I recently read an advance proof for Karen Conti’s upcoming book, Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy, about her experience representing him during his death penalty appeal. He’d been convicted of the murders of 33 young males. Conti was the only female on the team. She cared about her job and the fight to resist capital punishment, which meant she had to spend a lot of time with a man who most Americans viewed as pure evil. Bantering with him, sharing meals, learning about his background, and listening to his concerns showed her that no one is so uniformly monstrous they’re devoid of likable qualities. “He wasn’t my friend, but I found humanity in him,” she said. “The people who knew him well loved him, even knowing what he’d done. Before his execution, they were weeping.”
Some people believe that to accept the human side of offenders who’ve done monstrous things, we lessen their crimes and devalue their victims. However, talking to killers to gain the insights needed for developing treatment and preventing crime requires finding ways to relate. It's possible too see a complex individual while also denouncing their damaging acts.
Journalist Martha Elliott made this effort with rapist and serial killer Michael Ross, describing her approach in The Man in the Monster: An Intimate Portrait of a Serial Killer. She spent a decade communicating with Ross as he challenged the state of Connecticut to execute him.
Elliott considers her work the “missing manual” as she delved into Ross’s background, along with the trial records, investigative reports, interviews, and psychiatric records. As she learned about Ross, Elliott realized that his sexual sadism was a mental illness. This was the monster part, but there was more to him than his disease. “I wanted to understand how a farm boy and Cornell grad became a brutal killer, and [also] try to explain his psychopathology.”
Elliott explored how Ross’s escape fantasies fed off deeper psychological needs from a rough childhood that launched his stalking behavior. Eventually, he grabbed a girl and let her go. Then he molested one. Then he began to kill, over and over. He described his bad behavior as a cancer of the mind that had to be excised. With medication, he experienced relief from his constant violent fantasies.
“Perhaps what I learned most from Michael Ross,” Elliott writes, “is that even the person who is supposed to be the worst of the worst is still a human being.”
This is the message in Listening to Killers by psychologist James Garbarino, in which he discusses the many murderers he interviewed over two decades. Despite the terrible things he’s heard from them, he urges us to strive to acquire a full sense of the person. He says this can be achieved without excusing their crime.
Garbarino believes that an offender’s past pain can influence the infliction of pain on others. To learn this, an in-depth analysis of multiple domains of the offender’s life is crucial. “What does it take to really listen to killers?” Garbarino asks. “I believe it all starts with a fundamental refusal to dissociate and disconnect from their humanity.” It’s easy to dismiss the worst of the worst as soulless, one-dimensional bad guys. Yet making the effort to see more in them is important for all of us: “Understanding them is the key to begin making a safer, less violent society.”
In Miller’s Children, which focuses on juvenile killers, Garbarino shows why humanizing is even more critical with kids. “Teens are different,” he says, “and traumatized teens are more different.” Based on multiple interviews, Garbarino points out that “teenage killers are not playing with a full deck when it comes to making good decisions and managing emotions ... but many of them are also playing with a stacked deck because of the developmental consequences of adverse life circumstances.”
Among 10 key adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) in risk accumulation listed by the CDC are poverty, domestic abuse, maltreatment, household substance abuse, divorce, depression in a family, and incarceration of a family member. Nearly 40% of adolescents who kill have at least five of these factors versus just 10% of kids from the general population. “The psychologically traumatic and socially toxic nature of their families and communities,” Garbarino writes, “exacerbates the immaturity of thought and feelings intrinsic to adolescents, not just additively but exponentially.”
Garbarino gives plenty of examples of ACEs in the backgrounds of violent kids. He describes “David F,” who at the age of 16 raped and fatally strangled a girl who’d broken up with him. He admitted he’d been engaged in deception and petty thefts since he was 11. Garbarino found that David had an ACE score of 8, “worse than 999 of 1000 kids in America.”
It’s easier to shun our monsters than to try to understand them, but the effort will pay off. Seeing more than the monstrous side will aid in recognizing signs in kids at risk for violent acts and in developing effective interventions. In the big picture, society gains more.
References
Conti, K. (2024). Killing time with John Wayne Gacy. Black Lyon Publishing.
Elliott, M. (2015). The Man in the monster: An intimate portrait of a serial killer. Penguin.
Garbarino, J. (2015). Listening to killers: Lessons learned from my 20 years as a psychological expert witness. University of California Press.
Garbarino, J. (2018). Miller’s Children: Why giving teenage killers a second chance matters for all of us. University of California Press.
Heide, K. M. (2021). Juvenile homicide offenders: A 35-year follow-up study. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 39(4), 492-505.
Where’s the Human in a Monster?
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16.01.2024
I recently read an advance proof for Karen Conti’s upcoming book, Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy, about her experience representing him during his death penalty appeal. He’d been convicted of the murders of 33 young males. Conti was the only female on the team. She cared about her job and the fight to resist capital punishment, which meant she had to spend a lot of time with a man who most Americans viewed as pure evil. Bantering with him, sharing meals, learning about his background, and listening to his concerns showed her that no one is so uniformly monstrous they’re devoid of likable qualities. “He wasn’t my friend, but I found humanity in him,” she said. “The people who knew him well loved him, even knowing what he’d done. Before his execution, they were weeping.”
Some people believe that to accept the human side of offenders who’ve done monstrous things, we lessen their crimes and devalue their victims. However, talking to killers to gain the insights needed for developing treatment and preventing crime requires finding ways to relate. It's possible too see a complex individual while also denouncing their damaging acts.
Journalist Martha Elliott made this effort with rapist and serial killer Michael Ross, describing her approach in The Man in the Monster: An Intimate Portrait of a Serial Killer. She spent a decade communicating with Ross as he challenged the state of Connecticut to execute him.
Elliott considers her work........
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