The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (28 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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We walked across the lobby together.
“You’ll never
believe
what just happened,” I said in a startled whisper.
“What?” said Bob.
“The concierge just manhandled me.”
“In what way?”
“I was using his phone to try and call you, and when he saw me, he grabbed it out of my hand and slammed it down,” I said. “It was totally uncalled for and actually quite shocking. Why would he want to
do
that?”
“Well, he’s one,” said Bob.
I looked at Bob.
“A
psychopath
?” I said.
I narrowed my eyes and glanced over at the concierge. He was helping someone into the elevator with her bags.
“
Is
he?” I said.
“A lot of psychopaths become gatekeepers,” said Bob, “concierges, security guards, masters of their own domains.”
“He did seem to have a lack of empathy,” I said. “And poor behavioral controls.”
“You should put
that
in your book,” said Bob.
“I
will
,” I said.
Then I peered at Bob again.
“Was that a bit trigger-happy?” I thought. “Maybe the guy has just had a long, bad day. Maybe he’s been ordered by his bosses not to let guests use his phone. Why did neither Bob nor I think about that?”
We got the elevator to the executive floor.
 
 
It was nearly midnight. We drank whiskey on the rocks. Other business travelers—those with the key card to the executive bar—typed away on laptops, stared out into the night. I was a little drunk.
“It’s quite a power you bestow upon people,” I said. “The power to spot psychopaths.” Bob shrugged. “But what if you’ve created armies of people who’ve gone power mad,” I said, “who spot psychopaths where there are none,
Witchfinder Generals
of the psychopath-spotting world?”
There was a silence.
“I do worry about the PCL-R being misused,” Bob said. He let out a sigh, stirred the ice around in his drink.
“Who misuses it?” I asked.
“Over here you have your DSPD program,” he said.
“That’s where my friend Tony is,” I said. “The DSPD unit at Broadmoor.”
“If thirty is the cutoff point, who gives the score?” Bob said. “Who administers that? Actually, there’s a lot of diligence in the UK. But in the U.S. we have the Sexually Violent Predator Civil Commitment stuff. They can apply to have sexual offenders ‘civilly committed.’ That means forever. . . .”
 
 
Bob was referring to mental hospitals like the one at Coalinga, a vast, pretty, 1.2-million-square-foot facility in central California. The place has 320 acres of manicured lawns and gyms and baseball fields and music and art rooms. Fifteen hundred of California’s 100,000 pedophiles are housed there, in comfort, almost certainly until the day they die (only thirteen have been released since the place opened in 2005). These 1,500 men were told on the day of their release from jail that they’d been deemed reoffending certainties and were being sent to Coalinga instead of being freed.
“PCL-R plays a role in that,” said Bob. “I tried to train some of the people who administer it. They were sitting around, twiddling their thumbs, rolling their eyes, doodling, cutting their fingernails—these were people who were going to
use
it.”
A Coalinga psychiatrist, Michael Freer, told the
Los Angeles Times
in 2007 that more than a third of Coalinga “individuals” (as the inmates there are called) had been misdiagnosed as violent predators and would in fact pose no threat to the public if released. “They did their time, and suddenly they are picked up again and shipped off to a state hospital for essentially an indeterminate period of time,” Freer said. “To get out they have to demonstrate that they are no longer a risk, which can be a very high standard. So, yeah, they do have grounds to be very upset.”
 
In the executive bar, Bob Hare continued. He told me of an alarming world of globe-trotting experts, forensic psychologists, criminal profilers, traveling the planet armed with nothing much more than a Certificate of Attendance, just like the one I had. These people might have influence inside parole hearings, death penalty hearings, serial-killer incident rooms, and on and on. I think he saw his checklist as something pure—innocent as only science can be—but the humans who administered it as masses of weird prejudices and crazy predispositions.
 
 
When I left Bob that night, I made the decision to seek out the man responsible for what must surely be the most ill-fated psychopath hunt in recent history. His name was Paul Britton. Although he had at one time been a renowned criminal profiler, he’d been a lot less conspicuous, even quite reclusive, these past years, ever since he became mired in his profession’s most notorious incident.
I spent the next few days leaving messages for him everywhere, although I didn’t hold out hope. And then, late in the evening, my telephone rang. It came up as “Blocked.”
“I’m sorry,” said the voice. “My name’s Paul Britton. I’m aware you’ve been trying to . . . sorry . . .” He sounded hesitant, self-effacing.
“Will you talk to me about your criminal profiling days?” I asked.
I heard him sigh at the memory. “Spending your life literally in the entrails of some poor soul who has been butchered is no way to pass your time,” he said.
(Actually Paul Britton rarely, if ever, spent time literally in someone’s entrails: criminal profilers don’t visit crime scenes. The entrails he came into contact with would have been in police photographs, and in his imagination, when he attempted to visualize whichever psychopathic sex murderer he was profiling.)
“Will you talk to me about those days anyway?” I asked.
“There’s a new Premier Inn next to Leicester railway station,” he said. “I can meet you on Thursday at eleven a.m.”
 
 
Paul Britton arrived at the Premier Inn wearing a long black coat reminiscent of the kind of dramatic clothing that Fitz—the brilliant fictional criminal profiler from the TV series
Cracker
—would wear. But I was probably making that connection because it has always been assumed that Fitz was based on him. We ordered coffee and found a table.
I started carefully by asking him about Bob Hare’s Checklist—“He’s done a marvelous job,” Britton said. “It really is a valuable tool”—and then the conversation dried for a moment and he shifted in his chair and said, “I don’t know if I should tell you a little bit about how it all began for me? Is that okay? Sorry! You need to stop me trundling off if I’m being redundant. I won’t be remotely offended by that. But may I . . . ?”
“Yes, yes, please do,” I said.
“It all started back in 1984,” he said, “when a chap called David Baker, one of the finest detectives you could ever come across, visited my office. . . .”
 
Nineteen eighty-four. A young woman’s body had been found on a lane near the NHS hospital where Paul Britton then worked as a clinical psychologist. She’d been stabbed while walking her dogs. There were no suspects. Criminal profiling in Britain barely existed back then but some instinct motivated David Baker—the investigating officer—to seek Britton’s opinion.
“David is really the father of psychological profiling in the United Kingdom,” Britton said, “because he came and asked me the question. Do you follow me? If David hadn’t come and asked, I would have had no reason to get involved.”
He looked at me. It was obvious he wanted me to say, “Oh, but
you’re
the father of criminal profiling in the United Kingdom.”
I think he wanted to emphasize that there was more to him than the terrible incident.
“Oh, but you’re the father of criminal profiling in the United Kingdom,” I dutifully said.
 
 
And so David Baker watched as Britton “almost unconsciously began asking myself questions” (as he later wrote in his best-selling memoir
The Jigsaw Man
). “When did he tie her up? How long had she been conscious? How quickly did she die?”
Britton eventually announced to Baker that the killer would be a sexual psychopath, a young man in his mid-teens to early twenties, lonely and sexually immature, probably living at home with his parents, a manual worker comfortable with knives, and possessing a big collection of violent pornographic magazines and videos.
“It turned out to be entirely correct, and they were very quickly able to lay hands on the person responsible,” Britton said. “A man called Bostock, I think it was.”
 
 
Paul Bostock, who did indeed fit Britton’s profile, confessed to the murder, and Britton became a celebrity. There were glowing newspaper profiles. The Home Office brought him in to finesse a newly created Offender Profiling Research Unit and asked him to appear in a TV series,
Murder in Mind
. He said he was reluctant to become a TV celebrity and agreed only after the people at the Home Office explained to him that they wanted to be seen to be at the cutting edge of psychological profiling and reminded him that “everything I’d done was very successful.”
As the months progressed, Britton correctly profiled lots more psychopathic sex murderers, almost all of them young men in their mid-teens to early twenties, living alone or at home with their parents and owning a big collection of violent pornography.
“There is a criticism . . .” I began.
“A
criticism of what?
” Britton unexpectedly snapped.
He had been so modest, even meek, until that moment and so this sudden lurch in tone came as a surprise.
“. . . that, uh, your profiles were all of almost identical personality types,” I said.
“Oh, well, that’s after the event.” He shrugged.
And in fact he did—according to
The Jigsaw Man
—successfully profile some criminals who weren’t the archetype: a blackmailer who slipped razor blades into Heinz baby products turned out to be a former police officer, just as he had apparently predicted.
These were the golden days for him. True, the odd unsubstantiated rumor began to surface of occasions when he may have got it wrong. For instance, it was said, a teenage girl had in 1989 walked into a police station in Leeds and claimed to be a “brood mare” for some pillars of the community, including the chief constable and the attorney general, a member of the House of Lords.
“What’s a brood mare?” the baffled policeman asked the girl.
She explained that she was regularly taken to a flat in the student district of Leeds, where, in the basement, which had a pentagram painted on the floor, she was impregnated by the chief constable and his fellow satanic Freemasons. Later the fetus would be ripped from her and sacrificed on the altar to Lucifer.
The policeman didn’t know which way to turn. Was she a fantasist or an actual brood mare? Was his boss a satanic elder or a victim of slander? And so he asked Britton to assess her testimony. He declared she was telling the truth, the police launched an expensive investigation and found nothing. No altar, no coven, no evidence of brood mare activity of any kind. The case was quietly dropped.

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