Murderous Minds Read Online Free PDF

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    A look back at nearly thirty years of research reveals that there is indeed an association between schizophrenia and violence—homicide, in particular. But most of this violence can be attributed to drug and alcohol abuse. In fact, people with schizophrenia who abuse drugs are about as violent as people without schizophrenia who abuse drugs, 42 so the corollary to violence could arguably be the drug use versus the schizophrenia itself. Jared’s friends reported that he had used drugs extensively in the years before he was arrested, although he had reportedly stopped using them in the last few months before he was arrested. His past history included abuse of alcohol, marijuana, and hallucinogens. 43
    The confounding issue of drug abuse and violence illustrates the difficulty of sorting out a complex issue like violence and its multiple causes. Robert Hare and his co-workers, for example, suggested in 1994 that drug use by psychopaths, which is hardly rare, could probably be linked more to their unstable and antisocial lifestyles than to the characteristic features of psychopathy. 44
    There are superficial similarities between brain abnormalities reported in schizophrenia and abnormalities found in psychopaths. For example, they both are believed to involve dysfunction in the frontal lobes. But schizophrenia and psychopathy are distinct disorders. The uninformed diagnosis of “psycho killer” doesn’t begin to capture the mysteries behind either condition. Of the two, psychopathy may be the more puzzling, and even the scarier, because when it involves violence, the violence springs from someone who on the surface appears as normal as the rest of us.
“No I Am Not Crazy …” —Eric Harris 45
    Eric Harris left us thousands of words in his notebooks and on his web pages, words that tell us a lot about him: “My belief is that if I say something, it goes,” he ranted. “I am the law, and if you don’t like it, you die. If I don’t like you or I don’t like what you want me to do, you die… . I’ll just go to some downtown area in some big ass city and blow up and shoot everything I can. Feel no remorse, no sense of shame.” 46
    There are indeed no indications of remorse or shame in Eric’s personal
    manifestos and ranting announcements. But he had no problem feigning those feelings when it would help him, as Dave Cullen pointed out in his 2004 Slate article, “The Depressive and the Psychopath: At Last We Know Why the Columbine Killers Did It.”
    Frank Ochberg, M.D., a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Michigan State University, said he believes Eric lacked a conscience. 47 Based on his history and writings, Eric impressed Ochberg and other experts as someone who was good at reading and manipulating people and ingratiating himself to them when it would benefit him. 48
    For example, the FBI agent perhaps most familiar with the motivations of the Columbine killers, clinical psychologist Dr. Dwayne Fuselier, told Cullen that Eric wrote “an ingratiating letter” to a person he had robbed. 49 Eric wrote it when he was participating in a community service program that allowed him to avoid prosecution for breaking into a man’s van. The letter offered not just apologies, but went so far as to express empathy. Fuselier said Eric’s letter “was packed with statements like Jeez, I understand now how you feel and I understand what this did to you. ” 50
    Eric added: “My parents and everyone else that knew me was shocked that I did something like that. My parents lost almost all their trust in me and I was grounded for two months … I am truly sorry for what I have done.” 51
    That is the mask of contrition and human decency Eric brought out and wore when it suited him. Eric and other criminal psychopaths may be able to express empathy, but it is not part of their emotional repertoire. Behind the mask, in private, he revealed how he really felt: “Isn’t America supposed to be the land of the free? How