The Wisdom of Psychopaths (32 page)

And such perpetual peregrination can be just as ascetically demanding. The transient, peripatetic lifestyle, a core feature of the psychopathic personality, has, just like the transmutation of the passions, ancient foundations in the lore of spiritual enlightenment. In Atisha’s time, for example, the embodiment of the spiritual archetype was the
shramana
, or wandering monk—and the shramanic ideal of renunciation and abandonment, of loneliness, transience and contemplation, emulated the path to enlightenment followed by the Buddha himself.

These days, of course, the
shramana
is spiritually extinct: a primordial ghost that haunts the star-swept crossroads of spectral, nirvanic wastelands. But in the neon-lit shadows of bars, motels, and casinos, the psychopath is still going strong, assuming, just like his monastic forebears, an itinerant, nomadic existence.

Take serial murder, for example.
The latest FBI crime figures estimate that there are around thirty-five to fifty serial killers operating at any one time within the United States. That’s a hell of a lot of serial
killers by anyone’s standards. But dig a little deeper into why this might be the case, and you soon begin to wonder if there shouldn’t, in fact, be more.

The U.S. interstate highway system is a schizophrenic beast. During the daytime its rest areas are busily frequented, and have a convivial family vibe. But during the hours of darkness, the mood can quickly change. Many become the haunts of drug dealers and prostitutes on the lookout for easy pickings: long-haul truck drivers and other itinerant workers.

These women aren’t exactly missed by their families back home. Many lie dead for weeks, sometimes years, at rest stops and on vacant lots the length and breadth of America, often hundreds of miles away from where they were originally picked up. Police recently discovered the five-to-ten-year-old remains of one of the victims of the Long Island serial killer, for instance, who at the time of writing has been linked to a total of ten murders over a fifteen-year period. The true number of lives claimed by Henry Lee Lucas will never be known. The vastness of the country, the paucity of witnesses, the fact that each state constitutes an independent legal jurisdiction, and the way both victims and offenders are frequently “just passing through” all add up to a logistical, statistical nightmare for the investigating authorities concerned.

I ask one FBI special agent whether he thinks that psychopaths are specially suited to certain types of professions.

He shakes his head.

“Well, they definitely make good truckers.” He chuckles. “In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that a truck probably constitutes the most important piece of equipment in the serial killer’s toolkit here in the U.S. It’s a modus operandi and getaway vehicle rolled into one.”

The agent in question is part of a team of law enforcement officers currently working on the FBI’s Highway Serial Killings Initiative, a scheme designed to both facilitate the flow of data within America’s complex mosaic of autonomous legal jurisdictions and increase public awareness of the murders.

The initiative started almost by accident. In 2004, an analyst from the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation detected a pattern. The bodies of murdered women had begun turning up at regular intervals along the Interstate 40 corridor running though Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi. Analysts working on the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP), a national matrix containing information on homicides, sexual assaults, missing persons, and unidentified human remains, scanned their database to see if similar patterns of highway killings existed elsewhere.

They did—and then some. So far, ongoing investigations have revealed more than five hundred murder victims from along or near highways, as well as a list of some two hundred potential suspects.

“Psychopaths are shadowmancers,” the agent tells me, a large-scale map of the United States dotted with timelines, hot spots, and murderous crimson trajectories plastered across the wall behind his desk. “They survive by moving around. They don’t have the same need for close relationships that normal people do. So they live in an orbit of perpetual drift, in which the chances of running into their victims again is minimized.

“But they can also turn on the charm. Which, in the short or medium term, at least, allows them to stay in one place for a sufficient length of time to allay suspicion—and cultivate victims. This extraordinary charisma—and it borders, in some cases, on the supernatural: even though you know they’re cold as ice, and would kill you as soon as look at you, you sometimes just can’t help liking them—acts as a kind of psychological smoke screen that masks their true intentions.

“This, by the way, is also why you generally tend to find a higher proportion of psychopaths in urban, as opposed to rural, areas. In a city, anonymity’s easy to come by. But you just try melting into the crowd in a farming or a mining community. You’re going to have a hard job.

“Unfortunately, the words ‘psychopath’ and ‘drifter’ go together hand in glove. And that’s a huge headache for law enforcement agencies.
That, right there, is what makes our job so goddamned difficult at times.”

Peter Jonason, the purveyor of “James Bond” psychology, has a theory about psychopathy. Exploiting others is a highly risky business, he points out, which often results in failure. Not only are people on the lookout for cutthroats and shysters, they are also inclined to react badly to them, legally or otherwise. If you’re going to cheat, Jonason elucidates, being extroverted, charming, and high in self-esteem make it easier to cope with rejection. And easier to hit the road.

Bond, of course, was always on the road. As a spy it comes with the territory, same as it does for the serial killer out on the interstate, same as it did for the wandering monks of old. But although these three have rather different reasons for their travels and occupy rather different stations along the psychopathic spectrum, they are also guided by a common metaphysical blueprint—the ceaseless quest for novel, heightened experience, be it a fight to the death with a deranged criminal mastermind; the unfathomable, toxic power in taking another’s life; or the transcendental purity of eternal peregrination.

Such openness to experience is a quality common to both psychopaths and saints, and, if you recall, constitutes an integral component of mindfulness meditation. Yet it is one of quite a number that these two apparent opposites happen to share (see
figure 7.2
below). Not all psychopathic traits are spiritual traits, and vice versa. But there are some, as we’ve seen, that undoubtedly overlap, of which openness to experience is perhaps the most fundamental. Hunter S. Thompson would certainly agree. And it is, after all, the only one we’re born with.

After wrapping things up with the FBI in Quantico, I meander down to Florida for a holiday. Killing some time in downtown Miami before catching my flight home, I chance, on a cloudless Sunday morning in the
calles
of Little Havana, upon a flea market. On a table of bric-a-brac, by the side of a stack of jigsaw puzzles, is a copy of
Archy and Mehitabel
, its midnight-blue dust jacket sandblasted a tropical turquoise by the sun and the salt of the ocean. The book, originally penned in 1927 by the celebrated New York columnist Don Marquis, chronicles the verse of its unlikely title character, Archy—a cockroach auteur with a peculiar penchant for poetry—and his oddball adventures with best pal Mehitabel, a reincarnated alley cat, who claims, in a previous life, to have once been Cleopatra.

Figure 7.2. The relationship between psychopathic and spiritual states

I thumb through the pages. And cough up a couple of dollars. It’ll do for the plane back, I think. Later that night, forty thousand feet over the slumbering North Atlantic, I come across the following poem.

It’s a poem about moths. But it’s also a poem about psychopaths.

I get it copied. And stick it in a frame. And now it glowers redoubtably above my desk. An entomological keepsake of the horizons of existence. And the brutal, star-crossed wisdom of those who seek them out.

  1
“They say that humans developed fear as a survival mechanism …”
See Arne Öhman and Susan Mineka, “The Malicious Serpent: Snakes as a Prototypical Stimulus for an Evolved Module of Fear,”
Current Directions in Psychological Science
12, no. 1 (2003): 5–9, doi:10.1111/1467-8721.01211. For an easy-to-read introduction to the evolutionary basis of emotion, see Joseph E. LeDoux,
The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).