Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (6 page)

E R A S E D

second-chair counsel Pat Harris and the defense jury consultant even

while potential jurors were being grilled about prejudices they may

have formed against him. When the trial began, he took on a more

serious mien, a sphinxlike demeanor that was impossible to read but

that at the same time, as juror Richelle Nice noted, ‘‘spoke volumes.’’

During the guilt phase of his trial, he shed a tear only on two

or three occasions, such as when his mother took the stand and

when a former buddy testified. Greg Reed met Scott through their

membership in the Rotary Club, and their wives became friends as

well. Greg’s wife, Kristen, was pregnant at the same time as Laci, and

the Petersons attended Lamaze class at the Reed home. Greg was one

of Scott’s closest friends, and as Reed described their mutual passion

for hunting and fishing, their membership in the Del Rio Country

Club, the party the couples had planned to attend together on New

Year’s Eve 2002, Scott seemed genuinely moved.

When psychopaths shed tears, they are almost always ones of

self-pity. I suspect that at that moment, Scott was seeing not his

friend but a mirror image of himself, Scott Uninterrupted, and the

life he could have been enjoying if not for a cruel twist of fate. I

believe he was mourning at that moment not the loss of a beloved

wife and child but the chasm between the lifestyle he had when he

was pals with Greg Reed and the one he now had behind bars.

He cried often during the penalty phase, when family members

and other defense witnesses attested to his sterling character and

insisted, despite the fact that he had now been convicted and his life

hung in the balance, that he could not possibly have killed his wife

and child. But when a show of sadness or regret for his actions might

easily have made the difference between getting the death penalty

and being sentenced to life imprisonment, he made not even a feint

in that direction.

The total lack of normal human emotions exhibited by eraser

killers is the hallmark characteristic of psychopaths. Although I

believe that eraser killers have psychopathic tendencies, they do not

appear to be typical psychopaths by all definitions of that term, nor

do I believe that psychopathy is the only factor playing an important

role in their psychology.

In common parlance, the terms ‘‘psychopath’’ or ‘‘sociopath’’

are names laypeople too often apply to those whose conduct they

find morally and socially objectionable, whether it be a mass mur-derer or (as one recent documentary film argued) a corporation.

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But for forensic psychologists, psychopathy has a distinct meaning

and—with the cooperation of the subject and enough time and skill

on the part of a qualified examiner—the degree of psychopathy in

a particular personality can be measured and quantified. Because

such cooperation is required, however, few if any of the world’s most

famous psychopaths— the classic type represented by Jeffrey Dahmer

or Ted Bundy—have ever been formally tested for psychopathy using

the recognized ‘‘gold standard’’ for diagnosis.

That test, the Psychopathy Checklist or PCL, has been developed

over the course of at least three decades of investigation by the

acknowledged leader in the field, Robert Hare, now professor emer-itus of psychology at the University of British Columbia. Hare has

spent his entire career trying to understand the minds of psychopaths,

primarily studying those in prison for violent offenses. Hare based his

body of work on the groundbreaking research done by the famous

American psychiatrist, Hervey Cleckley. Cleckley wrote the first mod-ern treatise on psychopaths,
The Mask of Sanity
, in 1941, a seminal

work still used and referred to today.

Through trial and revision, Hare perfected a test that measures

twenty key items to assess the presence and degree of clinical psy-chopathy. Eight of the items concern primarily psychological and

interpersonal factors, which, for simplicity’s sake, we can call the

personality items:

1. Glibness and superficial charm

2. A grandiose sense of self-worth

3. Pathological lying

4. Conning and manipulation of others

5. Lack of remorse or guilt

6. An overall shallow affect

7. Callousness and lack of empathy

8. Failure to accept responsibility for one’s own actions

The second axis of the checklist deals with lifestyle traits and

criminal behavior, how psychopaths’ lives are characterized by a high

degree of social deviance—the constant breaking of rules, lack of an

ability to control negative impulses, and inability to set and achieve

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goals. We can sum these up as the behavioral or antisocial lifestyle

items:

1. Constant need for external stimulation and a tendency to

become quickly bored without such stimulation

2. A parasitic lifestyle (sponging off or taking advantage of others)

3. The inability to control one’s behavior

4. Behavioral problems early in life

5. Lack of realistic, long-term goals and instead having either no

goals or wildly unrealistic ones

6. A high degree of impulsivity (for example, tending to do things

to excess or without substantial thought, from high job turnover

and relationship volatility to excessive spending, drinking, or

gambling)

7. Irresponsibility (lack of trustworthiness, reliability, punctuality,

and so on)

8. History of juvenile delinquency

9. Failure to adhere to the conditions of probation

There are three additional items that, according to established

typologies, might fall into either the first or second categories:

1. Promiscuous sexual behavior

2. The tendency to have multiple short-term marital relationships

3. Criminal versatility (which means that one commits and is

accomplished at not just one specialized kind of crime, such as

forgery, but a wide array of crimes)

Having two or three traits in moderate levels from various parts

of the checklist does not mean that someone is a psychopath. The

testing procedure involves assigning a score from 0 to 2 on each

item, then adding up the total, with a score of 40 being the highest

possible. Those scoring 30 and over are generally regarded as clinical

psychopaths, though some researchers set the cutoff at a lower level.

When tests are done among large groups of prisoners, the average

score is typically around 22, but different levels of prisons will yield

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different results. Testing of ‘‘normal’’ nonprison populations may

yield an average of around 5.

Although all this sounds simple enough, the test for psychopa-thy was developed almost completely within the confines of the

prison system and was originally used only to assess and study vio-lent and career or recidivist criminals. Robert Hare is the first to

admit that a much larger problem is the unknown number of still

dangerous but much less obvious subclinical psychopaths running

at large in society—people whose intimate partners are not armed

the way prison guards are protected from these potentially violent

individuals.

For those who have had no previous brush with the law, have held

down jobs, have stayed married for a considerable period of time, and

are generally ‘‘high-functioning’’ yet share many of the personality

characteristics that define psychopathy, the test is not particularly

useful because it was never designed for such people.

In the unvarnished Scott Peterson, the man captured in words on

the Amber tapes and other wiretaps and in deed by his crime, we can

see nearly all the personality traits associated with psychopaths: super-ficial charm, manipulativeness, pathological lying, self-centeredness,

a lack of empathy, and an absence of remorse.

He does not, however, have the long documented history of

lawbreaking and behavioral problems that would rank him in the

highest levels on the PCL. Rather, Scott Peterson appears to be more

typical of the high-functioning or subclinical psychopaths Hare and

psychologist Paul Babiak refer to as ‘‘snakes in suits.’’

‘‘The
real
Scott Peterson . . . can be appreciated by anyone who

watched [his TV interviews] or listened to the taped phone conversa-tions his girlfriend made,’’ Hare and Babiak write in their 2006 book

Snakes in Suits
. ‘‘In these audio and visual documents, he shows no

apparent concern, empathy, remorse, or even sadness at his wife’s

disappearance.’’

Peterson had no history of violence, had never even been in a

fistfight, according to his family, yet was suddenly able to commit an

extraordinarily heinous murder. He was fairly responsible, capable of

holding down a job and achieving moderate success, although at the

time of the killings he was not meeting the expectations his employer

had set for him. He did not leech parasitically off of those around

him. Other than being serially promiscuous, he did not engage in

random thrill-seeking behavior.

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If anything, Scott Peterson seemed pathologically overcontrolled

and passive-aggressive, catering to his wife’s every wish while metic-ulously plotting her demise. In many respects he was law abiding to a

fastidious degree. How many full-blown psychopaths would go to the

trouble of purchasing a fishing license and bringing along tackle and

poles if the sole purpose of their boat ride on San Francisco Bay was to

dump a body? How many would spend potentially their last precious

hours of freedom—knowing two bodies had been discovered in the

bay and that they might be arrested at any minute—preparing their

tax return?

What we see in Scott Peterson is not the unrestrained psychopathy

of a pure predator like Jeffrey Dahmer. He was capable of controlling

his darker impulses in a way a more classic psychopath is not.

On the surface, he was a veritable Boy Scout. His violence was

channeled to a singular and specific goal, timed, planned, and well

thought out, not driven by an animal-like frenzy. As the noose of

apprehension drew tighter around him, he did not snap into the

self-preservation-at-all-costs mode of a full-blown psychopath.

Scott’s continued communication with Amber Frey is another

example of behavior not consistent with a ‘‘classic’’ psychopath. Scott

continued to call and romance Amber after his wife’s disappearance,

chatting with her for hours on end about nothing and everything

but the fact that he was married and had a wife who was missing.

When Amber discovered that her purportedly single boyfriend was at

the center of a massive missing persons investigation, she contacted

police and offered to help.

For a while, she played along, pretending not to know anything

about Laci as Scott told her lie after lie, fantastical story after fantastical

story about his exciting bachelor life. Eventually, at the direction of

the police, she confronted him. Scott continued to call her on an

almost daily basis—even after she was presented to the world at a

press conference held by Modesto police, a plan detectives hastily

conceived after learning that the media was about to reveal Amber’s

identity, hoping to turn the situation to their advantage by ratcheting

up the pressure on their suspect.

A high-scoring psychopath would not have taken such news

well. In fact, personal betrayal, whether real or imagined, is often a

key triggering mechanism for psychopathic violence. A full-fledged

psychopath would have immediately realized that Amber was working

with the police and ceased contact with her to protect himself—just

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as his attorney ordered him to do. Scott kept right on talking to her,

sending her gifts, talking of a future between them, all to his ultimate

peril. Not very smart for a guy who prided himself on his intelligence.

Interestingly, he did experience a gut-level reaction to this unex-pected development. But he immediately spun the momentary fear

he felt into an attempt to continue manipulating Amber and to win

back her trust. He told her the next day that as he listened to the

press conference on his car radio, he had to pull over and throw up

because he was so ‘‘proud’’ of her ‘‘amazing character.’’ That wasn’t

pride—it was cold-sweat panic.

These kinds of anomalies are seen in other eraser killers. For

example, Mark Hacking’s strange but dogged pursuit of a ‘‘double

life’’ as an imaginary doctor certainly involved pathological lying,

conning others, and a failure to accept responsibility. ‘‘Classic’’

predatory psychopaths do not pretend to be doctors. They grab

women off the street, hold up liquor stores and execute the compliant

clerk for no reason, kill for laughs or to satisfy a $2 debt. Something

more complex and more subtle had to be driving these very controlled

and otherwise high-functioning eraser killers.

The puzzle of seemingly ordinary people who engage in bad

acts but who do not have a history of easily identifiable antiso-cial behavior—the kind that would usually earn them a criminal

record— is a problem that another research psychologist has been

working on for many years.

Delroy Paulhus, a colleague of Robert Hare at the University of

British Columbia, has been studying such behaviors as cheating,

lying, and a phenomenon he calls overclaiming—a technique some

people use to enhance themselves in the eyes of others by willfully

exaggerating or fabricating their knowledge or experience. He believes

that a combination of three closely related negative personality factors

explains the behavior of a wide range of people who may never have

been to prison but who consistently deceive, manipulate, and take

advantage of others, and do so without any sense of guilt or shame.

Paulus has named the cluster of toxic traits—psychopathy, narcis-sism, and Machiavellianism—‘‘the Dark Triad.’’ Although the three

personality constructs overlap a great deal, each has its own partic-ularities that influence different aspects of behavior. As they have

for psychopathy, psychologists have developed scales for measuring

degrees of narcissism and Machiavellianism. Someone who possesses

any of the three traits to a significant degree has the capacity for

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