The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience (38 page)

“Can you tell me your name, please, sir?” asked the new officer.

“Dr. Kent Kiehl,” I answered.

“I’d like to ask you about the content of these notes,” he said. “A passenger on your flight notified the authorities that you appeared to be typing out a confession to a series of murders. We want to know if you want to confess to us.”

I had written my notes for the Dugan interview in first person, just as Brian had relayed the details to me. Brian had given me detailed information about the murders and his other crimes.

The woman in the middle seat must have been reading what I was typing on the computer. I realized just then that she had not returned to her seat before we landed.

The cops looked like they had just made the arrest of the century.

My detailed notes read just like a confession, which was a lot more evidence than the prosecutors had on the two men who had been wrongly convicted.

I motioned slowly to the officers that I was going to reach into my pocket. I did not want to startle them again. I slowly withdrew my wallet and removed Steve Greenberg’s business card. I slid it across the table and said: “Gentlemen, I’m afraid that I am unable to discuss with you the contents of the notes. I’d like to call my attorney.” I tapped on the business card.

The new officer was clearly frustrated. He turned and looked back to the other two officers and motioned for them to leave the room. He stood up.

“You can have five minutes for a call, but you are not leaving without telling us about those notes,” he said emphatically as he left the room in a huff of frustration.

I needed to ask Greenberg whether the details of Brian’s murders were confidential or whether I could tell the officers the truth.

Steve picked up the phone quickly. I was relieved to hear his voice.

“What’s up, Doc?” he said in a heckling voice.

“You are not going to believe this,” I started. I told him the situation, that a woman sitting next to me on the plane thought I was writing out a confession to murders I had committed and had told the police at the airport. “I’m in an interrogation room right now. Is it okay to tell them my notes are about Dugan or do I have to keep them confidential?”

Steve’s laughter on the other end of the phone was predictable, but not very funny to me at the moment.

“Normally, I would tell a client in your position to keep your mouth shut,” Greenberg said, still laughing, “but in your case, just tell the cops where the notes came from. Dugan has already confessed to the three murders and pleaded guilty. There is nothing to hide. Besides, we gave you permission to publish Dugan’s case. Go ahead and tell the cops.” And then he finished by saying, “And if they don’t believe you, then give me another call and I’ll fly down and try to get you out of jail.” The last statement trailed off as he broke out laughing again. And then he hung up.

I stood up and went over to the door and knocked, and the officer who had been questioning me walked in.

“I’ve been given permission to tell you about the notes,” I said flatly. “I study psychopaths for a living, and I just returned from Chicago where I was interviewing a psychopathic serial killer named Brian Dugan. Those notes are his words from an interview I conducted yesterday.” I pulled the Dugan file from my bag and showed the officer the court order allowing the transport and interview of Dugan.

He looked at the court order suspiciously.

I continued, “I have some media clippings on my computer that I can show you that describe the crimes Dugan has committed.” I reached into my bag and pulled out my laptop. The officer took a seat across from me at the table.

I pulled up the latest articles from the
Chicago Tribune
that detailed the Dugan case. I spun the laptop around and showed the officer. He quickly skimmed the headlines and then excused himself and left the room.

I packed up my laptop and papers, and I placed my computer bag on top of my carry-on bag. I wanted to get out of the airport as quickly as possible.

The officer returned and said the most comforting words I had heard in a long time: “Dr. Kiehl, you are free to go.”

And then he continued, “Please don’t type out your notes on such cases on airplanes again.”

I promised him that I would not.

I drove home staying under the speed limit the entire way.

Monday morning I settled into my home office to begin the review of Brian’s brain density analyses. I entered the secure network and proceeded to pull up the results. I planned to complete three checks this morning. The first step was to conduct a quality control assessment to make sure all the processing had been completed without error. The next step was to conduct an
internal physiological control
⁹
analysis, comparing Brian’s data with control subjects’ in brain regions that I did not expect to show any impairment; that is, Brian should show normal brain tissue in regions outside the paralimbic system. Finally, the last step was to examine whether the paralimbic regions of Brian’s brain were atrophied, as they were in our studies of other psychopaths.
¹⁰

The first step took only a few minutes to complete. All the stages of image analyses had proceeded without any problems.

For the second step, I programmed the computer to randomly select a dozen brain regions outside the paralimbic system. I extracted
density values from those regions of Brian’s brain and compared them to my database of over one thousand control subjects.
¹¹
Brian’s density values for the control regions were well within the normal range.

In the final step, I extracted the density values for the paralimbic regions of Brian’s brain and compared them to the normal database and the database of other psychopaths we had scanned.

The density measures from Brian’s paralimbic system were strikingly consistent with our findings from other psychopaths. In every region of the paralimbic system, Brian showed the same pattern of atrophy we had seen in other severe psychopaths. Brian had scored in the 99th percentile on the Psychopathy Checklist, and his brain data fit within that percentile on gray matter density. Brian’s paralimbic gray matter values were even more atrophied than most psychopaths’.

I downed the rest of my quad espresso and sat back in my chair as I processed the results. I’d looked at hundreds of psychopaths’ brains in my career, but the consistency of their brain abnormalities never ceased to amaze me.

As I passed the offices of my students and postdocs at the Mind Institute, I noticed light emanating from Lora Cope’s office. I slowed down and gave the door a soft kick with my foot, announcing my presence. Startled, Lora jumped up, and then looked at me sheepishly.

“You got me again.”

I had a notorious habit of startling my lab staff. It was a vestige of my years growing up with three sisters. My parents had raised me to never be physically aggressive with my siblings, so many of our childhood altercations took the form of psychological digs and jabs. My sisters had devised numerous ways to get me. My retaliation had come in devising devious ways of startling my sisters when they least expected it. My behavior carried through into my adult life.

I always felt a bit of relief when my staff startled if I gave them
a quick scare. After all, psychopaths have a very small startle response. It’s kind of my little psychopath test to conduct on people in my lab.

After she recovered, Lora looked at me and said, “The paralimbic system of the brain scan you sent me is the most atrophied that I have ever seen.”

Lora had analyzed the brains of hundreds of psychopaths over the past several years, and she was one of the world’s leading experts in the nuances of brain density analyses of psychopaths.

“I’ve worked up some figures for you on the data; I’ll send them to you shortly. And the functional imaging results will be ready by the end of the day,” she said.

The results from functional MRI tasks collected on Brian confirmed what I had expected. Like other psychopaths, Brian failed to show the normal engagement of paralimbic structures during processing of emotional stimuli. In addition, in the attention Oddball Task, Brian failed to show the engagement of the orienting response system, which included the majority of the paralimbic system, results that were consistent with the peer-reviewed literature on psychopaths.

The analyses of Brian’s brain had revealed how he was different from the rest of us. Indeed, the pattern of results across the various brain analyses was amazingly consistent with the latest science of psychopathy.

I wrote up the report and submitted it to the legal team, outlining how Brian’s brain imaging data fit within the known abnormalities in psychopaths. Next, I created a presentation to educate the jury on the latest neuroscience of psychopathy and how Brian’s Psychopathy Checklist score and brain data fit within that literature.

During Brian’s sentencing trial, the judge granted permission for me to observe the other members of the team as they presented Brian’s history. Brian’s entire mental health records were put up for the jury to review. A psychologist testified about Brian’s behavioral
and affective problems as a youth. Dr. Jim Cavanaugh offered his clinical opinion regarding Brian’s emotional problems. Many days of testimony were offered to the jury. The final piece would be my presentation.

The morning of my presentation to the jury, I got up early and walked over to the coffee shop to order an espresso. After dressing and looking over my PowerPoint presentation one more time, I headed down to the lobby to meet Greenberg for the short ride to the courthouse.

Inside the courtroom, I connected my computer to the projection system that would display my presentation for the jury. It was an enormous screen, larger than most found in academic classrooms. I went through my slides again, making sure they were in the right order.

The judge called in the jury.

I was called to the witness stand and I gave my presentation. The jurists listened intently as I told them about the latest science of psychopaths. One young man in the front row of the jury box was jotting down a lot of notes.

I explained that Brian’s brain imaging data were consistent with what was known about deficits in psychopathy. Several members of the jury nodded in unison.

Everyone in the room seemed to know something was wrong with psychopaths, and with Brian.

At the end of the presentation, I was asked by the mitigation lawyer why I chose to make a career studying psychopaths.

I truthfully replied, “So we can develop better treatments for psychopaths and prevent them from ever committing crimes.”

After the jury was excused, I got down from the witness box, and the prosecutor came up to me and shook my hand, saying I was an excellent expert, and I had a long career ahead of me if I wanted to do this for a living.

I told him that if I had my way, I’d never testify in another case
like this. In my ideal world, Brian would have received treatment as a youth and perhaps, just perhaps, we could have prevented his crimes from ever taking place. The prosecutor nodded in agreement.

The testimony complete, the mitigation team and prosecution gave their closing arguments. The judge ordered the jury sequestered to deliberate on their sentencing verdict. The court officer drove the jury in a van to an undisclosed hotel.

The mitigation team met for a final dinner, to congratulate one another on the hard work they had put in over the past year. I’m certain the prosecution team was doing the same.

One of the lawyers said that DuPage County had never had a jury go out more than two hours in a death penalty case. In fact, he said, a DuPage County jury had
never
returned a life sentence in a sexual-based homicide.

I returned to New Mexico the following morning as the jury started its second day of deliberations. Then, on the third day, I got a single-word text from Greenberg: “Death.”

It was not an unexpected verdict.

It was 11 p.m., about six hours after the jury had returned a sentence of death for Brian Dugan, when my phone rang. The caller ID indicated it was Greenberg.

“Hi, Steve,” I said as I answered the call.

“You are not going to believe this!” Steve exclaimed. “I have to write up a subpoena to serve on the judge in the Dugan trial tomorrow,” he stated.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Haven’t you been watching the news?” he asked.

“No. Sorry. What’s going on?” I asked again.

“A jury member from the Dugan trial told a reporter that a
signed verdict of a life sentence had been turned in to the bailiff and handed to the judge. But the judge never told counsel about that signed verdict.”

“Oh, my god,” I stated.

“Exactly! Tomorrow I have to go in and subpoena the judge to preserve that verdict. I have no idea if this has ever happened before in the history of law,” Greenberg said. I could feel him shaking his head on the other side of the phone.

“This is just unbelievable,” he continued. “This whole case will be overturned, and we will have to start over. It will cost the state millions.”

Subsequent interviews with the jury indicated that the initial vote had been four of twelve jurors recommending a life sentence for Dugan. After many hours of deliberation, the jury had signed a verdict sheet with two abstaining, two voting for life, and eight voting for death. The jury had handed the signed verdict sheet to the court bailiff, who then gave it to the judge.

The DuPage County Courthouse had been transformed into a maximum-security setting in preparation for the final verdict in this twenty-five-year-old case. The lawyers were escorted under armed guard through a secure entrance to the building. Bulletproof glass shields were installed in the courtroom to protect the jury and the legal teams in case someone smuggled a firearm through the metal detectors. SWAT teams were deployed for crowd control. Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the courthouse.