The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience (3 page)

Dr. Brink’s door was closed; he was busy typing up notes on his computer, still facing away from the door. I tapped softly on the window. He turned, smiled, and got up to let me in.

“How did it go today?”

“Fascinating. It’s just like I imagined, only better,” I told him. “No problems. All is going well. I got to meet Dorothy, did two interviews,
and got leads on more inmates to interview tomorrow. I’m ready to head home for a beer.”

“Excellent. Well, don’t let me keep you from that beer. Have at it the rest of the week and stop by and see me if you need anything,” said Brink.

I wandered back out the maze of hallways, past the chapel, laundry, and barbershop. All were empty at 6 p.m., the inmates already locked up for the night. It was quiet, almost peaceful—until I was startled by the lock shot of the final gate opening. I passed through the gate and was overcome with a feeling of freedom. I would never forget my first day in prison. Nor, I would discover in the years ahead, would I ever walk out of a prison and not feel a small sense of relief to be back on the outside.

I climbed into my Toyota pickup and began the long drive to Vancouver. That day, at the beginning of my career in the prisons, my truck had 40,000 miles on it. By the time I retired it years later, it had more than 280,000 miles on it—a
moon unit
as I called it, referring to the fact I had accumulated enough miles driving back and forth to prisons that I had traveled the equivalent of the distance between the earth and the moon (238,857 miles).

On the ride home, I couldn’t stop thinking of how I might have given better interviews. I thought back on my interview techniques, trying to think of ways I could have gotten more details out of the inmates, how I could make the scoring of the Psychopathy Checklist easier. I realized that I needed to edit the default semistructured interview that comes with the Psychopathy Checklist, and I needed to find the right balance between asking more questions—probing to get all the details from different areas of an inmate’s life—without making the inmates angry. By the time I pulled into my driveway an hour and a half later, I had come up with a dozen new questions to add to the interview.

My 110-pound black German shepherd, Jake, raced around the corner from the backyard to greet me as I opened the gate. Seeing him, I was reminded of my idea to train him to search for cocaine so we could track down the loot from my new bank-robber friend.

My roommate, Andreas, a starving artist and conservationist, returned home from his double shift at Starbucks.

“Did you bring the drugs?” I asked Andreas.

“Yup,” he said, pointing to the overstuffed backpack he had dropped in the corner of the living room.

Andreas had been promoted a few months back to shift manager at Starbucks, and one of his responsibilities was to monitor the age of the coffee beans being used and sold in the store. He was told to throw away any coffee beans that had expired. But the beans were still quite good. He couldn’t bring himself to throw them away, so he brought them home where they decorated the living room in our small apartment like beanbag chairs. Before long we had over a hundred pounds of coffee in our living room. I finally convinced him to give them away, and he started shipping them to family and friends all over Canada.

“How was your first day?” Andreas asked, a little nervously.

“Amazing. Interviewed my first serial killer.”

“I don’t know how you do it—it would freak me out,” he said.

It’s a common question—“How do I do what I do?” Or even more often, “What are psychopaths like?” But what questioners are really wondering is, “How did I develop such an interest in psychopaths?”

I grew up in Tacoma, Washington, a couple blocks away from the house serial killer Ted Bundy was raised in. My father was a writer and lead editor at the
Tacoma News Tribune
, the local newspaper. I was just a kid when the story of Ted Bundy broke in the ’70s; my father would come home and tell stories he’d just edited for the paper of the child from down the street. My family would sit around the dinner table and wonder how someone like that could grow up in our sleepy little middle-class suburb. How indeed? That seed just sat there in my brain, waiting to germinate.

I was not much of an academic in high school. I skated along with a B+ average, opting to put my energy into sports: football, lifting weights, and track. My dad was a big reason I was successful in sports. My father never missed a single sporting event of mine—twelve years of baseball, ten years of soccer, four years of football, and four years of track. A sportswriter, he could rattle off every stat from every professional baseball player. He was born with a muscular
condition known as
nemoline myopathy
. He lacked the fast-twitch muscle fiber to participate in sports himself, but that never left him short of enthusiasm for sports. He coached my friends and me for years in baseball and soccer. During the high school football season, he would scout games by our rival high schools, giving me insights into how to prepare for the next team we would face. He was as dedicated as my high school football coaches.

My parents worked very hard to put all four of their children, myself and my three sisters, into the best private high school in the state. Bellarmine Preparatory High School was a place with highly dedicated teachers and an amazing community environment. Ninety-eight percent of my graduating class went on to a four-year university, so it was peer pressure that got me to apply for college. But it was sports that got me accepted.

I applied to a number of different colleges and was recruited to play football at the University of Washington, Washington State University, and a few others. Don James, the University of Washington football coach, told me that I could come play for him, but that I would not likely start in Division I all four years. James thought that with continued progress, I would be a good third-down wide receiver or free safety. I had started high school a scrawny five feet, nine inches, 150 pounds, but I played my senior year of high school football at six three, 205 pounds. James told me if I wanted to start all four years of college, I might consider the top Division II football program in the country—which at the time was the University of California, Davis.

So I sent my films to UC Davis football coaches and they recruited me. They also helped get my application accepted, and I decided to head off to California.

My football career was short-lived; my knee folded over at the end of my first year at UC Davis. After rehabbing for a year, my dream of catching footballs for a living officially died. I was struggling to find something to sink my teeth into. I turned to Dr. Debra Long, professor of psychology and my undergraduate adviser. One of the wonderful things about the academic environment at UC Davis was that undergraduates were encouraged to work closely with professors. I had gotten to work a great deal with Dr. Long over my first
two years at Davis and she knew me very well. When I visited her at the end of my second year seeking advice, she told me, “Kent, you have a scientific mind; I want you to go away this weekend and come back Monday and tell me five things you would love to study in your life. I think you should consider being an academic.”

She told me I had way too much energy to pursue a nine-to-five job. I needed a career, she said, not a job. I ruminated over the weekend and returned to give her my list of subjects I wanted to study: (1) the brain, (2) psychopaths (inspired by my childhood curiosity about serial killer Ted Bundy), (3) killer whales (another seed planted in childhood when a killer whale looked me right in the eye while on a fishing trip with my dad in the Puget Sound), (4) teaching, and (5) women. She got a good laugh out of the last one.

Dr. Long called a couple of other professors, Dr. Michael Gazzaniga, the founding father of the field of cognitive neuroscience (the study of how the brain processes information), and Dr. George Mangun, an attention researcher, both of whom had just relocated their laboratories from Dartmouth University to UC Davis. She told them that she had a motivated undergrad she was sending their way. Next she called Dr. Carolyn Aldwin in the human development department. Carolyn was married to Dr. Michael (Rick) Levenson, a research professor who studied psychopathy, among other conditions. She also set me up to see a lecture by Michael Szymanski, a graduate student who was studying brain electrical activity in killer whales. Wow! Dr. Long still receives free drinks anytime our paths cross. All of the individuals she contacted that day became mentors and lifelong friends, and eventually, I am honored to say, I came to be called a colleague by them.

My life was transformed. I realized that I had found a path forward in life. I wanted to be a professor and learn everything I could about psychopaths. I wanted to master brain-imaging techniques and teach the world what is different about these individuals, what’s going on inside psychopaths’ minds.

I quit partying and became serious about my studies. I went from a hundred buddies to three or four good friends. I went from a B average to straight A’s. I was advised that if I wanted to study psychopathy, I should do my graduate work with the most prominent
scholar in the field, Professor Robert Hare of the University of British Columbia.

And that’s how I started down the career path that brought me to maximum-security prison.

In the distance I could see the sun rising behind Mount Baker as I pulled into the parking lot of the Regional Health Centre. I grabbed my backpack off the passenger seat and walked up to the gates.

The same ancient guard who had let me through security the day before waved me past the metal detectors without a second glance. I stopped and knocked on the bubble’s window.

“You forget the way?” the voice heckled over the speaker.

“Nope. I thought you might like some coffee.” I reached up, showing him a one-pound bag of Starbucks breakfast blend (courtesy of my roommate, Andreas). The lock shot of his door fired instantly and he pushed open the door.

“Absolutely,” he said. Smile lines creased across his face. “Thanks much!”

I pushed the heavy entrance door open and headed down toward my office. I was not more than twenty feet into the prison when Grant emerged from the laundry carrying his bag of clean clothes.

“Hey, Kent,” he said. “You got a second.”

“Sure,” I said, “what’s up?”

A worried expression appeared on Grant’s face. After looking up and down the corridor and seeing no inmates, he said, “I’m not sure what you did, but rumor has it that one of the sex offenders doesn’t like you. His name is Gary. Just keep away from him. Okay?” He pulled away and went back into the laundry.

“Sure,” I managed to choke out.

My mind started racing with what happened yesterday. I couldn’t think of anything I had done to piss off an inmate. It’s the last thing I was trying to do.

The RHC is divided into a number of different housing divisions. On the west side of the complex is a wing of thirty or so beds for
inmates who have a severe psychiatric illness, like schizophrenia. These latter inmates typically don’t interact with the main population because they are very ill. The other housing units are contained within a two-level complex with four tiers radiating out from a central hub. The four arms of the first level house mentally challenged inmates. This includes inmates with low IQs or other mental problems. The top four tiers are split into two arms for the violent offender treatment program, and two for the sex-offender treatment program. Each of the arms houses twenty to forty inmates, depending upon whether they are double bunked or not. Each of the top-tier treatment programs operates on a rotating schedule such that twenty-five new inmates turn over every three months as the nine-month treatment programs conclude. This schedule provided a steady stream of inmates for my research studies.

Normally, sex offenders and other offenders are segregated from one another. This is done because in the prisoner hierarchy inmates who have committed crimes against women are scorned by the other inmates. Inmates who have sexually assaulted a child are considered to be the “lowest of the low,” and they are often victimized in prison. So for their safety and for the safety of the staff (who might have to try to break up assaults), sex offenders and other offenders are kept separate.

But at RHC, sex offenders and violent offenders share the same treatment schedule and are allowed to intermix. This sometimes leads to conflict, but because the offenders all volunteer to be part of the treatment program, they are generally much better behaved than they would be otherwise. For most offenders, the RHC treatment program is a stepping-stone to early parole, so their tolerance levels are fairly high for changes to the prison routine.

So during my time at RHC, I found it was not uncommon for vanilla inmates to socialize with sex offenders.

I wandered up to my office in a daze. I could not understand what I might have done to set off an inmate.

I figured I would just try to avoid this Gary until I could figure out what to do.

I updated my interview schedule for the Psychopathy Checklist with a couple dozen new questions and printed off two copies. I grabbed my consent forms, a bag of coffee, and removed my brass key from the lockbox. I instinctively palmed the brass key, mimicking the self-defense technique taught to women to fend off attackers using car keys.

I headed down to the housing units and went straight into the nurses’ station, not waiting for an invitation to enter. I just unlocked the door and walked in, making sure that no inmates came up behind me. I handed a bag of coffee to Dorothy. A smile widened across her face as she took the coffee and started a fresh pot.

“This is a nice surprise,” she said. Then she turned and looked at me. “Something the matter?” Dorothy had world-class clinical skills honed after twenty years of reading the faces of inmates. I thought she must be a fantastic poker player.

“Umm, do you know a sex offender named Gary?”

“Sure,” she said. “He’s over there. He’s a troublemaker, that one.”