Authors: David Samuels
Allergic to penicillin, the fugitive Donald Eugene Webb is a lover of dogs, a flashy
dresser, and a big tipper. I first encountered Webb, a darkly handsome fellow with deep-set eyes and a prominent forehead, on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Poster, a relic from the days of John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde, which I read from top to bottom while hanging around the
entrance to the Mountain Village police department. Described as “a career criminal and master of assumed identities,” Webb is being sought by the FBI in connection with the murder of a
police chief. He specializes in robbing jewelry stores. Killing the police chief in the course of a robbery was probably a mistake, I thought. As of this writing, Webb has been on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list for over twenty-five years without being caught. I wonder, for a moment,
whether Donald Eugene Webb is someone you might become by accident.
My reverie was interrupted by Robert Walraven, a big, crew-cut Texan wearing a blue
denim shirt, blue jeans, and a green fleece jacket. The detective who pursued Hogue to Arizona, Walraven has the broad shoulders and blunt manners of a Texas football coach. A certificate from the “National Institute for Truth Verification” pronounces him a “Certified Fraud
Examiner.” He tells me that Jim is a career criminal who is unlikely to ever change.
“Honestly, somebody needs to know where he is at all times just like you track a sex
offender, because if he’s in your community, a crime’s likely being committed,” Walraven said.
What he told me about Jim is a version of a theory that has dominated police work in America for the last sixty years, which rests in large part on a fascinating and quietly hilarious book that I have been reading off and on late at night in the room that I have rented in Telluride. It is no knock on Robert Walraven or other hardworking practitioners of the fine art of criminal justice to note that few working police officers have heard of
The Mask of Sanity
or of its author, Hervey Cleckley, a name whose clattering syllables sit uneasily in any normal sentence, just as Cleckley’s subjects— psychopaths—have trouble fitting in to human society. While Hervey
Cleckley never attained the widespread fame of contemporaries like Karl Menninger, his
influence on the use of applied psychology in the American legal system has arguably been
greater than that of anyone besides Freud. It is to Cleckley that judges, lawyers, and pulp-fiction writers alike owe our fondness for psychopaths and sociopaths, those lone rangers of the psyche whose existence on a plane outside normal conceptions of good and evil is an affront to more ecumenical notions of a shared morality.
Written in courtly, antique prose, Cleckley’s book is a fascinating and highly entertaining collection of firsthand accounts of the author’s experiences working with deeply recalcitrant and incorrigible patients in asylums and hospitals in the American South, particularly in the state of Georgia. Through these case histories, Cleckley distinguishes a population of “forgotten” human beings, intelligent and not suffering from any of the classical psychological disorders, who nonetheless fail to demonstrate any noticeable adherence to the moral codes by which the rest of mankind ostensibly chooses to live. One subject was a habitual drunkard and screwup. Another man, whose name is given as Stanley, induced five teenage girls to shave their heads for no apparent reason. Absent any natural inclination to abide by the law, or to feel guilty when violating even the most basic codes of human behavior, Cleckley wrote, this population lived a separate existence of its own, like a tribe of space aliens among the run of more or less normal or abnormal human beings, who are regularly beset by conformity and guilt:
It becomes difficult to imagine how much of the sham and hollowness which cynical
commentators have immemorially pointed out in life may come from contact in serious issues
with persons affected in some serious degree by the disorder we are trying to describe. The fake poet who really feels little; the painter who, despite his loftiness, had his eye chiefly on the lucrative fad of his day; the fashionable clergyman who, despite his burning eloquence or his lively castigation of the devil, is primarily concerned with his advancement; the flirt who can readily awaken love but cannot feel love or recognize its absence; parents who, despite smooth convictions that they have only the child’s welfare at heart, actually reject him except as it suits their own petty or selfish aims. . . .
Sanity, the outward show of understanding and adhering to social norms, was a mask that
these exiles from a shared humanity could put on when necessary, and throw off when feeling loony, unsettled, or bored. The price of this masquerade was a deep loneliness and an inability to make meaningful and fulfilling contact with others. While the absence of guilt made it possible for Cleckley’s sociopaths to deceive others with ease, the lack of a shared connection with normal human emotion made it difficult for the sociopath to sustain his masquerade for long periods of time. Sooner or later, his shallow acquaintance with socially connected emotions like guilt, love, and loss would land him in jail or a mental hospital.
Part of the pleasure of reading Cleckley is that sociopaths, and psychopaths, really do
exist. The other pleasure of reading Cleckley is that the joke is as often on us as it is on them.
The longer you think about Cleckley’s case histories, the harder it gets to keep friends and co-workers and spouses off the list. Published in 1941, as the world teetered on the brink of madness, Cleckley’s book was less the product of a strict scientific methodology than a kind of inspired backwater guess about the strictly conventional nature of social behavior that would become commonplace after the war in the work of hipster urban sociologists like Erving
Goff-man, for whom all social behavior might be profitably analyzed using the model of the
relationship between the con man and his mark.
I asked Walraven if he thinks that Hogue might have used his education to do some good
in the world if Princeton University hadn’t thrown him out before he graduated.
“I don’t think it would have been as simple as, ‘I’m gonna get a house with a white picket
fence,’ “ he said. “He’d have been one of those involved in one of those other big frauds,
whether it be Enron or something else.” The reason criminals like Hogue get caught, he said, is not because police officers are so dogged in their investigations, but because the criminals are unable to stop. “I’ve seen people get away with stuff for five years that are committing fraud and embezzlement, and then they get too comfortable,” he said. “This morning I was listening on the radio to a guy who had won the three-hundred-million dollar lottery. You know, he ain’t got a penny left, and he’s still writing bad checks. He had a hundred and ten million dollars that he wasted.” Behind him were boxes filled with papers and three large binders of photographs and stolen property reports related to Hogue that Walraven occasionally consults as we speak in order to refresh his mind about the details of particular cases.
Walraven estimates that Hogue stole over seven thousand items worth over $100,000. I
asked the detective why he is pursuing Hogue for an admittedly huge accumulation of essentially victimless crimes—where no one was hurt in any lasting way, where insurance companies
generally covered the losses, and even Hogue appeared to be baffled as to how he might benefit directly from his actions. Because Telluride is a resort town, he answered, property crimes pose a direct threat to the local economy. People whose homes are invaded and whose possessions are stolen lose their accustomed sense of safety and protection. Their sense of connection to their neighbors and to the larger community is strained. They feel violated.
“You take the old couple from Kansas City that he burglarized on one occasion—a
thirty-thousand-dollar-plus property loss,” he said, sounding entirely sincere. “You sit down and talk to that couple, and they don’t feel safe in their home anymore. That antique rocking horse meant a lot to them.”
When Hogue was captured by the federal marshals in Arizona, Walraven flew down to
Tucson and interviewed the captive in jail. A tape of the interview shows a determined
investigator who had studied the case with care. Still, his quarry continued to elude him.
“Do you have any interest in telling me where the rest of the property is that I haven’t
found?” Walraven asked.
Hogue played dumb.
“I don’t know what it is. Do you have a list?” he asked, accusing Walraven of making
vague accusations.
“No, I’m not,” Walraven defended himself. “In 2003, there’s an antique rocking horse,
leather chair, and paintings, hand-woven rugs. I’m not being vague when I describe a big rocking horse by your front door. The leather chair that was in your living room. That’s not vague. They were in your house.” The list of items made the detective sound silly.
“Where are they now?” Hogue asked.
“They’re in evidence.”
“Well,” Hogue answered, “then why are you asking me about them?”
Walraven paused, and then regained his bearings. “You told me on January 4 you’re
building a house. Remember that?” he asked.
“I remember passing your lie detector test,” Hogue said, referring to a test to which he
had voluntarily submitted to in Telluride before he left town. “I remember that much.”
Walraven made his annoyance clear. The test showed that Hogue always told the truth, he
said angrily, even on the control questions that he was supposed to lie about, like the color of the wall in front of him. “What does that mean?” he asked Hogue.
“I don’t know. You’re the one who was saying you’re the expert,” Hogue answered.
Sullen at the beginning of the interview, he was clearly enjoying himself. “Well I think that, uh, your office is a little overstaffed,” he added. He also expressed his dissatisfaction with a documentary film about his life that had appeared in 2002. Called
Con Man,
the film was produced by a filmmaker named Jesse Moss, who came to me for help after reading an article I wrote about Hogue in 1995 for the
Washington Post.
“You sounded like a pretty good track star,” Walraven offered.
“Not really,” Hogue answered, modestly. “I was seventeen years old, running against
people that were Kenyan Olympians. I mean, I didn’t expect to be able to beat them.”
When it came to the question of the stolen goods he had dumped out by Trout Lake, near
the old water tower, he was no more forthcoming.
“You talking about the water tower on the road? Near the entrance to Trout Lake?”
Hogue asked. “I don’t know anything about that water tower. I think you got your locations
mixed up.”
“I don’t think you could tell the truth if you had to,” Walraven said.
“I don’t think you know what you’re talking about,” Hogue answered.
“I think I do,” Walraven said.
“Well, I know you don’t,” Hogue said.
“How do you know I don’t?” Walraven asked.
“Well first of all, I don’t know anything about the water tower,” Hogue answered,
adding, “I know where the water tower is.”
When Walraven accused him of being a liar, he showed his disdain for the word by
shrugging his shoulders. “I would think that one lie would make a person a liar,” he answered.
“Going by that makes you a liar, because you’ve lied to me at least once.” “
What did I lie about?” Walraven asked.
“Oh, I can’t remember now,” Hogue answered airily. “But I remember thinking, ‘Oh, that
was a lie.’”
VII. The Sentence
In a series of letters that he wrote from jail in Colorado to Brian Patrick, Hogue arranged for money to be transferred to his fiancée. He also tried to negotiate a plea deal with the state using Patrick as a go-between. Details of his business affairs were mixed with breezy accounts of his adventures in the sciences that present themselves as the writings of a devoted naturalist with a broad and eccentric field of knowledge and a large library at his disposal. Perusing Hogue’s learned entomological correspondence, it comes as a shock to remember that the author is a
drifter who is sitting in jail.
“It seems that you are doing an awful lot of taxonomy, and that distinction is still as
important as it was thirty years ago when I was working with Lepidoptera,” Hogue wrote. In his day, he continued, “We all thought that the great new thing was electrophoresis gels to separate proteins; sort of a primitive DNA analysis.” While there is something giggle-inducing about watching Hogue try to game his nephew (his experience with “Lepidoptera” was a summer he
spent collecting butterflies in Wyoming in 1977), he was also capable of referring to the
somewhat dated but fascinating works of the naturalist Alexander Petrunkevitch, author of
An
Inquiry into the Natural Classification of Spiders,
a subject which happened to be his nephews primary area of academic interest.
How and when the work of the late Yale professor, a Russian emigre and contemporary
of Nabokov, had attracted Hogue’s attention was not clear. But it wasn’t hard to see what in Petrunkevitchs work had caught his interest. “I remember reading his really good essay about how the bigger wasps
g. pepsis
prey upon tarantulas,” Hogue wrote, citing an old issue of
Scientific American
from the 1950s in which he believed the article had appeared.
“If the wasp attacked the wrong species, it lost, but it never lost against the correct
species,” he wrote, clearly fascinated by the way that giant wasps could defeat the poisonous spiders by biting them in a specific place in their midsections where they were most vulnerable.
“There was probably some chemical identifier for the wasps and maybe some chemical means
for the wasp to mollify the spider,” he speculated. Nature was a game, in which animals were always searching for an advantage over others. The techniques of the game interested him the way they would interest any naturalist.