From Chapter One - Introduction to the Gradations of Evil Scale Dr. Stone and I contend that the concept of evil, which is universally sensed on a basic level, and yet extremely difficult to articulate and comprehend, is worthy of serious inquiry. We have dedicated significant portions of our careers to this area, spending years evaluating, studying and sometimes even treating violent killers, rapists, child abusers, and other offenders--people whose crimes few would hesitate to call "evil"--in hospitals, prisons and other settings. Within this larger framework, Dr. Stone has made a specialty of what are known as personality disorders, characterized by inflexible, maladaptive patterns of behavior, thought and inner experience, which, as we shall see, constitute a key aspect of violent behavior. My own area of expertise, following forensic training, has been psychosis, or abnormal states of the mind in which perceptions, thoughts and emotions are impaired to the point that one loses contact with reality. In my clinical work, as well as in my research with a team of investigators, I explore the relationship between violent thoughts and behaviors, and psychotic illness, especially as the latter first emerges in adolescents and young adults. We must begin with the basic questions of whether some individuals' acts and core drives are more evil than others', and, if so, how we might classify them into distinct, meaningful categories which can then be ranked by severity. In The Anatomy of Evil , Dr. Stone proposed a Gradations of Evil Scale, whereby, for the first time, we might endeavor to quantify the degree of evil associated with an individual's violent and/or homicidal actions. By "evil," he was not referring to spiritually sinful or societally forbidden acts, per se. What is deemed abominable by one religion or culture might be fully accepted in another. Rather, the rankings encompass the types of actions that virtually anyone, regardless of culture, faith, time, or place, would find unspeakably horrible and utterly depraved. Using a 22-point continuum, the scale takes into account the morality of the prime motivation underpinning an individual's crime or repeated criminal acts, ranging from the justifiable to the groundlessly cruel. It weighs, for instance, whether a homicide is driven by self-defense or feelings of helplessness in the context of abuse. It captures those who take lives due to intense, difficult to control feelings of jealousy or rage. It considers those who kill out of blind loyalty to another person or party, or who aim to eliminate anyone impeding the achievement of some selfish end. As it moves into its upper limits, the scale ranks individuals who commit murders to conceal evidence of a crime; for sport; due to loss of contact with reality; or for perverse sexual gratification. At the extreme end are those motivated by a sadistic desire to inflict prolonged, unimaginable pain upon a sequence of victims, without the slightest hint of compassion or regret, sometimes followed by killing, and sometimes not. Stated another way, the scale examines one's degree of psychopathy --a constellation of personality traits and tendencies, such as deceit, callousness, lack of remorse, manipulation, grandiosity, glibness, and superficial charm. In addition to these often overlooked distinctions, the scale's categories delineate actions which the average onlooker might somehow comprehend, as a fellow human being, responding with sympathy and compassion, and those which are likely to result in horror, bafflement and disgust, such as protracted torture, necrophilia, or the sexual assault or killing of children. Thus, Dr. Stone's scale has real value for understanding why murderers, for instance, should not be grouped into a single category merely because they have killed. This is especially true of those we call serial killers , a topic we will discuss at some length. Serial murder is presently defined by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as "the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s), in separate events." As we shall see, this definition is problematic, in that it disregards entirely the notion of motive, such that an individual who has shot to death two homeowners during separate burglaries would be grouped alongside double murderer Ed Gein, who exhumed corpses from graveyards, and created articles of clothing and household items from their bones and skin. It also disregards the timeframe between murders, which eliminates a key distinction between serial killers, and what we call mass or spree murderers , classifications we will define later in this book. According to an earlier definition, a serial killer is one who murders three or more individuals, usually in the service of abnormal psychological gratification, with the killings occurring over more than a month and with a significant period of time between them. Here, the issue is that "abnormal psychological gratification" is vague, failing to distinguish between what specific drives one might be satisfying when one kills, such that John Wayne Gacy, the sexually sadistic torturer, rapist and murder of 33 boys and young men, might be categorized alongside Dorothea Puente, who fleeced elderly and mentally disabled guests in her boarding home of their social security checks, killing nine of them with poison. We shall see that, in fact, serial murderers can be motivated by several different psychological processes or exhibit highly distinct personality profiles. Dr. Stone's scale helps to clarify these important disparities. It is critical to note that the scale is isolated to crimes which occur in peacetime, as wartime can alter the justifiability of an "evil" act in an individual's mind. For instance, a man who detonates an explosive device during a military conflict, causing untold destruction and death, may, at the close of the war, in which his actions had represented part of a larger endeavor, find that he can barely swat a fly in civilian life. Acts of terrorism are also not evaluated by the scale, as they tend to be committed by persons who view themselves as parts of religiously or philosophically motivated armies. Organized crime is excluded, as it constitutes routine business within some wider enterprise, in which one criminal syndicate is at constant "war" with various others. Throughout our first several chapters, we will discuss each ranking in Dr. Stone's scale, describing the key distinctions between them in detail. The 22 categories are as follows: Killing in Self-Defense or Justifiable Homicide 1 - Justifiable homicide (killing was in self-defense, not psychopathic) Impulsive Murders in Persons without Psychopathic Features 2 - Jealous lovers; egocentric, immature people, committing crimes of passion 3 - Willing companions of killers; impulse-ridden, some antisocial traits 4 - Killing in self-defense, but extremely provocative toward the victim 5 - Traumatized, desperate persons who kill relatives or others, yet have remorse 6 - Impetuous, hotheaded murderers, yet without marked psychopathic traits Persons with a Few or No Psychopathic Traits; Murders of a More Severe Type 7 - Highly narcissistic, but not distinctly psychopathic persons--some with a psychotic core--who kill persons next to them, with jealousy as an underlying motive 8 - Nonpsychopathic persons with smoldering rage, and who kill when the rage is ignited Psychopathic Features Marked; Murders Show Malice Aforethought 9 - Jealous lovers with strong psychopathic traits or full-blown psychopathy 10 - Killers of people "in the way," including witnesses; extreme egocentricity (not fully psychopathic) 11 - Fully psychopathic killers of people "in the way" 12 - Power-hungry psychopaths who murder when "cornered" 13 - Inadequate, rageful psychopaths; some committing multiple murders 14 - Ruthlessly self-centered psychopathic schemers Spree or Multiple Murders; Psychopathy is Apparent 15 - Psychopathic, cold-blooded spree killers or multiple murderers 16 - Psychopathic persons committing multiple vicious acts, including murder Serial Killers, Torturers, Sadists 17 - Sexually perverse serial killers; killing is to hide evidence, no torture 18 - Torture-murderers, though the torture element is not prolonged 19 - Psychopaths driven to terrorism, subjugation, intimidation, rape, etc., short of murder 20 - Torture-murderers, but in persons with distinct psychosis, such as schizophrenia 21 - Psychopaths committing extreme torture, but not known to have killed 22 - Psychopathic torture-murderers, with torture as the primary motive; the motive need not always be sexual Experience tells us that those using the scale typically grasp, with no difficulty, the first eight categories, in which nonpsychopathic persons commit murder or other serious acts of violence in self-defense, or in the contexts of abuse, impulsiveness, or intense feelings of jealousy or anger. Categories 9 through 22 tend to prove more challenging, as they require moving beyond motivations that are clear, situational and human in tone to ones which are selfish, perverse and cruel to degrees generally unfathomable by the average individual. Moreover, proper use of these categories requires firm understanding of and ability to distinguish between psychological concepts such as psychopathy, psychosis, and sadism , all of which we will define and explain in the coming chapters. To clarify the distinctions between these sometimes complicated categories, we have provided highly-detailed case histories of a number of individuals designated to each. The names and facts provided are all matters of public knowledge, having been openly reported by the media. These are interwoven with insights regarding the respective individuals' established motivations and how these may relate to formative experiences, as well as signature elements of their crimes--that is, ones that are not necessary components of their modi operandi, but are psychologically required by a perpetrator for personal, psychological reasons, constituting a sort of calling card. For instance, a killer's method might be to murder women by strangulation, but his signature might be to do so with a black nylon stocking. Such elements in crimes provide key clues as to a given repeat murderer's underlying needs and drives. We will also review points drawn from the academic literature on violence, regarding commonly encountered genetic, dispositional and environmental antecedents to aggressiveness, and various systems for categorizing criminal behavior. Wherever possible, we will include samples of offenders' actual written or spoken language, culled from published interviews and personal writings. At the close of Part I of this book, which constitutes the most comprehensive exposition of Dr. Stone's ranking system published to date, we will introduce an algorithm we have developed, which greatly facilitates the process of determining an offender's most appropriate ranking in the Gradations of Evil scale. In Part II, Dr. Stone will discuss the increased frequencies and unprecedented heinousness of serial murders, rapes and other violent crimes since the 1960s, illuminating a number of cultural, psychological and philosophcal factors which we feel may have fundamentally contributed to these disturbing trends. He will also catalog several types of violence which have first emerged during this era of "new evil," including mass shootings by civilians involving semiautomatic weapons, Internet-related crimes, fetus-snatching, and other contemporary atrocities. As we move along Dr. Stone's continuum, it moves upward through higher numbers, but might best be envisioned as traveling downward, the way Dante, in his immortal Inferno , is escorted lower and lower into the bottommost circle of Hell, where the Devil, himself, resides. Indeed, Dante's work inspired the instrument. Readers are forewarned that, as we make this descent, some of the details of the crimes we describe will be difficult to read. It is important to hold in mind the relative rareness of cases of extreme evil, especially serial killing. Across time and space, and billions of people, past and present, it has always been the worst of human behavior that garnered the most attention. Let us never forget that there are wonderful, selfless people in the world, who are worthy of their own scale, circling through the heights of Heaven, as Dante ultimately did. Finally, let us pause a moment to remember the men, women, and children who have fallen victim to the monstrous behaviors of the people we will encounter here. We will meet young people sleeping in their beds or playing in public places who were snatched up and carried away into unimaginable darkness. We will encounter women who happened to cross the paths of sexually depraved predators who yanked them from their lives, and loves and other destinies; who had their choices taken away. We will discuss people who had never harmed a hair on a single head, no less those of their torturers or killers. These stories will force us to reflect on the stark reality that these victims were real people; that they could have been our own children, grandchildren, parents, siblings, spouses or significant others, friends, or neighbors--you or I. Any of us. Let us remember, still, that, the existence of evil proves, incontrovertibly, its counterpart, which is goodness, motivated by denial of the self and by love. Excerpted from The New Evil by Michael H. Stone, Gary Brucato All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
