← UNMARKED: A True Crime Podcast
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- [00:01]
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- [01:00]
Podcast Host
When we think of serial killers, we often picture a cold, calculating psychopath. It's an idea that's become so ingrained in the popular culture that many people assume the two things are synonymous. But what if that's wrong? Today on case notes, I'm speaking with Dr. Louis Schlesinger, professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal justice and one of the world's leading experts on serial and sexual homicide. For decades, Dr. Schlesinger has studied some of the most violent offenders in modern history and worked alongside the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit. So are all serial killers psychopaths? And if not, what separates a psychopath from a serial killer? And what does the science actually tell us about the minds of that are driving these crimes?
- [01:53]
Interviewer
Before we kind of dive in and dissect the question, perhaps we talk about the definition of psychopathy, at least as you see it. And I noted in some of your research that you found 23 different definitions of psychopathy. Is that right?
- [02:07]
Dr. Louis Schlesinger
That's correct. Let me give you a little background to put this in context. When talking about serial killers, someone will pose the question, why did this guy kill five people? And the answer is he's a psychopath. As if. Now it's understood. Now we know why he did it. Let me talk about psychopathic personality and how it has become popularized. First of all, psychopathy is a time honored concept. It's been around for over a hundred years, but it has never been an official diagnosis in any of the Diagnostic manuals. The diagnostic manual that's generally accepted in the mental health community psychiatrist, psychologist is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It began in 1952 and there's periodic revisions. I think it's up to the fifth, fifth revision now. Psychopathic personality has never been an official diagnosis. Many different people have used this back from the 1800s. More recently, in the early 1980s, Robert Hare, a very, very prominent researcher from Western Canada, developed a. A tool called the Psychopathy Checklist. And it's been revised and so on. And what that did is they. They list a number of traits and characteristics such as grandiosity, superficial charm, manipulativeness, all this type of thing. And Hare got those various traits and behavioral characteristics from the, the iconic textbook by Hervey Cleckley called the Mask of Sanity. And in that textbook, written in 1941, he lists all of these different characteristics that he considered psychopathic from his perspective. And so Hair took those characteristics and provides guidance in how you should rate people on them to come up with a number. So, for example, you interview a person first for 45 minutes to an hour, and Hair gives you the different criteria, his educational background, his upbringing, his employment, all the rest. And then you rate each characteristic. 0, 1 or 2. 0 means it's not present, like superficial charm, not present. 1 means it's a little bit present. 2 means he's really, really superficially charmed. And there is some criteria. And then you add the numbers up and they get a number of how psychopathic the personality is. Now, when you have a number that triggers a great deal of research, it's very easy then for researchers to conduct their empirical research if they say, well, our subjects are psychopathic on the Psychopathy Checklist at this level. The problem that again, I'm not criticizing the instrument because it's very valuable and very respected, but there is a problem. The problem is that all of those ratings, 0, 1 or 2, can differ dramatically depending upon who's doing the rating. So, for example, if you had a group of 10 students, psychologists, and want to rate a particular subject, are they all going to rate them the same? No, there's going to be a great deal of disparity. Therefore, although it has the trappings and certainly looks like an objective measure of psychopathy, when you go into the weeds a little bit, it's really nothing more than a bunch of subjective impressions with criteria. So that's another point.
- [05:34]
Interviewer
I wonder if you're familiar with the research out of the University of Toronto. There's a remarkable study that's been done on the hair checklist very recently. And just to put this in context for our audience, the hair checklist gives you a score of psychopathy. I believe it's 0 to 40, if I'm not mistaken.
- [05:50]
Dr. Louis Schlesinger
They're shortened forms, but yes, yes.
- [05:53]
Interviewer
And the research coming out of Toronto is exactly what you're saying. It's showing that there's a lot of bias inherent in the test, depending who's administering it, because there is such subjectivity on the rating system. But I think that brings us back to the question that we're trying to answer. What is psychopathy fundamentally? Is this a personality structure? Is this a disorder? And so I'm curious to know your opinion on that.
- [06:20]
Dr. Louis Schlesinger
It's certainly a concept and it's certainly a disorder. Whether it's a diagnosis is another issue because. Because it's never been an official diagnosis. The best explanation of what a psychopath is is Hervey Cleckley's definition. Hervey Cleckley in his iconic text the Mask of Sanity. And there he describes in his book Psychopathy from his perspective. And essentially, these are people that have no interpersonal bonding with another individual. They don't have any interpersonal attachment. However, they can appear super normal and very, very engaged with other people. So, for example, a good psychopath from the Cleckleian sense can walk into a room of 20 people, meet everybody, call them by their name. Don't you like when someone calls you by your name? The guy likes me. I mean, you know, and that sort of thing. So that's the Kleclean concept. But he said there's no interpersonal bonding, really. And why he called it the mask of sanity is because that's what makes us human, an attachment to other people. And he said that deficit is so significant that because it goes right to what it means to be human. That deficit is at the level of a psychosis, not a psychosis. Hearing voices, hallucinations, delusions. No, a psychosis, meaning there's such a deficit structurally in the individual's personality. And so that's basically what Collectly's concept is. Psychopathy in the kleclean sense is not equated with criminality. It can be in many, many walks of life. And to say it a little bit of a different way, psychopathic traits can be helpful and adaptive to some professions. Take, for example, a CEO of a major corporation. If you're a very nervous, worried person, you. You know, you're. You're very concerned about how other people feel. You know, that you because of your personality would never rise to the level of somebody who's going to be a CEO of a major corporation. Why? Because if you have a layoff and you're hearing this in the news all the time now, 5,000 people here, you that if that affects you, if that bothers you tremendously, which it would for most people, you're not going to function at that level. Politics is the same thing. There's nothing, no job harder than politics. And you have to be able to cut people loose. Now, not everybody can do that. And so those traits can be adaptive. Again, it's not necessarily equated with criminality. And so so often you hear on your podcasts and on news, you know, person will be apprehended who killed a number of people and they'll ask an expert, why did he do it? He's a psychopath. How do you know he's a psychopath? Well, look what he did. It's a circular argument. And so it's a time honored concept. It's a good concept, but it's not an explanation for criminal behavior. And we look now also, let me say this as well, on the empirical research over the past 20 years on serial murder. The empirical research, not just somebody writing an article, but doing a research study. And we found the number one diagnosis is not psychopathic personality, it's antisocial personality. Antisocial personality is probably the closest in the dsm, but it's very different than what Cleckley said. Cleckley's concept is what I just explained. The dsm antisocial personality disorder is somebody who is impulsive, who violates the rights of others. You know, explosive and alcohol and substance abuse and all the rest. It's very behavioral. So the number one diagnosis in the research is antisocial personality disorder.
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- [11:17]
Dr. Louis Schlesinger
Number two is psychopathic personality. But if you read the study, what the criteria for psychopathic personality is, it varies from the PCLR score to just an impression and so on.
- [11:30]
Interviewer
I wonder if this comes down to definitions. For example, as you're saying, we have a lot of trouble defining what a psychopath even is, although I think all the research would agree that it's some combination. It's an inherent personality, some combination of grandiosity, callousness, impulsivity on some level. And then, as you say, some definitions would include antisocial behavior and some definitions. Leave that out. And then to go back to the question, are serial killers psychopaths? Not only do we not have a clean definition of psychopathy, we don't have a clean definition of serial killer either.
- [12:14]
Dr. Louis Schlesinger
That's correct.
- [12:14]
Interviewer
And I think this goes back to the Behavioral Analysis unit and the FBI, who've kind of coined the term back in the 70s. But the idea that someone who is very mentally ill, who is like the examples you gave, someone who's schizophrenic or schizoid personality, who is seeing delusions and going out and killing people because they are truly not appreciating reality, I think that person is different from a man who goes out and tries and stalks and targets victims for his own sexual gratification and cannot appreciate their suffering. I think those are different people, yet they would both fall under the definition of serial killer, perhaps. So how do you kind of square that circle in answering this question?
- [13:00]
Dr. Louis Schlesinger
Well, let me clarify a couple things as well. Serial killing is a generic term. It literally means murdering people one after another, killing people one after another. But there are many subtypes of serial killing. For example, the type of serial murder we know most about and has been most researched is the serial sexual murderer. Jack the Ripper, Boston Strangler, Ted Bundy, btk. All of these people killed. It's a result of sexual motivation, sexual gratification. Another type of serial killer is the contract killer. One of my famous cases was Richard Kuklinski, the Iceman, who I spent a great deal of time with. He didn't kill for sexual gratification. He killed for money. He was a contract killer. Organized crime would hire him to kill people. That's another type of serial killer. Also, if you go into any prison in the United States, you're going to find a number of people there in the course of their criminal career that killed more than two or three people during a felony, for example, during an argument and so on. So to understand serial killing best, you really have to specify the type of serial killer you're talking about. Now the Son of Sam, David Berkowitz is an interesting case with respect to that. Let me explain why. Sexual murder is very difficult for most people to wrap their arms around. Okay, killing the person is one thing. Why do you have to remove her clothes, leave her in a sexually degrading position with foreign object insertions? And the answer is in those cases, murder is not psychosexually sufficient. He has to go above and beyond just killing the person to gratify himself. And where does that come from? It comes from years of fantasy. Somebody doesn't wake up one day and say, I think I'm going to go out and kill five women. That sounds like a good idea. No, this begins 10, 15, 20 years earlier in the offender's mind, in his fantasy. And then in the course of his life something triggers it and he then. And then he does it. And so that's another point as well.
- [15:12]
Interviewer
Couldn't agree more. And to kind of bring home the point, if that's what we're talking about, if we're talking about men who are neurologically vulnerable, perhaps have a predisposition to mental illness or psychopathy or sociopathy or some combination, who then go through some sort of perceived childhood trauma that generates or enables this years long fixation on sadistic fantasy, if those are the men we're talking about and men who will go out and harm vulnerable populations knowing that they can get away with it, to me, the fact if you are capable of killing multiple people whom you don't know for sexual gratification to fulfill your own fantasy, you are by definition grandiose, callous and impulsive. Therefore you are a psychopath. And to me that's what I struggle to understand is the behavior of a serial killer. At least the subtype of serial killer that we're talking about, seems to necessitate that you be a psychopath to pull that off. But perhaps that circular reasoning, I'm not sure.
- [16:27]
Dr. Louis Schlesinger
That would not be my opinion. That's a popularized opinion. That would not be my opinion. But, but you have to understand, I'm not looking at this in a popularized way. I'm looking at a scientific way. I'm looking at it from an empirical research point of view. Now, some of the you mentioned, I think three traits. One was impulsivity.
- [16:41]
Interviewer
Impulsivity, callousness, grandiosity. Those are kind of the typical pillars.
- [16:45]
Dr. Louis Schlesinger
Well, callousness is certainly one, but not impulsive. Many of these are highly planned, highly targeted. You see, Let me break it down a little bit more. Yeah. There's generally speaking two types of serial offenders. Serial sexual murderers. Let's say one who acts out impulsively, spontaneously when a victim of opportunity crosses his path. And as a result, he wasn't planning on killing the person. He harbored these fantasies. But opportunity presented itself. Where a vulnerable victim crosses path, he struck out. Those individuals look at the crime scenes that they leave. They're disorganized crime scenes, meaning it wasn't planned. So he didn't bring any weapon of choice. He used a weapon of opportunity, a rock, you know, a pipe to smash her over the head. As a result, there's blood all over the place. He often leaves the murder weapon there with his and so on. So those are more offenders that act out impulsively, Much more psychologically disturbed people. There's another group though, that act out not an impulsive way, but in a very planned way where they'll target victims in a very sophisticated way. They have complete control over the victim. And the crime scene itself is not all disorganized where there's a fight and furniture's knocked around and his blood is on her and her blood. No, the crime scene looks highly organized. It looks as if the offender had complete control over the victim. The weapon he used, which says a ligature strangulation he took with him, he left very little trace evidence. Not impulsive, planned, Are they callous? Well, yeah, I mean, you'd have to be. Yeah, yeah, without a doubt. But I would say even a little bit. Let me just refine what you said a little bit more. Sure. Yes, callousness, but an ability to encapsulate his emotions is even more important. What does that mean? Know when you do something horrific like, I mean, you don't even have to kill somebody. I mean just something horrific. A non murder crime, you know, something really terrible, most people, it rattles them. You know, an individual has an ability to encapsulate that, meaning block out the emotions for that, not the memory, you know, what you did, you know why you did it. But the emotional aspect is detached and blocked out. A little bit more refined callousness.
- [19:16]
Interviewer
Would you not say, though I'm interested in research that points to not the fact that they' compartmentalizing the suffering but that they are unable to see it. And I'm thinking of large scale studies of especially people who commit sexual assault, who when they go back and speak to them about the assaults they commit, they're often delusional about the response of the victim and that they can't actually, it's not that they're compartmentalizing the suffering, but they can't actually appreciate it. Do you put a lot of stock in that?
- [19:47]
Dr. Louis Schlesinger
Let me discuss that from a slightly different angle. When you get an individual who committed a heinous crime, serial murder, or you know, a mass murder or familicide family mass murder, and ask them all sorts of questions, this may come as a big shock to all of your viewers. Criminal defendants don't always tell the truth. I don't know if you folks have flawed, but they lie all the time. All the time. Now take serial murder for example. A person who's apprehended, goes to trial, gets convicted. His attorney at time of sentencing is going to try his best to introduce mitigating factors so that the court doesn't impose the more severe sense. One more point with respect to at finding out the background of people. Let's say you want to do a research project and the same guy who said 20 years, 30 years earlier, his lawyer said in court he was abused, all these terrible things happened to him, traumatic and so on. Then you go to talk to this guy in state prison as part of your research project and ask him about it. And even if it's true, he very often will deny it.
- [21:06]
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- [21:07]
Dr. Louis Schlesinger
Because many serial offenders do not want to be seen in the victim passive role. They want to see themselves and want others to see them as strong and dominant. So abuse, if it's true, has to be corroborated by like child protection or I wouldn't negate it, but I would say possibly with a question mark. And even if it was true, many years later, they deny it for other psychological reasons that I just mentioned. So this area, this is extremely complicated and I know everybody wants to get a simple explanation for this and so does that, which is understandable. But simple explanations are not always correct.
- [21:48]
Interviewer
Well, I will just add that I believe you're going to enjoy our community because here on Unmarked we try to avoid simple explanations and our audience and our community definitely enjoy that.
- [22:02]
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