The Anatomy of Violence (13 page)

And that hocus-pocus PET scan still hangs on the wall of Joe Beard’s office as a reminder of the brain excuse that defendants increasingly ply in capital cases. A reminder of how pretty-colored pictures of the brain can be used to sway jurors’ perspectives on innocence versus guilt—on life in prison versus the death penalty.

Yes, the causal direction of the relationship between prefrontal dysfunction and violence is certainly open to question. Imaging does not demonstrate causality. There is only an association, and many possible counter-explanations. We’ll never know what Bustamante’s brain scan looked like the day before the homicide. We’ll never know if Bustamante’s poor orbitofrontal functioning
caused
him—in one way or another—to morph from an altar boy into a killer who beat an old man to death.

Nevertheless, let’s try to put the pieces together just as any detective or doctor would. Antonio Bustamante was as good as gold growing up, right until early adulthood. Then, at age twenty, a crowbar from hell struck the altar boy. Medical records from that time attest that it
resulted in a very significant head injury. This injury likely increased Bustamante’s impulsivity and
lowered his threshold for more accidents. Not long after the crow-bar injury, he was involved in a serious automobile accident that resulted in yet more head injuries.
¹²

For the two decades that followed, Bustamante was incessantly in trouble with the law. He also had more bar brawls, which very likely resulted in further head injuries. It’s not exactly Jekyll and Hyde, but it’s not far off. At the relatively late age of twenty-two, he clocks up the first offense in his life—just
after
the crowbar and automobile incidents that resulted in head injury. Bustamante suddenly switches from good to evil, tumbling into a turbulent world of
drugs and crime, eventually ending up at the house of his victim—and homicide. I think the order of events is telling.

Let’s put this Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation together with the medical fact that the area of the
brain most susceptible to damage from head injury is the orbitofrontal cortex. Combine this with the well-known neurological fact that damage to the orbitofrontal cortex frequently results in disinhibited, impulsive behavior, poor
decision-making, and a lack of emotional control.
¹³
Blend this with Bustamante’s PET scan, revealing reduced orbitofrontal functioning. Consider that his crime was impulsive, not planned. While it was vicious, it was also very unsophisticated. His homicide was followed by disorganized, thoughtless actions. He made no attempt to cover his tracks.

You don’t have to be a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that it was the head injury at twenty—well beyond his control—that likely caused his poor
prefrontal functioning and the later impulsive, violent offending. Even the plodding Doctor Watson with his nineteenth-century medical knowledge would likely have come to the same conclusion. But is this scenario true of all killers?

In striking contrast to Antonio Bustamante we have our other killer, Randy
Kraft. You’ll recall from Randy’s early life history that we see nothing extraordinary. He grew up as an all-American boy in conservative Orange County in Southern California—not exactly the greatest risk factor for violence.

Would Randy have the same prefrontal
impairments that we saw in Bustamante? Think about it. The selection of the victim. Working out
how to orchestrate the evening beginning with friendly drinks. Being able to booze and schmooze without losing executive control over the situation. Timing the point to strike. The escalation to drugging the victim. Ensuring that he is well bound and cannot escape. All those bodies to get rid of. All that mess to clear up. Working on murder into the early hours only to show up for work the same morning and put in a hard day’s computing.

How did he do it? You can see for yourself in Randy’s brain scan. Take a good look at
Figure 3.3
, in the color-plate section, and focus on the three scans in a row. On the left you have the normal control, on the right you have a single murderer, and in the middle you have Randy Kraft—labeled “Multiple Murderer.” Check out the difference between Randy’s brain and the single murderer. What stands out is that he does not have reduced
frontal functioning. Instead, that part of the brain is lit up like a Christmas tree.

To me, Randy is the exception that proves the rule. Here we have a man capable of killing approximately sixty-four people in a twelve-year period without getting caught. You have to have good prefrontal functioning to pull that off. He had an excellent ability to plan, to regulate his actions, to think ahead, to consider alternative plans of action, to sustain attention, and to keep on task. It’s exactly what you need to be a successful serial killer. He’s an exception in that he differs from other killers in his brain profile. He proves the rule that a
lack
of frontal functioning results in a
lack
of ability to plan, regulate, and control one’s
impulses, resulting in not just homicide but early apprehension.

Let’s look further into Randy’s mental makeup, and piece together why he succeeded in staying so successful in slaying while other killers are caught more quickly. To begin with, in stark contrast with
Antonio Bustamante, who had
twenty-eight
arrests before his homicide, Randy Kraft had
almost nothing
in his criminal record before he was apprehended. It was almost as clean as a whistle, and what little there was is illuminating. Let me elaborate.

This story starts in the summer of ’66. It was the summer of Speck—the summer that
Richard Speck was killing
nurses in Chicago. It was also the summer of a historic first that I will never forget. It was the one and only time that England won the World Cup in soccer. I was twelve and Randy was twenty-one. He was also never to forget that time, but for a different reason. It was his first police bust.

Randy was taking a stroll at Huntington Beach just south of L.A.
and propositioned a young man on the beach. Unfortunately for him the young man was an undercover police officer. Randy was charged with lewd conduct but nothing came of it, even though it was duly recorded. That’s because he was told something that many first-time
offenders are told: “Just don’t do it again.”
¹⁴

I suspect this was a double message for Randy. The message said: (1) watch out, the police are about, and (2) smarten up your act, and you can beat the cops. Remember that this was five years before Randy’s first known homicide. It was a scare that smartened him up in a way that his well-
functioning prefrontal cortex could register. Poor frontal functioning results in poor social judgment, loss of self-control, and an inability to modify behavior appropriately. It was
good
frontal functioning that helped Randy to learn from his mistakes and adjust his careless behavior accordingly. Once bitten, twice shy.

And yet Randy still wanted
sex. What’s a man to do? Well, one adaptive strategy is to move from adults to adolescents—lower-hanging fruit that yields easier and more satisfying pickings, and a new sensual exploration of younger flesh. Given that there was also less chance of getting caught by an undercover vice officer, this is what Randy decided to do.

There are likely many victims in the four years since that initial sting that we’ll never know about. The only one who lived to tell the tale was
Joey Fancher. It was March 1970, and young Joey was just a wayward thirteen-year-old from Westminster, not far from where Randy was living in Long Beach. Joey had skipped school to race up and down the Huntington Beach boardwalk on his bicycle. There Randy clapped eyes on him. He gave Joey a cigarette, and perhaps having a sense of the kind of kid Joey was, asked him a question. Had he ever had sex with a woman? No. Would he like it? Yes! So off the two sped on Randy’s motorbike, back to his apartment under the pretext of making young Joey’s adolescent dreams of lovemaking come true.

The bike ride itself might have been a buzz for the boy as he clung on to this cool beach dude, but a bigger buzz awaited him. Once in the apartment Randy brought out the next enticement—a bit of dope. The boy felt woozy with the
cannabis, so Randy—the benevolent host that he was—brought Joey just the thing that would wipe away that wooze. Four little red capsules with some Spanish sangria to wash it down. Now the boy was all Randy’s, to fulfill his wildest wishes with. Kraft forced the disoriented boy to give him oral sex. Joey resisted, but would
years later tell a jury, Kraft “put his hands on my head and forced me. I couldn’t do nothing. Period. It was like I was a rag doll.”
¹⁵

Joey retched with the ejaculate in his mouth. Kraft then took him to his bedroom, placed him on the mattress, and sodomized him. You’d think that after taking a break to go to the bathroom Randy might have gotten the better of his overflowing emotion and backed off just a bit. Instead, he beat the boy mercilessly and sodomized him yet again. Joey the rag doll was passing in and out of consciousness in a drug-drenched haze. He could still feel the intense pain of the anal penetration. He wept with the physical and psychological
torture. He vomited from the alcohol-drug mix. Randy made one more trip to the bathroom. This time he came back out and nonchalantly told the boy he was going off to work—as simple as that. Randy just left the apartment, as cool as a cucumber.

Herein lies the tragic moment. If the correct action had been taken, Kraft would have been removed from circulation. He would never have been able to continue his pedophilic impulses. But it was not to be. Joey got out of the house, crossed Ocean Boulevard in a haze, and was almost hit by a car. He just managed to make it across the road to a bar and appeal for help. A customer called 911 and Joey was taken to a hospital to have his stomach pumped to discharge the drugs and alcohol. Two police officers then returned with Joey and his family to Randy’s apartment, where Joey had left his new shoes. There they found a hoard of seventy-six photographs, largely of men in various stages of
orgasm.

You’d
really
think something would have happened, but it didn’t. Joey was not much different from many other
sexually abused children. Too ashamed of what had happened to him, Joey could not bring himself to tell the police and parents about the wretched rag-doll rape and beating at the hands of Kraft. It was too humiliating. Plus, the police had done their inspection without a search warrant. They did not charge Randy.

For his troubles Joey ended up that night getting a beating from his grandfather—who mercilessly used a board with a nail in it—for cutting school and almost losing his new shoes. This was on top of the intense pain from his bleeding and a torn rectum that took two weeks to heal, while he kept his lips firmly sealed on the rape.

As for Randy, I can imagine him carefully contemplating at the end of that evening how close he had come to conviction for pedophilic rape and
assault. His prefrontal cortex was recognizing once again that
he must be much more careful. The under part of the prefrontal cortex specializes in learning
from experience and fine-tuning decision-making based on past experience.
¹⁶
Randy was contemplating how to proceed. Dead men tell no tales. From now on, he would leave no witnesses, and to our knowledge he made his first killing the following year.

Let’s look back at Randy’s brain in
Figure 3.3
and compare it this time to the normal control. You can see more activation in the very middle—the
thalamus—as well as excellent activation of the
occipital cortex at the bottom and the
temporal cortex at the side-middle area. You don’t see as much activation in either the normal control or the one-off killer.

But we did see this in someone else who had a brain scan very much like Randy’s. That scan is shown above Randy’s in
Figure 3.3
. Take a look at this one and compare it to the three you see below it. Which one would you say it most approximates? It’s not a perfect match, but it does seem more similar to Randy’s than the others. Note the plentiful prefrontal activation at the top, the bilateral thalamic activation in the very middle, the occipital activation at the bottom, and the temporal lobe activation at the sides.

What’s interesting about this brain scan is that it’s my brain scan. As you noticed earlier, it’s hard for me not to see parallels between Randy’s life and mine, and the parallels go on. We both have flat feet and we both love tennis. Randy was one of the four top seeds in the Westminster High varsity tennis team. I was not as good, but I captained the tennis team at my college at Oxford University.

Randy also had an elder sister who was a primary-school teacher, just as I did—we were both influenced by that sisterly connection. At university I very much wanted to be a primary-school teacher and I was accepted for postgraduate teacher training at Brighton. I particularly wanted to teach eight-year-olds, because during university breaks I took children on holiday for a charitable trust. I had different age groups but felt I could connect with eight-year-olds. Randy also wanted to be a primary-school teacher and spent a semester working as a teacher’s aide with third-graders aged eight and nine. Neither of us sustained our career goal. We’ve both been caught drunk in our cars in Southern California by the police, albeit under different circumstances. And we both have the same brain functioning.

Am I a serial killer? I’ve never been caught and convicted for homicide. Nor any other offense, for that matter, with the exception of smuggling
moon cake from Shanghai into Melbourne in 2000, for which I was fined about $175. Might I have a brain predisposition to be a serial killer? Maybe. Does this similarity in scans demonstrate that brain imaging is
not
diagnostic? I’d like to believe so.

Clearly there are “normal” people like myself—and perhaps yourself—with “abnormal” brain scans. And by the same token, there are “abnormal” violent individuals who have quite normal brain functioning. We cannot use brain imaging as a high-tech tool to tell who’s normal, who’s a one-off killer, and who’s a serial killer. It’s just not that simple. Yet at the same time we are beginning to gain important clues as to which brain regions—when dysfunctional—could give rise to violence.