For the six-year-old Cochran twins, Jennifer and May Nicole, whose family had left Orlando at two o’clock in the morning so they could join the festivities, the “field trip” their parents planned had been an educational one. Jennifer told reporters from the Gainesville Sun that “she understood why Ted Bundy was going to die. ‘He killed a lot,’ she said.”
May Nicole had a harder time focusing on the lesson at hand. “We saw a deer this morning,” she announced.
The party was over. The crowd dispersed. The TV stations packed up their equipment. The vendors counted their takes. The sky was the pink of an Easter egg, until the sunrise faded and it was just another day.
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO BELIEVE IN EVIL WITHOUT BELIEVING in choice. When we talk about the psychopath, we describe a person born without a conscience, yet we often talk about this lack as if it is not a disability but an advantage: proof that someone has evolved beyond the pesky morals that hobble the rest of us and is now free to enjoy a consequence-free life of sex, theft, and violence. Whether psychopaths actually do enjoy this life is, according to Dr. Hare, not a question even worth asking. Therapy—especially “attempts to teach psychopaths how to ‘really feel’ remorse or empathy”—is “doomed to failure,” Hare writes in Without Conscience, primarily because psychopaths don’t want to change. “They see nothing wrong with themselves,” Hare explains, “experience little personal distress, and find their behavior rational, rewarding, and satisfying; they never look back with regret or forward with concern. They perceive themselves as superior beings.” To Hare, and to the psychiatrists and legal professionals who continue his work, a diagnosis of “psychopathy” is wholly separate from mental illness, and cannot serve to mitigate a defendant’s guilt. The only guilt it can mitigate is a jury’s: if it is wrong to kill a human being, it can still be acceptable to recommend the death penalty for someone who is not really human.
When I asked Ted Bundy’s attorneys whether they would describe him as a psychopath, their responses were not just unanimous but unambiguous. “No,” Minerva said, without hesitation. “I think he was severely, deeply mentally ill,” he said. “Psychotic. I always believed that.”
“I think we understood why he did what he did,” Coleman said. “We knew it was a product of a mental illness.”
“He was mentally ill,” said Joe Nursey, a lawyer who worked with the defense team during Ted Bundy’s abandoned plea bargain and subsequent trial, and is now a supervising attorney at New York’s Office of the Appellate Defender. “Anybody who looks at it with any degree of honesty knows that he was mentally ill,” Nursey said. “Just being with him long enough, you saw it . . . His mind [didn’t] function rationally: on any level, on anything.”
Nelson was silent for a long time as she considered my question. “You know,” she said, “‘psychopath’ to me implies some kind of evil motivation, like an evil corporation knowingly polluting. And I don’t see that in Ted. He was much more like an addict.”
More often than not, the lawyers I spoke with found the term “psychopath” so poorly defined that they didn’t feel comfortable applying it to anyone. The word, Coleman said, “becomes a cop-out. Judges latch onto it to avoid having to deal with what’s actually going on. It’s presented to juries as a way for them to not struggle with understanding the defendant’s behavior, and to attribute to it this label that basically explains everything.”
“It’s a cheap word,” Nursey said. “It’s a word that is used to avoid trying to understand something in a larger context. Medicine has not developed to the point where we understand the mental illness that leads people to commit what appear to everybody to be random, cold-blooded acts of violence . . . These are out-of-control people, but we won’t acknowledge that they have a mental illness. We just want to say they’re pure mean.”
For decades, Ted Bundy has served as the textbook example of psychopathy not just for tabloid readers and true-crime enthusiasts, but for revered psychologists like Hare. But after hearing the same thing about Ted Bundy from so many of the people who both knew him as a person and accepted his guilt, I had one question left: If Ted Bundy wasn’t a psychopath, who is?
“The better question,” Nursey told me, is, “‘Does the term have any real meaning?’ And it doesn’t.”
One of the most troubling aspects of Hare’s description of the psychopath, particularly in Without Conscience, is its sheer simplicity. There is only one diagnosis, “the psychopath,” into which every patient must fit. Personal history, age, gender, past trauma or abuse, evidence of brain injury, and diagnoses of other personality disorders or even mental illnesses don’t enter into the equation. And while it is comforting to believe that the only reason a person can commit or be complicit in the most horrific of crimes is because they were simply born bad, we have to wonder whether this sense of comfort leads us to accept certain conclusions not because they are logical, but because we want them to be true.
We can say that Ted Bundy was a psychopath, but we can also attribute his behaviors to the mental illness his lawyers observed in him, and doing so reveals a very different picture from the one we know. It shows us a man who appears to have been unable to control his actions or make the decisions that would have saved his life, who put on shows of competence and superiority because he needed to force the world to see a version of himself that he was no longer sure existed, and who loudly proclaimed his own innocence because, to him, it had become a kind of truth.
“I think he always viewed himself as being two personalities, in effect,” Coleman told me. “One good and one bad. He viewed the good Bundy’s role as protector of the bad Bundy, because that was the only way to protect the good Bundy . . . So denying that he was guilty—I don’t think, in his mind, he was doing anything contradictory. He really did believe it.”
“The person standing before you couldn’t kill anyone,” Ted told the jury at one of his trials. It was a tactic he used repeatedly, despite the fact that it never convinced anyone of anything. “The bottom line,” he told another jury, at his Orlando trial, “is that the person who murdered Kimberly Leach is not in the courtroom today.” The jury deliberated for less than an hour before recommending the death penalty.
Dr. Al Carlisle, the psychiatrist who evaluated Ted prior to his sentencing in Utah, concluded after six weeks of interviews that “the constant theme running throughout the testing was a view of women being more competent than men. There were also indications of a fairly strong dependency on women, and yet he also has a strong need to be independent. I feel this creates a fairly strong conflict in that he would like a close relationship with females but is fearful of being hurt by them. There were indications of general anger and, more particularly, a well-masked anger toward women.”
Polly Nelson researched Ted’s childhood in preparation for the evidentiary hearings, and learned, she wrote, “that, contrary to Ted’s description of an idyllic family background, his grandfather had been a violent and bizarre man who beat his wife and talked aloud to unseen presences. Ted’s grandmother had been hospitalized for depression several times and treated with electroshock therapy.” Eventually, “the family had conspired to get Ted and his mother out of his grandfather’s house—and out to Seattle to start a new life.” But, Nelson wrote, “Ted’s mother denied there had been any problems.”