I’ve been spending time in prisons lately speaking with murderers in Colorado and Kansas, which raises fundamental questions for me as a journalist. What’s the job of a reporter in this situation -- to challenge the false or outlandish things a killer is saying or simply let him or her talk? “InColdBlog” obviously gets its name from the gold standard of all true crime writing, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and I’ve often thought about Capote having a full five years to sit in a cell with Dick Hickock and Perry Smith before they were executed in 1965. Capote spent most of his time with Smith, the actual killer of the four members of the Clutter family, and the impression we have decades later is that not only didn’t he judge Smith, but grew quite fond of the man over time. One criticism of In Cold Blood was that Capote was too sympathetic to someone who’d slaughtered four innocent people.
When I’m in prison with inmates who’ve done the worst possible things, I find that I’m not judgmental, either. I usually feel empathy toward them and never walk out of a jail without thinking that but for the grace of God, there go I. This does not alter my view of their guilt or that they should be incarcerated, perhaps for life. Sometimes, my feelings in this arena bother me and I’m haunted for days after I’ve left inmates behind in their cells. I’ve also had trouble breathing after exiting some prisons, as if I’ve been standing too close to evil or being too accepting of it. I’ve never known how to reconcile all this inside myself, but I do know one thing: I can’t change my visceral and emotional response to being around killers.
Over time, I’ve decided that these feelings have something to do with being a writer and the role we assign ourselves, for better or worse, as members of society. We have lawyers, judges, and courtrooms to determine the guilt or innocence of those arrested for crimes (by and large, I think our system of due process, for all its shortcomings and tediousness, is the best in the world). We have prison chaplains and other religious functionaries to offer inmates forgiveness or salvation, if that’s what they’re looking for. We have psychiatrists to decide it those behind bars are legally sane or not. But we don’t have anyone inside the criminal justice industry who’s primarily interested in why tragedies happen or what might be learned about the nature of human violence. That’s what I go into prisons looking for and that’s why I let the killers talk and talk without much interruption, even if I know some of what they’re saying isn’t true: I want to know more about now they think and feel (or can’t feel), and why they’ve done what they’ve done.
Having visited prisons for the past 25 years, I’ve been repeatedly struck by how there seems to be little or no correlation between intelligence and brutal behavior. Very bright and articulate people do horrific things and then rationalize their actions with clouds of elaborate language. I’m always most unsettled by encountering truly smart criminals who have no compunction about taking other lives. There’s an entire school of thought today that says criminal behavior is the result of bad genes and chemical imbalances in the brain. I’d like to believe this because it might make humans more predictable, but I have some doubts. I’ve come to believe that the underlying reality of much of the violence I’ve observed or written about is grounded in emotional processes we still understand very little about. Why do people stop feeling? Why can they snuff out a stranger, but feel deeply about their children or a pet? We’re going to be exploring and uncovering emotional mysteries here for decades and centuries to come, just as scientists are doing with physical matter.
I recently spoke with a man who’d gunned down another man and the unmistakable feeling the killer conveyed was that he was greatly relieved to have committed the murder. This was the only way he’d seen to lessen his anxiety, when he had a thousand other alternatives. Crime teaches me that we are still in the primitive stages of human development.
Last June 10, James von Brunn was armed with a rifle when he burst into the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., as several thousand people milled around and looked at exhibits. He emptied his gun into the crowd, killing an African-American security guard, 39-year-old Stephen T. Johns, before being shot and hospitalized in critical condition (he died in early January 2010).
On February 17 of this year, Joseph Stack of Texas sent a very personal anti-government message by flying a small plane into a federal building in Austin to protest American tax laws. Before he set his house on fire, loaded his plane with an extra gas tank, and slammed it into a structure holding IRS offices, killing both IRS employee Vernon Hunter and Stack himself, he’d posted this online manifesto:
“I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.”
His suicide mission generated numerous supporters in cyberspace, including Facebook groups like “The Philosophy of Joe Stack,” which quickly had 2,000 fans. Websites held tributes to the dead man and then came a video game challenging players to burn down a house and fly a plane into a building.
The Secret Service, meanwhile, has reported that death threats against President Obama have been up 400% since he took office, the highest level ever for a White House occupant. Two preachers, Wiley Drake in Buena Park, California, and Steven Anderson of Tempe, Arizona, have made no secret of their prayers for Obama’s death, and on the Internet, the President’s enemies have geared up to sell t-shirts, teddy bears, bumper stickers, framed tiles, and note pads carrying a Biblical quotation from Psalms 109:8: “Let his days be few…Let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.”
On March 4, 2010, John Patrick Bedell of California opened fire at an entrance to the Pentagon, wounding two police officers before he was fatally shot. Bedell had been diagnosed as bipolar or manic depressive and been in and out of treatment programs for years. His parents reported him missing January 4, a day after a Texas Highway Patrol officer stopped him for speeding in Texarkana. He returned to his parents’ home, but the next time he went missing he showed up with a 9mm handgun in D.C. and began shooting outside the Pentagon. His assault came four months after a deadly attack on the Army’s Fort Hood, Texas, post, allegedly by U.S. Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim with radical Islamic leanings, who killed thirteen people and wounded 30 others. Hit by return fire, he survived the worst mass shooting ever at an American military base. He was convinced that America was conducting a “war on Islam” and he was committed to doing “good work for God.”
All the shooters had one thing in common: they were virulently anti-government and had no compunction about attempting to kill people, usually people associated with our government, for this set of beliefs.
Day after day on national and local talk shows across the country, the federal government is attacked by both the right and the left, but most prominently by those on the right (the day before the recent health reform bill vote in the House of Representatives, protesters spit at African American Congressmen and hurled racial slurs at them). This is, in many cases, a general assault on government itself. Commentators can do freely this under the First Amendment, but at what point do they stop to consider the effect of their words on listeners who might not be stable or as sane, and certainly not as successful in life, as they are? When do they start seeing themselves as powerful members of our society whose thoughts can have a potent impact on others? When do these cease viewing themselves as victims of our society, rather than participants with it and part of the governmental structure they’re assaulting?
Hating government for the sake of it, or the fun of it, is at the very least unproductive and at worst something that incites others already on the edge. How many more mass shootings before we recognize that words matter and feelings count? It’s all an abstract discussion until you’re the one being shot at.