him to take his psychopaths on a journey into uncharted waters. Like the Dream Group.
“People dream, and I wanted to capture what was going on in their dreams,” Gary said. “So before they went to bed, I’d have them hold hands and say, ‘Let me experience my dream life in this community.’ And then they would quietly go to sleep and dream.”
When they awoke, they’d head straight to the Dream Group, which consisted of an equal number of psychopaths and schizophrenics.
“The problem,” Gary said, “was that the schizophrenics had incredibly vivid dreams—dream after dream after dream—but the psychopaths would be lucky if they even
had
a dream.”
“Why do schizophrenics dream more than psychopaths?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Gary laughed. “I do remember the schizophrenics usually dreamed in color—the more intense a dream, the more likely it’s going to be in color—but the psychopaths, if they managed to have a dream at all, dreamed in black-and-white.”
All this was creating a power imbalance. In regular group meetings, Gary said, the schizophrenics would be subservient to the psychopaths, “but suddenly the poor psychopaths had to sit and listen to the schizophrenics go on about dream one, dream two, dream three . . .”
When it was time for the patients to vote on whether to continue the Dream Group, the schizophrenics said yes, but the psychopaths vociferously argued against it and were victorious.
“Just because of the power struggle?” I asked.
“Well, there was that,” said Gary, “plus who wants to listen to some schizophrenic’s boring dream?”
 
 
Then there was the mass chanting.
“We’d do it after lunch. We chanted Om for maybe twenty-five minutes. It was so pleasurable for the guys. The ward sounded like sort of an echo chamber, and pretty soon they started to chant Om in harmony.” Gary paused. “We used to have visiting psychiatrists. One day one of them was sitting in on the chant when she suddenly jumped up and ran from the room. It was quite an embarrassment. We found her out in the corridor. She said, ‘Being in that room was like a freight train coming to run me over. I just had to get out of it.’ ”
“She panicked?”
“She panicked,” Gary said. “She thought she’d lose control and would somehow be attacked.”
Gary’s most vivid Oak Ridge memories involved gentle psychopaths learning and growing but foolish psychiatrists and security guards conspiring to spoil everything. Which is exactly, he said, what happened when it all went too far, when it all went somewhat Heart of Darkness.
Concern has been expressed as to the direction of recent developments in treatment. The use of LSD appears to be undergoing some change from the approach originally approved [along with] the introduction of mystical concepts. I would ask you to gently de-escalate these aspects of your program.
—MEMO FROM OAK RIDGE MEDICAL DIRECTOR BARRY BOYD TO GARY MAIER, AUGUST 11, 1975
 
“Okay, you saw that memo,” said Gary. “Ah.”
“What happened?”
Gary let out a sigh. “Right . . .” he began.
 
 
Gary asked me to consider what happens when any of us—no matter what age we are—go home to visit our parents at Christmas. It doesn’t matter how wise and insightful adult life has made us. “Two days with your parents at Christmas and you’ll all just be swatted back to the deepest level of the family’s pathology.”
He had that exact same problem at Oak Ridge. “We’d give these guys LSD. They’d have these marathon weekends, and they’d
change
, but then they’d go back to a general ward that wasn’t
ready
for the change. So they’d be swatted right back.”
Two steps forward, two steps back. If only the entire general ward—every psychopath in the whole place—could somehow achieve metaphysical enlightenment at the same time . . .
And then it came to him: a mass LSD trip! It was radical but critical, the only way to break down the deep pathology of the ward.
“I saw it as the culmination of all the stuff I had done,” Gary said. “Give everyone the rite of passage of LSD at the same time. Or over a few days. Well, that was very upsetting for the security staff. They came into work and I said to them, ‘Just leave the guys alone.’ ”
And so the guards, bristling with anger and uncertainty, were forced to stand back as twenty-six serial killers and rapists ran around, en masse, off their heads on LSD.
“I probably didn’t play my cards properly there,” Gary said. “I think the guards lost their identity. The union guys probably thought I was going to get people fired.”
A few days later Gary received the warning memo, and a few days after that he turned up for work to discover that his keys no longer fit the locks. The guards had changed them overnight. One told him—from the other side of the bars—that he was fired and he could never set foot in Oak Ridge again.
“Oh well,” Gary said now, pushing what was left of his breakfast across his plate. “I was ready to move on.”

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