do not understand him. He is overly
sensitive to criticisms that others make of him, and cannot tolerate being made fun of. He is quick
to sense slight or insult in things others say, and frequently may misinterpret well-meant
communications. He feels he has great need of friendship and understanding, but he is reluctant
to confide in others, and when he does, expects to be misunderstood or even betrayed. In
evaluating the intentions and feelings of others, his ability to separate the real situation from his
own mental projections is very poor. He not infrequently groups all people together as being
hypocritical, hostile, and deserving of whatever he is able to do to them. Akin to this first trait is
the second, an ever-present, poorly controlled rage — easily triggered by any feeling of being
tricked, slighted, or labeled inferior by others. For the most part, his rages in the, past have
been directed at authority figures — father, brother, Army sergeant, state parole officer — and
have led to violent assaultive behavior on several occasions. Both he and his acquaintances have
been aware of these rages, which he says ‘mount up’ in him, and of the poor control he has over
them. When turned toward himself his anger has precipitated ideas of suicide. The inappropriate
force of his anger and lack of ability to control or channel it reflect a primary weakness of
personality structure…. In addition to these traits, the subject shows mild early signs of a disorder
of his thought processes. He has poor ability to organize his thinking, he seems unable to scan or
summarize his thought, becoming involved and sometimes lost in detail, and some of his thinking
reflects a ‘magical’ quality, a disregard of reality. He has had few close emotional relationships
with other people, and these have not been able to stand small crises. He has little feeling for others outside a very small circle of friends, and attaches little real value to human life. This
emotional detachment and blandness in certain areas is other evidence of his mental
abnormality. More extensive evaluation would be necessary to make an exact psychiatric
diagnosis, but his present personality structure is very nearly that of a paranoid schizophrenic
reaction.»
It is significant that a widely respected veteran in the field of forensic psychiatry, Dr. Joseph
Satten of the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, consulted with Dr. Jones and endorsed his
evaluations of Hickock and Smith. Dr. Satten, who afterward gave the case close attention,
suggests that though the crime would not have occurred except for a certain frictional interplay
between the perpetrators, it was essentially the act of Perry Smith, who, he feels, represents a
type of murderer described by him in an article: «Murder Without Apparent Motive — A Study in
Personality Disorganization.»
The article, printed in The American Journal of Psychiatry (July, 1960), and written in
collaboration with three colleagues, Karl Menninger, Irwin Rosen, and Martin Mayman, states its
aim at the outset: «In attempting to assess the criminal responsibility of murderers, the law tries to
divide them (as it does all offenders) into two groups, the ‘sane’ and the ‘insane.’ The ‘sane’
murderer is thought of as acting upon rational motives that can be understood, though
condemned, and the ‘insane’ one as being driven by irrational senseless motives. When rational
motives are conspicuous (for example, when a man kills for personal gain) or when the irrational
motives are accompanied by delusions or hallucinations (for example, a paranoid patient who kills
his fantasied persecutor), the situation presents little problem to the psychiatrist. But murderers
who seem rational, coherent, and controlled, and yet whose homicidal acts have a bizarre,
apparently senseless quality, pose a difficult problem, if courtroom disagreements and
contradictory reports about the same offender are an index. It is our thesis that the
psychopathology of such murderers forms at least one specific syndrome which we shall
describe. In general, these individuals are predisposed to severe lapses in ego-control which
makes possible the open expression of primitive violence, born out of previous, and now
unconscious, traumatic experiences.»
The authors, as part of an appeals process, had examined four men convicted of seemingly
unmotivated murders. All had been examined prior to their trials, and found to be «without
psychosis» and «sane.» Three of the men were under death sentence, and the fourth was serving
a long prison sentence. In each of these cases, further psychiatric investigation had been
requested because someone — either the lawyer, a relative, or a friend — was dissatisfied with the
psychiatric explanations previously given, and in effect had asked, «How can a person as sane
as this man seems to be commit an act as crazy as the one he was convicted of?» After
describing the four criminals and their crimes (a Negro soldier who mutilated and dismembered a
prostitute, a laborer who strangled a fourteen-year-old boy when the boy rejected his sexual
advances, an Army corporal who bludgeoned to death another young boy because he imagined
the victim was making fun of him, and a hospital employee who drowned a girl of nine by holding
her head under water), the authors surveyed the areas of similarity. The men themselves, they
wrote, were puzzled as to why they killed their victims, who were relatively unknown to them, and
in each instance the murderer appears to have lapsed into a dreamlike dissociative trance from
which he awakened to «suddenly discover» himself assaulting his victim. «The most uniform, and
perhaps the most significant, historical finding was a long-standing, sometimes lifelong, history of
erratic control over aggressive impulses. For example, three of the men, throughout their lives,
had been frequently involved in fights which were not ordinary altercations, and which would have
become homicidal assaults if not stopped by others.»
Here, in excerpt, are a number of other observations contained in the study: «Despite the violence
in their lives, all of the men had ego-images of themselves as physically inferior, weak, and
inadequate. The histories revealed in each a severe degree of sexual inhibition. To all of them,
adult women were threatening creatures, and in two cases there was overt sexual perversion. All
of them, too, had been concerned throughout their early years about being considered ‘sissies,’
physically undersized or sickly. … In all four cases, there was historical evidence of altered states
of consciousness, frequently in connection with the outbursts of violence. Two of the men
reported severe dissociative trance like states during which violent and bizarre behavior was
seen, while the other two reported less severe, and perhaps less well-organized, amnesiac episodes. During moments of actual violence, they often felt separated or isolated from
themselves, as if they were watching someone else. Also seen in the historical back-ground of all
the cases was the occurrence of extreme parental violence during childhood. . . . One man said
he was ‘whipped every time I turned around.’ . . . Another of the men had many violent beatings in
order to ‘break’ him of his stammering and ‘fits,’ as well as to correct him for his allegedly ‘bad’
behavior. The history relating to extreme violence, whether fantasied, observed in reality, or
actually experienced by the child, fits in with the psychoanalytic hypothesis that the child’s
exposure to overwhelming stimuli, before he can master them, is closely linked to early defects in
ego formation and later severe disturbances in impulse control. In all of these cases, there was
evidence of severe emotional deprivation in early life. This deprivation may have involved
prolonged or recurrent absence of one or both parents, a chaotic family life in which the parents
were unknown, or an outright rejection of the child by one or both parents with the child being
raised by others. . . . Evidence of disturbances in affect organization was seen. Most typically the
men displayed a tendency not to experience anger or rage in association with violent aggressive
action. None reported feelings of rage in connection with the murders, nor did they experience
anger in any strong or pronounced way, although each of them was capable of enormous and
brutal aggression. . . . Their relationships with others were of a shallow, cold nature, lending a
quality of loneliness and isolation to these men. People were scarcely real to them, in the sense
of being warmly or positively (or even angrily) felt about. . . . The three men under sentence of
death had shallow emotions regarding their own fate and that of their victims. Guilt, depression,
and remorse were strikingly absent. Such individuals can be considered to be murder-prone in
the sense of either carrying a surcharge of aggressive energy or having an unstable ego defense
system that periodically allows the naked and archaic expression of such energy. The murderous
potential can become activated, especially if some disequilibrium is already present, when the
victim-to-be is unconsciously perceived as a key figure in some past traumatic configuration. The
behavior, or even the mere presence, of this figure adds a stress to the unstable balance of
forces that results in a sudden extreme discharge of violence, similar to the explosion that takes
place when a percussion cap ignites a charge of dynamite. . . . The hypothesis of unconscious
motivation explains why the murderers perceived innocuous and relatively unknown victims as
provocative and thereby suitable targets for aggression. But why murder? Most people,
fortunately, do not respond with murderous out-bursts even under extreme provocation. The
cases described, on the other hand, were predisposed to gross lapses in reality contact and
extreme weakness in impulse control during periods of heightened tension and disorganization.
At such times, a chance acquaintance or even a stranger was easily able to lose his ‘real’
meaning and assume an identity in the unconscious traumatic con-figuration. The ‘old’ conflict
was reactivated and aggression swiftly mounted to murderous proportions. . . . When such
senseless murders occur, they are seen to be an end result of a period of increasing tension and
disorganization in the murderer starting before the contact with the victim who, by fitting into the
unconscious conflicts of the murderer, unwittingly serves to set into motion his homicidal
potential.»
Because of the many parallels between the background and personality of Perry Smith and the
subjects