(footsteps)
(copying)
(printing)
(tapping paper)
(keys jingling)
Okay.
Here are the two copies, Mom.
-Dorothy Lewis: Okay. And again, by the way... -I'm ready.
feel free to say yuck.
But, you know, feel free to say, "Mom,
don't say that," okay? Okay.
That Joseph Paul Franklin was crazy,
there could be little doubt.
"The New York Times" called me "The Slayer."
I like the word, you know, the term "multiple slayer"
better than "serial killer" anyway.
You know what I'm saying?
-Dorothy: Got it? Okay. -Eric Lewis: Mm-hmm.
Dorothy: No, not 'cause he hated Jews.
Lots of ostensibly sane people hate Jews.
Bigotry and insanity are different.
-(projector clicking) -At least my mother thought so.
-Wait, can you hold on one sec? (muttering) -Yeah, do you see that?
-Then it goes from there to my mother... -My mother seemed to know
the names of every anti-Semite alive and dead.
Henry Ford, Richard Wagner,
Joe Kennedy, even Walt Disney.
And then I have in quotes, "Not Walt Disney, Mom!"
-Unquote, okay? Close quote. -Eric: Mm-hmm.
Dorothy: "Yes, Walt Disney," she declared.
Still, she took me to see "Bambi" and I cried and cried.
Now, it goes up to the upper left-hand corner, okay?
Dot-dot, got it? (laughs)
The memories that come back to me
when I'm, you know, when I'm writing.
They're-- they have nothing to do with the case,
but it's sort of fun. Okay,
now we're going back to, "As I write this,
I ask myself why I agreed to examine Mr. Franklin."
How are you supposed to act if you've killed people?
You know? You're supposed to have blood dripping from your mouth
and all that? Fangs?
Dorothy: How could I be certain that I would not be prejudiced?
Looking back in time, I think examining Mr. Franklin
was as close as I would ever come to examining Hitler.
Hitler has always been a mystery.
A man responsible for the deaths of so many,
but someone who, to the best of my knowledge,
never personally killed anyone.
My regret is that nobody had the chance to study him,
to find out what made him tick.
How did he get that way?
Could I get that way? Could anyone?
♪ ♪
I look back on the many killers I have come to know
over the past four decades.
There are diagnoses I make now
that I didn't even know existed
because of my own ignorance, comma,
because I didn't ask the right questions.
(laughs) It's nice to be able to correct one's mistakes.
More often, we probably don't even know when we make them.
Man: Doctor, looking at the evidence in this case,
are you able to tell us whether the defendant
(echoing): is insane or not?
♪ ♪
(newsreel music)
Dorothy: When I was very little,
I remember reading about the Nuremberg Trials.
Newsreel Narrator: In Berlin, the defendants
are to plead guilty
-or not guilty... -Dorothy: Lying on the carpet.
We lived in New York, in an apartment,
and the newspaper in front of me,
and seeing pictures of Goebbels and Göring.
Judge: Defendant Hermann Wilhelm Göring,
the International Military Tribunal
sentences you to death by hanging.
Dorothy: I was aware that
people were deliberately killing other people.
And I was aware
of my own anger and my own aggression.
And I remember thinking,
how come I don't kill?
How come, when I get so angry, I don't kill?
It's fascinated me.
I've been horrified by the fact that
I think any one of us, myself included,
could become a Nazi.
♪ ♪
Maybe I went to medical school or became a psychiatrist,
in part, to learn about why.
(bell chiming)
Don't you ever wonder why you don't murder?
-Alex Gibney: I do. -Yeah.
I never planned to work with violent people,
certainly not murderers.
Dorothy and Narrator: I went through medical school
in order to become a psychoanalyst.
I saw myself in a private office,
seated behind a supine patient...
Narrator: listening and commenting as he struggled
to resolve the violent internal conflicts
between his id and his superego.
Instead, a series of unexpected events
drew me deeper and deeper into the study of violence.
In the early '70s, I was working at
the Juvenile Court Clinic in New Haven,
examining delinquents. Most of the delinquents
who crossed the threshold of my office
had horrendous backgrounds--
car accidents, falls, burns,
even carbon monoxide poisoning.
A good number of the injuries
were not caused by reckless drivers,
broken tree branches, or overturned coffee pots.
They were caused by parents.
♪ ♪
Gradually, I was gathering clues.
I was discovering why one person cried in pain,
while another lashed out in response to it.
(siren wailing)
I managed to get a small grant to study the prisoners on
the Bellevue Forensic Wards.
I examined Mark David Chapman,
the man who shot John Lennon.
We also saw a less famous, but more flamboyant inmate,
who cut off his father's head and penis,
and chucked both out the window.
It was a... colorful period.
(hospital chatter)
Gibney: So how'd you first start working with Dorothy?
By accident, yeah. So,
I saw this ad for a research assistant.
"Juvenile delinquents," is what the ad says.
A grant to do a project
having to do with delinquency.
It happened to be Dorothy.
I happened to say, you know, I'll give it a shot.
We hit it off, and it started everything.
Dorothy: We became a bit of a team, working together.
And we saw so many children at Bellevue.
Narrator: A study of the patients on our children's psychiatric ward
revealed that of 55 children admitted in one year,
21 had been homicidal.
One child was admitted after trying to strangle her sister.
Another set fire to the couch on which his mother slept.
A 4-year-old held a knife to his mother's throat.
-(flames burning) -(children chattering)
We tried to look at the variables.
Was there any difference between
the homicidal young children,
and the ones who were on
the psychiatric ward, but had not been homicidal.
And we found that
the homicidal kids were much more likely
to have been abused,
and they were much more likely
to have signs of organic impairment,
brain dysfunction.
Jonathan Pincus: I was an ambitious academic neurologist at the time,
on the faculty at Yale.
I thought that there was nothing
neurologically wrong with violent people.
She convinced me to participate in the study.
What's the relationship between
the brain damage and the behavior?
Dorothy: What we saw was if you have battered a child,
shaken it, knocked it against the wall,
then you could often see little hemorrhages in the brain.
Sometimes, that distinguished
the super-aggressive kids
from the psychiatrically ill but not aggressive kids.
♪ ♪
I had written an article in a psychiatric journal,
and Diane Sawyer, her assistants had read it,
and they called me and she wanted to interview me.
We're going to take a closer look at violent children,
-teenagers or... -Dorothy: It's the first time
I'd ever been on television.
Diane Sawyer: Dr. Lewis, thank you very much for coming this morning.
It's a fascinating study, and a pioneering one,
as I understand it.
We did a study of the medical histories
from hospital records...
Dorothy: I talked about the brain dysfunction
and the history of abuse that a lot of
-the violent kids had. -46% had major neurological problems...
Either that day or the next day, I got a call
from Dick Burr, just an incredible public defender
and he said, "I saw you on the news yesterday."
Dick Burr: She was talking about how
you can't begin to evaluate somebody
who's committed a violent crime unless you have
a really thorough and complete life history.
-Here's a family history... -Burr: And at that point
in the death penalty defense community,
we had always thought mental health was important,
but we didn't understand it.
Dorothy: He said, "I have a client
on death row here in Florida."
Burr: We had a case, William Elledge...
♪ ♪
that I was the primary lawyer on,
moving into the state post-conviction process.
Dorothy: "Would you be willing to come down to death row
and examine him?"
Burr: And she came and helped us and taught us. (laughs)
-(prison chatter) -Dorothy: Sure enough,
the guy had brain dysfunction
and a history of hideous abuse.
A few weeks later, I saw I got a call again.
"We have another guy."
His name was Nollie Martin.
Apparently, someone had run over his head with a car,
and there was a dent in his head.
So, I wrote it up.
A colleague of mine said to me,
"Dorothy, think of it this way.
"If you put your finger in a haystack
"and you get tapped by a needle, that's by chance.
"But if you put your finger in the haystack a second time,
and again you're stuck by a needle," he said,
"there are a lot of needles there."
Burr: When a murder happens, you wonder why.
I've always been of the view that there are some reasons
that they happen. Not because people
are inherently bad or evil.
I don't believe in evil. (laughs)
Anybody who pulls a trigger and squeezes a life out of somebody
for the calculated reason of starting a race war
where other people would be killed is evil.
Well, evil is a religious concept.
It's not a scientific concept.
And what society wants to do
with a person like that is up to society.
But, it at least helps to know what motivates
a serial killer or what motivates a...
-Right, hatred. That's what's motivating it. -Well, it's more than that.
There's much more than that.
Burr: You know, we all sort of just saw the light,
and began to realize from working with Dorothy that
we had to get a lot more information about people's lives.
Yeager: We had defense attorneys
from different parts of the country start to call us
as a team to see their tough cases.
These tended not to be open-and-shut cases
of people doing violent things. These were puzzles.
I have now seen 22 serial killers.
A lot of other plain-old killers,
(chuckle) but 22 serial killers.
And what we tend to find is
when you couple either a predisposition to psychosis
and/or some kind of brain dysfunction,
with a history of horrible early ongoing abuse,
you get a super-dangerous person.
And what is fascinating is you can find
what were the social, the psychological,
the biological forces that came together to create
this murderous human being.
It's like being a detective, which I love.
I truly love it.
(birds chirping)
(coffee machine humming)
-(cafe chatter) -Dorothy: Thanks so much.
-Thank you. Yeah. -Barista: You're welcome.
(cars honking)
(elevator bell dings)
Teacher: The only way to approach a drawing is to feel free.
If you have that freedom in you,
it's gonna show in your drawing.
As long as we keep in mind,
stepping back, looking at what we're doing,
and then going back and making changes.
Changes are very important.
I always say to the students,
remember those first drawings you were doing,
and then you were unhappy with them?
Those drawings allows you actually
to do what you have been doing now.
And so, that's why I always talk about the process
and making changes all the time...
♪ ♪
Dorothy: Any case I've worked on,
I came as a blank slate,
and saw whatever I saw.
Over time, the complete picture came to light.
Early in my career, I evaluated a woman,
Marie Moore.
She lived in an apartment with her 14-year-old daughter,
and her daughter's boyfriend.
The boyfriend was
a particularly sadistic kind of person.
-(woman giggling) -Somehow, Marie got
sexually involved with the boyfriend.
And a girlfriend of her daughter came over,
-and Marie and the boyfriend -(door creaking)
-took her captive. -(shuts)
They kept her naked, just in diapers.
-(cuffs click) -They handcuffed her
and toe-cuffed her to the floor.
They shoved things into every orifice
that a person has.
And then, one day, the 14-year-old boy
dragged her over to the bathroom
and knocked her head
-(thud) -against the tub and killed her.
(dripping)
The body was discovered and they were arrested.
(police siren, radio chatter)
The boy ratted on Marie.
It was the boy who had actually killed her,
but, being a juvenile, he was offered a plea,
and Marie was tried
-for this murder. -(phone ringing)
I got a call from an attorney asking me
whether I would do an evaluation of Marie.
The lawyer said something to me about how
he thought she was a multiple.
Well, I had been trained that there was no such thing.
♪ ♪
I went to see her,
and she reminded me of me.
I was wearing big glasses and she was wearing big glasses.
We were talking and I asked her
had anyone ever bothered her sexually,
and she said,
"No! No! No!
Absolutely not!"
I had been told that
people around her said that she changed.
That sometimes, her voice became gruff,
and she wanted to be called Billy.
So I asked her about this, and she said,
"Well, people tell me that I get that way,
"that I become like a boy,
but I don't remember it. I don't think so."
♪ ♪
It was getting to be about 5:00,
and the investigator
stuck his head in the door, and he said, you know,
"We have to go." And I said, "Marie,
I have to stop now, but I'll be back to see you."
And she said, "Don't go."
She said, "There's something I have to tell you."
In just that tone. And so, I sat.
And, uh, sat.
And I said, "You know, Marie,
I really have to go."
And then I gathered up my papers,
and I turn my back and put my hand
on the doorknob, and I hear
behind me a voice that said...
(gruffly): "Don't go."
(laughs) You know, the hairs on my arm stood up.
And I turned around and I said...
"Billy?" And he says...
(gruffly): "Hello."
♪ ♪
I said, "Billy, how long have you known Marie?"
And he said, "I've known her all her life."
I said to him,
"Did her father ever bother her
in any way?" And Billy said,
"Sure, he did.
"He used to put pencils
"in her vagina, in her rectum.
"When she was 12 years old, he went to bed with her
and he had sex with her."
And I said, "Billy,
I really need to talk to Marie again."
But Billy said,
"I could kill her.
"I could make her take pills.
I could make her hang herself."
That turned out to be the very first multiple that--
Not the first I've ever seen.
The first that I ever knew I saw.
♪ ♪
I had her have psychological testing.
And on the Rorschach test,
which is a projective test,
you look at inkblots and see what people see,
and there are certain normal responses
and certain psychotic kinds of responses.
And Billy's test results were
as psychotic as they come,
and Marie had absolutely
the most normal Rorschach that you would expect.
I'm fascinated by how can there be such
different functioning in the same brain?
My daughter Gillian says,
"Mom, you're the only one who does
group therapy with one person."
♪ ♪
Narrator: I would never again see people as I had before.
My innocence, which sprang from ignorance,
would be stripped away,
and I would learn things about human beings
that I'd not been taught during my training as a psychiatrist.
Things most of us would rather not know.
Violent alternate personalities
are usually caricatures of evil,
created in the minds of tormented children
to take their pain and defend them
against real or imagined enemies.
They embody the strength, courage, and wiliness
needed for a tortured child to survive.
Though some mental health experts say
Multiple Personality Disorder doesn't exist,
the American Psychiatric Association says it does,
calling it Dissociative Identity Disorder,
and adding, in most cases, it involves
severe abuse or trauma in childhood.
Parts of the mind splitting from each other...
Dorothy: Before Freud, people like Janet talked about
consciousness at many different levels,
like streams running parallel to each other.
♪ ♪
Haven't you ever driven and been kind of
into your own thoughts and you pass the exit
that you meant to get off at
'cause you were really thinking about something else?
-We all, from time to time, dissociate. -(fireworks popping)
It's a continuum.
There are degrees all the way to where,
for a period of time, the individual
truly believes himself to be someone else.
At Bellevue, we ran a clinic for children
with Dissociative Identity Disorder,
and it became clear that it starts
very, very, very early.
I worked with one child, let's call her Nancy,
and she had an alter named Amanda.
Uh...
Around 7 or 8.
-7 or 8? What did you do for her? -Mm-hmm.
-I talked to her. -(clicks pen)
You talked to her?
-What about? -(clicks pen)
What happened.
Dorothy: Nancy was referred to me
by a social worker.
She had been abused by a relative.
Dorothy: I have videos of Nancy going through
so many different kinds of stages.
♪ ♪
Also, Nancy kept a diary.
Her different personas had different handwriting.
Different spelling!
Narrator: Alternate personalities leave evidence
of their existence all over the place.
Teacher reports, social service records,
medical charts, journals,
diaries, drawings.
All are pieces of the puzzle that reveal the picture
of a divided, often fragmented mind.
These constitute the evidence needed to show
that Multiple Personality Disorder existed
years before the diagnosis was even considered.
They're proof that the interviewer
did not create the disorder.
(applause)
Gibney: So when you start to present some of your findings
-to other psychiatric colleagues... -Dorothy: Yeah.
...what was their reaction? Was it welcoming?
Oh sure. (laughs) No.
If you were an esteemed clinician,
researcher, psychologist, psychiatrist,
you did not take that seriously.
That was a bogus diagnosis.
Dorothy: I got ridiculed a lot
at Yale, where I showed
some of the most poignant pictures of small children,
and you saw them switch,
and you could give the history of what had happened to them.
Even when they saw it right in front of their faces,
the head of one of the departments said,
"There must be another explanation."
(laughs) And so I thought,
"Tell me what it is. I'm open to that." But, uh,
so, there was...
Well, I think there still is a skepticism.
♪ ♪
At Bellevue, we had a lot of room
to spread out our data and to videotape
and stuff like that and then
they hired someone who was very hostile to our work
and took away all our space, and, eventually, I left.
(machine humming)
(footsteps)
H, I, J...
These files are filled with death row inmates,
or evaluations that we've done
on murderers who were going to trial.
(rattling)
There are also records of what we discovered
and then what the law was willing to accept.
♪ ♪
-(typing) -(indistinct chatter)
Man 1: She was just snatched off the street...
Man 2: Found a body...
Man 3: Possibility of strangulation...
Man 4: You would not be able to recognize the face of the body.
Man 5: Postmortem mutilation of the victims...
Man 6: It is one of the most significant arrests...
Arthur J. Shawcross...
Served 15 years in prison for the murder of two children.
1987, he was released on parole.
Man 7: He is a severely emotionally disturbed man.
Woman:
Whether this defendant was legally insane
is a question of fact for you to decide.
Narrator: Arthur Shawcross was preparing to go to trial
in Rochester, New York.
Before I even laid eyes on the defendant,
his lawyers had obtained an MRI of his brain.
The MRI had shown that at the very tip
of his right temporal lobe was a small fluid cyst.
♪ ♪
The brain is a very sensitive organ.
The tiniest scar or tumor or cyst
can, under certain circumstances,
trigger abnormal electric activity
and seizures associated with bizarre,
animalistic behaviors.
Here is the frontal lobe,
and the frontal lobes restrain.
They're the part that kind of says,
"Well, I might want another piece of cake,
but I'm not gonna have it."
Or, "I might like to rape this lady, but maybe I can find some...
more appropriate (laughs) whatever."
There's a deep part of the brain called
the limbic system.
This limbic system has to do with food,
with sex, with anger,
with you name it.
It's the very primitive part of the brain.
There are a lot of connections between the lobes
and the limbic system.
I think of it as reins on a horse.
So, with Shawcross,
the cyst in his temporal lobe
would excite the limbic system,
and put it out of whack.
But then, Jonathan Pincus said, "Dorothy,
what about the scars in the frontal lobe?"
♪ ♪
And, you know, it's incredible.
The reins on the horse had been cut,
and he was triggered.
If somebody said, "I'll tell the police,"
or, "I'll tell your mother."
That would snap him, and he would kill.
-Dorothy: Do you know me? No? I'm Dr. Lewis. -No.
Would it be okay to talk with you a little bit? Yeah?
I videotaped Arthur Shawcross, yes.
Yeah. Oh, he was a character.
Dorothy:
And, you know...
(birds chirping, animals calling)
I just...
Dorothy: From day one, I said,
"I think he has temporal lobe seizures
from everything he told me."
The person may see very bright lights,
the person may get nauseated, the person...
may feel a headache or dizzy,
followed by sleep.
Dorothy: What would happen is the girl would be in his car
or his van,
and he would kill her,
and he'd fall sound asleep.
And he'd wake up,
and it was kinda, "Oops. I must've done it again."
Shawcross:
(police chatter)
Yeager: Something that was telling about how his brain worked
was we interviewed the wife separately,
and she did not believe he had done anything bad.
She saw him as this loving man
who worked nights. He was a cook in a cafeteria.
And then he would be done early in the morning,
and our best guess was if he was gonna commit a murder,
it would be sometime in the dark in the middle of the night
or towards dawn.
And he would tell his wife,
"You know, there's a serial murderer around. Don't go out."
(laughs) So, when she told us that,
you know, at that point, we had an inkling
that there was something not right.
Dorothy:
(in falsetto): Bessie.
Bessie!
(paper crinkling)
Narrator: It became clear that Arthur Shawcross experienced
dissociative states.
At these times, he would hear his mother in his head,
berating him and the women he was seeing.
No one was good enough for Artie. They should die.
Dorothy:
-I hurt all of them. -Dorothy: What?
(scoffs)
Dorothy:
He lifted up his fist.
There was no way that I could get out,
and I thought that he was going to attack me.
Dorothy: A knife?
(sighs)
Dorothy:
(sighs)
Dorothy: Who are you cutting?
Dorothy: One of his victims
had been sliced from her neck
all the way down to her pubic area.
-(police chatter) -(siren)
Dorothy:
(in childish voice):
Dorothy:
(whimpers)
Where is she biting you, Art?
Art, Art, where is she--
Dorothy:
(whimpers)
Narrator: I had no question that Mr. Shawcross
had been severely abused.
School records described his mother
as punishing and rejecting.
In grade school, the young Arthur cowered under radiators
-while the other children sang songs. -(distant singing)
Psychological tests revealed
a seriously disturbed child,
lost in a fantasy in which he perceived himself
a new person.
(normal voice):
Opening arguments began today
in the Shawcross murder trial, and late this afternoon,
the first witnesses were called to the stand.
Defense Attorney Thomas Cocuzzi
contends that his client's sanity
is in question. Cocuzzi told jurors
that he will put an expert psychiatrist,
Dr. Dorothy Lewis, on the stand.
Thomas Cocuzzi: And you're going to hear aspects
of his medical records and his school records
and his prison records...
reflecting his behavior
not since his arrest,
but throughout his life.
-Gibney: You were testifying for the defense. -Yes, I was.
But what's interesting with him--
Gibney: To keep him from being executed?
Well, not really 'cause it was New York,
and they don't execute people in New York.
But the defense was arguing
he should be in an institution, not in prison.
And I had said to the lawyers,
"We're gonna be educating the public.
"Look, you can show the jury pictures
"of the MRI.
"You can see the cyst.
"You can see the scars in the frontal lobe.
Go with that." And they didn't.
Instead, they ran with the dissociative symptoms.
Dorothy (on video):
(in falsetto):
But that's a much tougher diagnosis for a jury.
I mean, it, it just seems so fantastic.
Dorothy (on video):
Dorothy: 11?
-Shawcross (on video): -Dorothy (on video): No?
Narrator: I had been tricked.
What about the neurological findings?
By the time I took the stand,
it was clear that Shawcross' attorneys
were not going to produce a neurologist.
Your Honor, I was lied to, and therefore,
I cannot credibly testify
without clarifying what I was told,
what I was told was being done,
-and then what I... -Burr: Dorothy had a hard time on the witness stand.
She was always involved in so many things.
She would come to wherever the hearing was,
and she wouldn't have sort of
gathered her thoughts and,
you know, kinda systematized her thinking.
Dorothy's not linear, um.
And that's part of her genius.
But it's also part of...
frustration in trying to,
to bring her into a system
that requires linearity, like the legal system.
-(indistinct) -Dorothy: Your Honor, may I please request
a recess for 15 minutes
because I do not feel prepared to go on right now.
Narrator: I was repeatedly chastised by the judge
for not responding directly to questions with a succinct
yes or no.
I looked clumsy and disorganized.
This is not the way psychiatry works. It is not the way...
Narrator: The prosecution hired Park Dietz, one of the most
highly regarded forensic psychiatrists in the nation,
a man who had been a consultant at the FBI and CIA.
He was a handsome, confident man who never appeared hassled.
It was very clear what was happening on the videotapes,
that Dr. Lewis was inviting him
to play various performances.
She invited him to play the role
of his mother, even telling him that
he can take on the role of his mother and talk like his mother,
and he even does it in a falsetto voice.
Gibney: Do you buy the whole idea of Multiple Personality Disorder?
No. (laughs) I think it's a hoax.
I think it is a sad fact
that people in my profession
were so eager to find something
that they did a form of interviewing
that can cause vulnerable people
to believe they have more than one personality.
Dorothy:
Dietz: Dr. Lewis subjected Shawcross
to a kind of a hypnosis during part of her interview.
Dorothy:
Dorothy: You don't like to use hypnosis if you can avoid it.
But it was early in my career at the Shawcross trial.
Hypnosis is questionable.
People who can be hypnotized can also-- are very suggestible.
If you do use hypnosis, you want to
confirm what was said,
either from other relatives,
friends, hospital records, school records.
You just can't believe everything.
Dietz: During a hypnotic session,
he identified himself as a 13th century cannibal.
Yeah?
Dorothy:
He exhibited none of that with me.
Dietz:
He answered to his name,
as he had to everybody else throughout his entire life,
except Dorothy Lewis.
And he understood how, where, when, and why
he did every one of those murders.
Any popular notion that serial killers
are crazy people is just wrong.
We have no way to know how many men
have as their favorite sexual fantasy
strangling a woman to death
until her tongue protrudes from her mouth
and you hear the last breath leave her body.
But I bet it isn't related only to those few men
who do that routinely.
Gibney: This was a guy who did
some pretty grisly things to his victims.
Well, he...
ate the vagina of one of them,
and, uh, you know,
I thought that was pretty bizarre, and I've seen a lot.
Nobody with a taste for that.
Dorothy: On the stand,
Park Dietz said he ate the vagina
to hide the DNA.
Surely, Doctor, there must be an easier way
to get rid of the evidence. (laughs)
♪ ♪
Dietz: Ultimately, it was my opinion
that Shawcross was not insane
under the law, and that he knew what he was doing,
knew it was wrong.
Gibney: "What kind of sane person
would eat the vaginas of his victims?"
I guess would be what an average person like me might say.
One has nothing to do with the other.
Whether you are responsible for a murder you did
is unrelated to whether you once ate a raw rabbit
or a raw vagina.
Cold, calculating,
and remorseless.
For whom killing
was not an emotional disturbance.
Yeager: Siragusa was the prosecutor on the case,
and he was running for office.
And so, I think she was the recipient
of his need to
show that he's a tough guy on crime.
-And you said-- -Dorothy: Said that they might've been caused...
-by a stroke. -Excuse me, Doctor. Can you answer--
Can you try, Doctor, just to answer our question?
-Shh. -Can you hear me, Doctor?
Yeager: And he was gonna put her into the mud because that
would help his cause, and he did get elected.
I would never say anything
about Dr. Lewis other than to comment that
I think her performance in court speaks for itself.
You know, Dorothy paved the way
for a whole generation
of mental health professionals who followed in her steps.
But she was a pioneer, and pioneers are often...
you know, not treated well.
I think there was an intuitive recognition
on the part of prosecutors, uh,
that what she had to say
bore heavily on the truth.
And the truth is not
what some prosecutors wanted.
She swallowed the stories he told hook, line, and sinker.
Gibney: So when you were on the stand,
the attorney on the other side, the prosecuting attorney
-was making fun of you for thinking that there was -Yes.
-such a thing as multiple personalities. -Yeah. Yes. Yeah.
Or for anything else (laughs) you know.
The local radio station made up jingles about me.
DJ: The boys have written a song in Dorothy's honor
and I hope it comes out alright.
♪ Hey, look who's on the stand again ♪
(country music)
♪ Back to defend her killer friend ♪
♪ Got her psychiatry degree ♪
♪ Hoo Lord! ♪
♪ Now, she's on Arthur's side you see ♪
♪ She tries to justify what's wrong ♪
♪ Because his mother played with his dong, hey, hey! ♪
♪ Yakety yak, Dorothy's back ♪
-Yeah. -Gibney: They were making fun of you because--
just because you were on his side, or because
you were evincing a particular theory about him?
How about all of the above?
All of the above, you know, uh...
Yeah.
Members of the jury,
how do you find in the matter of
the People of the State of New York vs. Arthur Shawcross?
Foreman: Guilty.
Narrator: It took the jury less than two hours
to find Mr. Shawcross sane
and guilty of the murders of 10 women.
It took me three years to recover
from my three weeks on the stand.
No one had believed a word I said.
-Reporter: Do you think Dorothy Lewis let you down? -Don't block me, please.
I have no comment on Dr. Dorothy Lewis.
-Thank you. -(door shutting)
Dorothy: What are you doing? What's happening?
(whimpering) No more.
Narrator: Was Arthur Shawcross crazy when he murdered his victims
and consumed their genitalia?
Of course. He had to be.
Insane?
Not necessarily.
(birds chirping)
-Gibney: When a defense attorney hires you... -Dorothy: Yeah? Mm-hmm.
-in the legal system, for what purpose do they hire you? -Dorothy: Yeah.
Well, uh, you know,
I don't really care for what purpose
'cause I do the same evaluation.
They're probably hoping that I will find
the person is stark raving mad. (laughs) But, uh...
The law has a lot to learn from psychiatry.
And instead, psychiatry accepts the legal definition
of what's crazy and what isn't crazy.
They have a notion of competence,
and a notion of insanity,
both of which don't make sense psychiatrically.
There are different levels of competence.
"Oh, well, I know what a courtroom is.
A courtroom is where there's a judge and there's a jury."
"And do you know what you're accused of?"
"Oh yeah. I'm accused of robbery,
of murder, and..."
Done, you know? He's competent.
This is the law, period.
Burr: In the Middle Ages in England,
they had the death penalty, and the legal system
had the view if somebody had become mad,
that madness itself was enough punishment.
That's part of the English common law
that came with the English colonists to North America.
At some point though,
in death penalty cases in the United States,
that notion got lost.
That madness was punishment enough,
and people could be executed
despite being very psychotic.
And as late as the 1950s,
the US Supreme Court had examined a case like that,
and said that doesn't offend the Constitution.
It's not cruel and unusual to do that.
Dorothy: You're competent to be executed
if you know what you've been found guilty of,
and if you know what it is to be executed.
Now, that's a pretty low bar, wouldn't you say?
By and large, the law has taken on
the very simple-minded criterion
that ignores all that we know now
about how the human brain works,
about some of the genetics of disorders.
(applause, cheering)
When Clinton was running for president,
he was called back to Arkansas
to sign a death warrant because he was governor.
Apparently, Ricky Ray was used to having his dinner
at a certain time and saving the dessert for later.
And he...
saved his pecan pie
for after the execution.
Now, I would say he didn't know what it meant to be executed.
But my colleagues found him perfectly competent
to be executed.
And I don't know who ate the pie.
(applause, cheering)
♪ ♪
Max (singing): ♪ Mrs. Mooney has a pie shop ♪
♪ Does good business, but I've noticed something weird ♪
♪ Lately, all the neighbors' cats have disappeared ♪
♪ Wouldn't do in my shop ♪
♪ Just the thought of it's enough to make you sick ♪
♪ And I'm telling you them pussycats is quick ♪
♪ No denying times is hard, sir ♪
♪ Even harder than the worst pies in London-- ♪
More pies.
Eat the flesh.
♪ Eat his body, drink his blood ♪
Narrator: I am haunted by the prospect of condemning
to death a person whose upbringing
and brain function have made it hard,
if not impossible, for him to control his acts.
Granted, the person may be a menace.
I have no problem locking him up
and throwing away the key.
Until we know how to treat such individuals,
the public must be protected.
Dorothy:
(bird chirping)
Max was brought to the prison ward at Bellevue
because this was the second time
that he had tried to kill a lover.
♪ ♪
I was called by one of the doctors
because they believed that he had
Multiple Personality Disorder.
I was asked to confirm the diagnosis,
and then we kinda clicked.
-(Dorothy laughs) -So, I went to see him frequently.
Party tonight.
As far as we could tell, Max had been
tortured by his mother.
Dorothy: Where would she hit you?
She punched...
she punched and she...
She had big long nails, and she used to break...
-Dorothy: Really? -She used to dig them into your skin.
Do you have any marks where she hurt you?
Do I have any marks where she hurt me?
I see marks here,
-little bit I think here, yeah. -Max: Yeah.
-And also right here. -Dorothy: Mm-hmm, yeah.
Marks where I had to kneel on glass.
-Dorothy: What do you mean, kneel on glass? -I had broken some,
and she said, "Well, clean it up."
And so, she pushed me down on the floor, and I,
you know, there was glass on the floor, and I said,
"Well, let me get up." She said, "Clean it up.
You broke it. Clean it up," she said.
-(slapping, growl) -Dorothy: Stop it!
-(gibberish) -Dorothy: ...terrible things.
(gibberish)
(in haughty voice): But you cannot see him?
Why is that we can see him-- Can you see him?
-Mm, no. -He's there.
-Who? -You...
-You cannot see him? -Dorothy: There was
a very strong, often cruel,
part of him, Kalki,
who was almost god-like in the way he viewed himself.
Whatever I do is good.
Dorothy:
He was the one who stabbed Max's lovers.
It was the game.
(gibberish)
(mumbling)
Dorothy: And then there's Jabreel,
and Jabreel was an old man.
A Zen monk.
(lightly): You see? That is love there. That is love.
She would hold him sometimes...
Dorothy: He seemed to have developed as a comforter for Max.
-Max also talked about a baby. -(whining)
(whining continues)
Yeager: He was a very bright young man
and had some insight
into what was going on in his head.
So we would say to him, "Max,
"if a 12-year-old kid had the same kinds
"of switching that you have,
what kinds of questions would you ask him?"
I would ask them...
if they had a place...
-(water flowing) -they can go
that nobody else can go to.
A place inside themselves
where nobody else could go to.
-(birds chirping) -That would seem like that no one else is there.
And I would say, "Is it a beach? Is it trees?"
I would say, "What is it? Where do you go?
"Where do you go when
you just feel like going someplace else?"
♪ ♪
It's a very special thing to do, and not many people can do that.
-Dorothy: So you'd say it's very special? -I'd say it's very special.
Yeager: And then we would try it out on the kids,
and he was spot on.
That's how bright and insightful he was,
but he couldn't help himself.
-Dorothy: What games are you playing? -Hm.
Dorothy: The last time you played games,
-you got him into a lot of trouble. -Hm.
-Dorothy: What are you doing, Kalki? -Hm.
Don't pull that "hm" on me.
-Hello, Kalki. Yeah, I know you're there. -I am here.
I know you're there, and I know most people don't
-talk to you straight. -Hm.
But I am miffed. I thought we had an agreement.
You and Jabreel had an agreement.
-I thought we did. I thought we did! -We did not.
I thought that went--
Do you speak any French?
You know ça va sans dire.
-It goes without saying. -Saying. (laughs)
Maybe we clicked because I didn't play favorites.
If you notice, I'm empathic to every one of them.
Well, Kalki certainly has a lot of strength.
(lightly): Yes, he is very strong, isn't he?
Dorothy: You never badmouth, especially the abuser.
That is-- that's an invitation to murder.
-(ominous music) -(thunder rumbling)
♪ ♪
One day, I came into my office,
and my secretary handed me one of these telephone slips,
and it said,
"Mr. Scorsese's office has called,
and would like you to call back."
So I called back,
and an assistant of his said,
"Mr. Scorsese has discovered that you see murderers.
"Robert De Niro is going to be in a remake
"of 'Cape Fear,' and he would like
"to meet some murderers.
Can you arrange that?"
It was so funny. I felt like,
would you say, a casting director?
So I asked Max.
He really had attempted to murder twice.
Oh yes, I could talk to him.
Dorothy: Max said sure, he would talk with him.
-I said, "Well, how about Kalki?" -(haughty): Yes.
-"And Jabreel?" And Jabreel said... -(lightly): Oh, yes.
Dorothy: So we made an arrangement for De Niro
to go into the prison ward.
At first, Max seemed puzzled.
And I said, "Max, you must know him.
You've seen 'Taxi Driver.'"
And he said, "I've never seen 'Taxi Driver.'"
I said, "Max, Mr. De Niro's going to make
"a movie out of a man
who has trouble with his temper."
Oh! (grunts)
(Dorothy laughing)
And I said, "I know
"Kalki has had trouble with his temper.
"I would like very much
for Mr. De Niro to meet Kalki."
♪ ♪
And the next thing I know, Max really metamorphoses
to this haughty--
The chin came up.
You know, he really looks different.
The whole visage is, you know, different.
The muscles.
I said, "Kalki, this is Mr. De Niro.
Mr. De Niro, this is Kalki."
And Kalki says,
"Oh, you were so good in 'Taxi Driver'!"
Dorothy: Tell me, what has happened to your case since--
No, nothing's happened. It will take a long time.
I do not care what happens.
-I wish they had the death penalty. -Oh!
I wish they had the death penalty. I would happily have it.
-Since wha-- Because when... -Dorothy: Why?
(voice breaking): I-I will tell you why. Because...
when a dog goes mad, you shoot it, don't you?
And a person's worth more than a dog,
and if, and if...
if you were that kind to a dog,
why not be that kind to a human being
and just shoot him or something?
Dorothy: Max had some good lawyers who cared about him,
and they asked me if I would write
a note saying that he was no longer dangerous
and that he should be discharged from there,
and I said no.
He had twice, in his altered states,
tried to kill.
And I had no reason to believe
that he wouldn't do it again.
And even though we had a lovely relationship,
you know, I've seen enough to know that
people can turn on a dime.
They were very, very angry at me,
but they found another psychiatrist who was willing
to write a note, and he was discharged.
I think Max never really forgave me.
(cars honking)
♪ ♪
(snow falling)
Where is Dad? Where is he?
-Gillian Lewis: Oh, there he is. -Eric: Here's Dad.
-Dorothy: Is this Dad? Yay. -Eric: Yeah.
Dorothy: I like that Royal Army Medical Corps, huh?
-Eric: It looks great. -Yes.
-Gillian: Design is so nice. -Beautifully done.
-Yeah. -Eric: It says, "scholar, editor, teacher."
-I forgot that we put that. -Gillian: You left out, you know,
-husband, father. -Dorothy: Husband, father.
-Gillian: Cool dude. -Eric: Funny guy.
Dorothy: I bought four places.
So which-- now which one of you wants to be where?
I wanna be there. I think we have that.
Eric: Yeah, you have to be next to dad.
And then the one back there, one back there.
-Eric: That works. -Dorothy: Yeah. Okay.
-Gillian: This is the weirdest conversation. -(laughs)
♪ ♪
(projector clicking)
Dorothy: I first met Mel in medical school at Yale.
I was a student, and he was
an assistant professor in psychiatry.
I bumped into him in the medical school library.
That night, I got a call.
He asked me out.
And I remember sitting in my chair,
and it spun, and just spinning around in it,
going, "Whee!"
I knew in a week I really, really liked this person,
and I didn't forgive Mel
because it took him two weeks to ask me to marry him.
(baby crying)
You know, he was a lot older than I.
And so, I spent a fair amount of time
when he was going off to meetings and things like that,
I was back here.
Gillian: When we were little, Mom brought us
to our music lessons,
and we'd do art projects with her.
Whereas my father, I remember
climbing over him and wrestling
in the living room, or stuff like that.
They were two very complementary forms
of bringing up a kid.
My father was the very playful one...
and my mom was kinda the inspirational one.
My career took off in a way I hadn't planned it.
♪ ♪
My work on juveniles condemned to death was cited
in several Supreme Court decisions,
but success did affect my family.
I made some teaching tapes of Arthur Shawcross.
And some of the things that he went through...
(childish): She squeezed my thingy.
...were terribly unsettling to my kids.
Now, they're kind of interested in it.
(typing)
My mom does her writing by hand,
and then I type up what she's given me.
I'm like a fast hunt- and-peck-type typist,
so it could be worse.
(printing)
-(footsteps) -Dorothy: Hey, Eric?
-Eric: Hey, Mom! -Dorothy: Yeah?
-Eric: I'm done. -That's beautiful.
Thanks, Mom, but read it over
because I probably made a few mistakes.
-Dorothy: Okay. -I love you.
I love you.
Oh, thank you so much.
-You're so welcome. I'll be back soon. -Yeah, okay.
-Alright, I love you, Ma. -I love you.
-Uber carefully! -I will.
(door shuts)
Woman 1: I will never forget that moment,
-or never forget that day. -(glass breaking)
Woman 2: The loss, the tragedy.
♪ ♪
Woman 3:
Woman 4: The guy oughta just be killed.
Dorothy: Johnny Frank Garrett had climbed into
the window of a convent,
and he had gotten into the room of a nun.
He left all the fingerprints,
he left the knives.
This was not a genius we were dealing with.
(laughs) And an arch-criminal? Uh-uh.
Narrator: It was not always easy to understand Johnny Garrett.
He was forever changing.
Shortly after confessing,
he insisted that he had nothing to do with the murder.
Hence, he refused to sign the confession
he had just provided.
To the trial court, he was a liar, pure and simple.
Johnny Frank Garrett,
thief, rapist, murderer, liar,
was not crazy. He was bad.
Johnny was dispatched to death row in Huntsville
to await execution.
♪ ♪
We were doing a study
of 14 juveniles under the age of 18
who were sentenced to death.
Johnny related in a bizarre fashion,
and he talked to voices.
He clearly was hallucinating.
We wrote reports on everybody we saw
and sent them to lawyers,
but this one, I was more detailed about
because at that point, he was the sickest
of the death row people I had ever seen.
I'd never seen somebody so flamboyantly psychotic.
I diagnosed schizophrenia with brain damage
and a history of seizures.
But then, I saw a video.
"48 Hours" interviewed him.
You're saying you didn't commit the murder?
No, I didn't. I didn't commit neither one of 'em,
rape or murder.
The hell would I go and do somethin' like that for?
Reporter: Johnny Garrett claims he talks
to his dead Aunt Barbara...
Sometimes she'll answer, sometimes she won't.
Reporter: ...who he says often appears in his death row cell.
-What does she tell you? -That they're not gonna kill me.
That they can't kill me.
Dorothy: Immediately, I realized he's a multiple.
That's all she'll say is they cannot kill me.
Dorothy: Years later, I was reading the "Times."
"Pope asks for clemency
for death row inmate Johnny Frank Garrett."
And I couldn't believe it.
(church bell ringing)
Narrator: Ann Richards, the governor of Texas,
found herself in a quandary.
According to the material she had read,
the condemned was obviously demented.
Texas was about to execute a crazy man
for an act committed as a crazy boy.
If there was ever a case deserving of clemency,
this was it.
On the other hand, Texas was still the no-nonsense state.
♪ ♪
In fact, Texas was running neck-and-neck with Florida
for the distinction of executing
the greatest number of criminals
since the death penalty was re-instituted
in 1976.
No governor of Texas
who granted clemency outright
could rely on reelection.
The Texas governor would convene a clemency board.
It would act as another jury.
If, after pondering all the evidence,
it voted to spare the prisoner,
so be it.
Nobody could then accuse
this governor of being soft on crime.
Who was the political pawn whose life hung in the balance?
Johnny Frank Garrett.
He was coming up for a clemency trial.
Dorothy: See, you can see a light in here,
and you can see if it's playing.
So I found out who his lawyer was,
and called her, and I said,
"I goofed. I made a mistake.
"I will come down to Texas,
no fee, no charge, nothing."
It's pretty clear that he dissociates.
He had a persona, a violent one, Aaron Shockman.
Dorothy:
(low whistle)
On about-- I guess I had to be
in fifth grade 'cause I met him--
Well, didn't meet him. I...
-Dorothy: How did you meet him first? -I got beat up.
And what happened when you got beat up?
-I became Aaron Shockman. -At that time?
And what did you do?
-Well, he beat them up. -Really?
He's older than me...
-mentally. -He's older than you?
-Intellectually. -Mm-hmm.
-He's smarter than I am. -Mm-hmm.
Dorothy: He would pause between what he was telling me,
and his eyes would kind of go up,
and you see that often
with people who are talking to someone
in their head.
Dorothy:
Dorothy: That's right.
Dorothy: Yeah.
Johnny:
♪ ♪
Dorothy: He needed someone to take pain.
Dorothy:
Dorothy: Yes?
Dorothy: Yes? Yes?
Dorothy:
(indistinct)
Narrator: I'd once heard a lecture by an FBI agent.
He talked about how children used in pornography
feared for the rest of their lives that their identities
and the perverted acts they were once forced to perform
will someday come to light.
Johnny was more terrified of being recognized
in the pornographic films he had made as a child
than he was of his impending execution.
Dorothy: Mm-hmm.
Aaron was talking with me.
Again, Johnny's eyes
kinda looked up,
and I said, "What's happening?"
Dorothy: Is someone talking to you now?
Who's talking to you, Aaron?
-What's go-- What's happening? -That bitch.
Dorothy: Aaron said, "That bitch Barbara,
she wants to get rid of me."
-Gibney: Aunt Barbara? -Yeah. There was Aunt Barbara.
She was another alter of Johnny's,
and she was near-sighted.
-I can't see you. -Dorothy: What?
I can't see you.
-Dorothy: What do you mean, you can't see me? -You're blurred.
-Dorothy: And what's your name? -Barbara.
Narrator: A condemned person must understand
the nature of the crime for which he is being executed.
He must also understand the fact
that he is about to die for it.
In Johnny's case, Aunt Barbara had promised repeatedly
that Johnny would not die.
I'm not gonna let that happen to him.
-Dorothy: What do you mean? -I'm gonna stop it.
Dorothy: How could you do that?
They will kill me, not him.
Dorothy: Really? They would kill you,
and then what would happen with him?
He would still be alive.
♪ ♪
Dorothy: I testified the following day.
We had reams of data
about his intelligence, his mental condition.
This is how you create a psychotic individual.
And we had clips
of him in some of these states.
When he doesn't want to remember...
he gives me the memories.
Dorothy: But the clemency board didn't give a damn.
Reporter: Board members came out to vote 17-to-1
to carry out the execution.
Garrett's only real hope now
is a personal pardon from the governor.
That's unlikely, and he faces death by lethal injection...
Dorothy: Yeah.
(door slams)
Narrator: To no one's surprise,
Aunt Barbara's plan did not come off,
and the poison flowed into Johnny's veins.
Witness accounts of the execution lead me to believe
that before the poison was injected,
it was Aaron, someone far tougher than Johnny,
who came to help him through his final ordeal.
Dorothy: His last words were something like,
"I'm sorry to my mother,
"sorry to the family of the nun,
and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves."
And I said, "Way to go."
Crowd (singing): ♪ Na-na, na, na! ♪
♪ Hey, hey, hey ♪
♪ Goodbye ♪
Reporter: To this group of mostly college students,
Johnny Frank Garrett represented
all that's wrong with our legal system.
With chants and candles,
they applauded Garrett's death by lethal injection,
saying the punishment must fit the crime.
Crowd (chanting): Texas, you know!
Death row has got to go!
Reporter: On the same side of the street,
but with an opposite view,
were members of Amnesty International.
The human rights group argue
that by executing a mentally unstable convict,
a greater crime was committed.
These hardened criminals
will never again murder, rape, or deal drugs.
As governor, I made sure they received
the ultimate punishment, death.
And Texas is a safer place for it.
Yeager: Back when we were doing a lot of this work,
the tenor of our culture at that time was really
crime and punishment, and not rehabilitation.
They are not just gangs of kids anymore.
They are often the kinds of kids that are called super predators.
No conscience, no empathy.
So I don't wanna ask
what made them do this.
They must be taken off the street.
Commercial: She's the only Democrat for governor
for the death penalty.
She's Dianne Feinstein.
When Dorothy and I first started working together,
and we were seeing our juveniles that were growing up,
so these were kids that she had seen at 14.
I saw them when they were in their 20s.
Man: Picture of a bird with a long...
Yeager: And, initially,
the state prisons had a rehabilitative model.
So they were teaching people how to read, write,
balance a checkbook, get a job, write a resume.
And then as we were getting more and more
into the work we were doing, the culture was changing
and the politicians were getting the message
that crime and punishment is what's important.
We don't want to rehabilitate.
It's too expensive, and who cares anyway?
If you come into our state
and you kill one of our children,
you kill a police officer,
you're involved with another crime
and you kill one of our citizens,
you will face the ultimate justice
in the state of Texas, and that is you will be executed.
-Moderator: What do you make of-- -(applause)
Burr: The rationales for the death penalty
have always been retribution and deterrence.
Keeping other people from engaging in the same behavior.
And all the studies, social science studies, have shown that
there's no deterrent effect from executions.
In fact, executions sort of bring
the act of killing into, uh,
the mainstream as acceptable.
In states where executions have gone up,
homicide rates have often gone up.
Dorothy: The legal system at this point
is most interested in incapacitating these people,
and you can't really blame them for that.
Their interest is in the public safety.
But, if you have that and only that,
and you don't try to figure out what it is that creates
these very dangerous people,
then you just run the risk of making
more and more and more prisons, and never preventing.
♪ ♪
Narrator: Ever since 1976,
juries have been obliged to consider the mitigating
as well as the aggravating circumstances of a murder.
Aggravating circumstances focus,
for the most part, on the grotesqueness of the crimes.
Was the victim tortured or raped or mutilated?
Was there more than one victim?
Then there are the mitigating circumstances.
These often focus on the defendant's abusive childhood
and on the issues of mental health.
Herein lies the contradiction.
The gruesomeness of the murder
is directly proportional
to the craziness of the murderer.
Now, ask a jury to wrestle with that equation
and come up with an answer. It can't be done.
Burr: The Supreme Court has always used that word "compassion"
in describing what's important about mitigation.
That it's something that allows
a compassionate impulse to work in jurors.
My hope, and others' hope,
in our community was that it would
expand to...
a view that serious mental illness
would exempt people from
even being sentenced to death to start with.
It hasn't, hasn't moved that direction.
Are the courts becoming more receptive?
Are juries becoming more receptive to this?
-Dorothy: No. -No.
Sawyer: This is Yale psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis
and her partner, neurologist Jonathan Pincus of Georgetown University.
They're trying to get courts to give Multiple Personality
different treatment under the law.
Which brings us to David Wilson,
convicted of murdering a stranger
who stopped to help when he thought
Wilson's car was broken down on the highway...
Man 1: Was shot point-blank with a 12-gauge shotgun...
Man 2: ...wallet still in the glove box.
-A savage act... -Man 3: What can you say after something
so shocking happens?
♪ ♪
Dorothy: David went into
some kind of state,
and he mistook
the guy who'd stopped to help him
for somebody dangerous, somebody in his life,
-and shot him and killed him. -(gunshot)
David: Wilson: Personally, I remember being in, in the car,
-but in the backseat sleeping. -Dorothy: Okay.
Wilson: I didn't know anybody got killed.
(video static)
-Dorothy: Is it working? -Man: Mm-hmm.
Dorothy: I went and examined him
after he was found guilty and sentenced to death.
I was quite startled
when I saw he had scars
all over his chest and all over his back,
and there was a burn scar.
Wilson:
Dorothy:
He had an alter named Juan.
Man:
Man: Juan?
Man: Lee?
Dorothy: And then he had another alter.
I think there were three of them.
Man:
-Man: -Dorothy:
Dorothy:
Dorothy: I do.
Dorothy:
David's father used to hang David up
by his stomach, with his trousers off.
Dorothy: Yeah?
-Dorothy: You... -(heavy breathing)
(sniffling)
Dorothy:
(sniffles)
Dorothy:
Dorothy: You don't remember...
What is, to you, the most telling thing
that convinces you?
-It's a constellation of things-- -And you've documented
-this independently? Not just his word? -Oh, yes.
No. Absolutely.
Because again, people sitting at home would say
he's got a lot to gain here.
-Well here, you know... -What? What does he have to gain?
-Getting hospitalized instead of jailed. -Dorothy: He doesn't want that.
I had a different impression from yours,
which was that he really did not want us
to see these switches.
And indeed, he doesn't really believe that they occur.
Dorothy: David touched me.
There's something about him that was so vulnerable and, uh,
and so innocent. There was a part that was...
♪ ♪
I got called to testify at the appeal.
And David was there.
And I was explaining his dissociative states,
and I stopped myself, and I said, "Your Honor,
"may I interrupt for a moment?
"Because David is not here right now,
but Juan has come."
He switched.
It was after that hearing
that the judge reduced the sentence to life.
-Dorothy: Do you remember me? -Yes.
-Yeah? What's my name? That's right. -Dorothy.
Dorothy: No civilized nation throughout history
has executed its insane.
So from a moral point of view,
you don't kill people who,
because of an illness,
act in an uncontrollable way.
Sawyer: But does this really mitigate
the horrible crime he committed?
He should be punished and punished severely,
but should he be put to death for that
if the main operative factors
in producing his violence were completely out of his control?
But under the law, he is still competent enough
to know right from wrong.
The issue is really whether the individual
has that degree of control
to conform his behavior
to the requirements of law.
♪ ♪
(banging)
Narrator: My daughter believes that the judge who sentences
a person to death should be responsible
for carrying out his sentence.
He should spring the trapdoor under the gallows,
press the button to deliver the current,
inject the poison.
-(church bells ringing) -She thinks then there would be fewer executions.
Most people, she believes,
would have trouble doing those things.
I'm not so sure.
Game Voice: Do you wonder what it is like to witness an electrocution?
Insert 25 cents,
then quickly pull the control handles
to administer capital punishment.
(electricity buzzing)
(clanking, banging)
Narrator: My question is, within our own society,
are there individuals who are able
to kill repeatedly,
and whose only psychopathology, if you could call it that,
is a lack of empathy for other human beings?
Are there real sociopaths?
♪ ♪
Reporter (on TV): The man on the left has killed almost
20 men in Louisiana
since December 1983.
He is sought after by the authorities,
-but only when it is time to kill again. -(chuckles)
Sam Jones is an executioner.
How many people do you think you've executed?
Sam Jones (on TV): Uh, I don't know the exact number.
Eighteen to 19, I'm not sure. I lose track.
Reporter: Sam usually works out of the death house
at the Angola State Prison in Louisiana,
but today, he's some 1,148 miles away,
up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he's working
at his other job as a licensed electrician.
Yeager: He was a traveling executioner.
So he would go wherever the execution needed to be.
"People" magazine had found this guy,
and I think he was probably advertising
his services pretty widely.
(laughs)
Jones (on TV): Warden, this is Sam Jones.
I was checking to see if I had any dates coming up.
Dorothy: He executed some of my clients.
He lived in a trailer park in Louisiana.
Cathy and I go down, and we meet this guy.
Yeager: I think I had said to you before,
not too many people have made me frightened.
He did.
Dorothy: Sam came with, I think, a six-pack,
and he opened for me
and for him, and we started talking.
Are you ready?
Dorothy:
Dorothy: Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
He had no insight into what this was doing to him...
He, uh...
Narrator: Now, I had met someone who told me
he had no qualms about killing anyone,
man, woman, or child.
Dorothy:
Narrator: Was Sam Jones the character
I'd been seeking for years?
The cool, premeditated killer without a trace
of psychosis or brain damage?
♪ ♪
I did all this stuff that I do with my murderers.
Dorothy:
Dorothy: Yeah. Like what?
Why? Oh really?
Dorothy:
Sam was as confused and muddle-headed,
as battered and beaten, as the violent men
I had interviewed on death row.
And by his own admission, he had a violent past.
His serial executions were but the latest manifestations
of his paranoid rage.
He had served time only for assault and battery, not for murder.
But that seemed more the luck of the draw
than a reflection of mental health.
By his 19th execution,
he had a lot of experience.
I suspect each press of the button further inured him,
making it easier and easier over time to do his job.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, uh-huh.
Yeager: When he was really talking about himself
and really getting into his philosophy
on executions and he's just doing a job,
he told us that...
Dorothy:
Yeager: He would blank out, and he would do a piece of artwork.
(indistinct chatter)
Dorothy: The pictures got more and more bizarre,
more and more psychotic,
and more and more violent.
Jones:
Yeager: There, you saw the real person who had
this facade that he was a cool guy 'cause he was doing this
terrifying work, which should upset anybody.
Although he was very cool about, you know, "Oh, no big deal."
His paintings showed his humanity.
You could see the upset.
Dorothy: Mm-hmm.
Dorothy: Yeah.
Dorothy:
It's puzzling. It's...
you know, you, you certainly wonder was--
did he dissociate or, uh,
did he think killing is different from executing?
Dorothy: Your grandchild? How old is your grandchild?
Dorothy:
(laughs) He does?
♪ ♪
(birds chirping)
(grunts)
(coughing) There's mold on these things.
(clacking)
Oh for... God's sake.
Hey, Eric?
-Eric! Eric, guess what I found? -Eric: Yeah?
"1/23/89, tape 2."
(Eric laughs)
You know what that is? I wouldn't even put
Bundy's name on it 'cause I thought
in case anyone got hold of these,
I didn't want them to know what it was.
That's my last interview with him.
Take a look. Don't get DNA on it!
(laughs)
♪ ♪
Narrator: It is now 30 years since Theodore Bundy,
arguably the most notorious
American serial murderer of the 20th century,
was electrocuted.
Crowd (singing): ♪ Fry, fry! ♪
♪ Ted Bundy, goodbye ♪
Narrator: For readers unfamiliar with this case,
Theodore Bundy was a young male
sexual predator who terrorized the United States
from coast to coast during the 1970s.
He committed over 30 homicides of young women,
decapitating some
and saving their skulls as trophies.
Attractive, articulate, and charismatic,
he convinced the court
to allow him to represent himself,
turning his trials more into performance pieces
than serious legal proceedings.
After numerous unsuccessful appeals,
Bundy was executed in Starke, Florida,
on January 24th, 1989.
(typing)
Why write about Bundy decades after his death?
Hasn't everything of importance already been said?
No.
The authors resurrect this case
to call into question the widely held belief
that Bundy had a normal childhood, and that he simply had
an innate predisposition to extreme violence.
That he was simply born evil.
Bundy himself perpetuated the fantasy
that he came from this perfectly normal childhood,
and so, he must be evil.
I grew up in a wonderful home with two...
dedicated and loving parents,
one of five brothers and sisters.
Yeager: That's fodder for us to say, now, wait a minute.
We know that people are not born evil.
That has to develop somehow.
I hope no one will try to take the easy way out
and to try to blame or otherwise accuse
my family of contributing to this because...
Gibney: So I'm interested in particular of why you,
you're so interested in him, even today.
Uh-huh. Well, uh,
first of all, 'cause I got it wrong.
♪ ♪
In '86, Bundy's attorneys asked, "Would you
work with the defense team?" Because they were appealing.
And I said sure.
We had our psychologist,
our neurologist, our neuropsychologist,
and did a computerized EEG.
We did not find any gross neurological problems,
but we did find some abnormalities
that are often seen in depressed people.
Bundy had already been evaluated by several other professionals.
They diagnosed psychopathy.
They said he was just a psychopath.
-Did you ever see the Dobson tapes? -Gibney: Yes.
You know? (laughs)
James Dobson: Ted, how did it happen?
Take me back. What are the antecedents
of the behavior?
The basic...
humanity and basic spirit that God gave me was intact,
but, unfortunately, it became overwhelmed at times
through the kind of fantasy life that was fueled...
largely, by pornography.
Do you realize how many
serial killers you would have out there
if pornography could do that?
It's so simple-minded.
I think it's clear that sexual sadists, like Ted Bundy,
are very much interested in pornography.
Research I've recently done with Roy Hazelwood of the FBI
indicated that more than 50% of sexually sadistic offenders,
like Bundy, had sizable pornography collections.
Would curbing pornography make our society any safer?
It would do more good than banning assault rifles would do.
Bryant Gumbel: What kinds of materials are, perhaps,
-more harmful? -Well, number one on my list,
as of 1986, was the covers of "Detective" magazines.
♪ ♪
Dorothy: Bundy's grandfather had a real collection
of pornography that he was exposed to very young,
pulp fiction,
sex and murder and stuff like that.
And he would fantasize about these sexual, murderous
kinds of things.
And he said it would build and build,
and then, it had to be released.
Ted Bundy: Those of us who have been
so much influenced by pornographic violence
are not some kind of inherent monsters.
We are your sons and we are your husbands.
We grew up in regular families,
and pornography can reach out
and snatch a kid out of any house today.
Dorothy: Clearly, it had some influence on him,
but I think there were other explanations.
♪ ♪
And so, I interviewed family members.
His aunts, an uncle, his mother.
I learned that his grandmother suffered
from a depressive disorder.
She was psychiatrically hospitalized
and treated with electroconvulsive therapy.
(electricity buzzing)
I was talking to Aunt Julia, and I said,
"What was he like as a little boy?"
And she said, "Well, when he was 3 years old,
"he used to come up with kitchen knives,
"and he'd stand
at the door, then he'd come in."
He picked up the blanket
and put the knives around her on the bed.
And he had that glint in his eye.
This was the first, the very, very first time
that we realized how aberrant he had been.
I was so stunned.
Reporter 1: Convicted murderer Theodore Bundy
is taking new steps to avoid Florida's electric chair.
Reporter 2: Armed guards brought Bundy
to the Orlando Federal Building for a hearing
to determine his mental competency.
♪ ♪
Dorothy: When I testified, I had enough data
to make a diagnosis of a bipolar disorder.
He had episodes of highs where he could keep
going and going and going and he was grandiose,
but these were interspersed with periods
of terrible depression,
when he'd drop out of school,
he would weep, he would go off by himself.
On the stand, I said he was not competent
either to represent himself,
or, really, to go to trial.
I'm not going through this and you knew that, Your Honor.
Dorothy: But the judge ruled that he was competent enough,
and he upheld the death sentence.
(static)
Reporter: Salvador Dali was 84.
In Florida, a convicted serial killer
is continuing his string of 11th hour confessions.
As NBC's Ed Ravel reports, Ted Bundy is apparently trying
to delay his execution scheduled for the electric chair tomorrow.
Dorothy: A few years after I first saw him,
I got a call from his lawyer,
saying he wanted to meet with me before he was executed.
So I did go.
The attorney, she said,
"Ted wants to know if you can
say that he is incompetent to be executed."
And I said, "I would be laughed out of town.
I just can't do that." And I said,
"And all the work that we've done
"to understand people who
"do these kinds of things will not be considered valid
if I say something as ridiculous as that."
Gibney: But he clearly knew he was going to be executed.
-Yes. -He knew what an execution meant.
That's right, and he knew what he had done.
♪ ♪
And I said, "Besides, the warden
"has three other psychiatrists out there,
waiting to refute this."
Gibney: What was his reaction?
He said he, he could understand that.
Dorothy (on tape): Testing.
Dorothy: He gave me permission to tape the conversation.
Dorothy (on tape):
Dorothy: I asked him why did he ask to see me.
And he said...
Bundy (on tape):
I was not fascinated by his perversions.
I was far more interested in how he got the way he was.
Narrator: Whatever his motives for asking me to come to Starke
and mine for coming,
our four and a half hours together
on the day before his execution were riveting.
Dorothy (on tape):
Bundy (on tape):
(door creaking)
Narrator: When the tape recorder was off,
Bundy told me that he had had
a sexual encounter with one of his sisters.
Later, his mother told me
that Bundy had told his sister
that she should be careful
because there was someone out in the world
who was killing women who looked just like her.
Bit by bit, I was beginning
to see a very different story in Bundy's family life.
One that would upend the myth of pure evil.
(horn blaring, train roaring)
♪ ♪
(rumbling)
(doorbell rings)
(door opens)
-Dr. Lewis, how are you? -Hello!
Dorothy: The last interview I did tape,
and there was a point in that interview
when he said, "I want you to turn the tape off." Only once.
And that was when he talked about
his relationship with his sister.
I didn't talk to him about his sisters.
I was basically talking about crimes with him.
Really? Did you-- But even earlier on,
-he didn't tell you that he had-- -No, I didn't...
He was always protective with his family. I mean,
he would tell me things that I wouldn't even ask him about.
Dorothy: Bill Hagmaier, he was the major
FBI agent on the case.
He had spent a lot of time with Bundy,
much more time than I did.
So, that's why I wanted to see him.
Each of us was close to Bundy
in a different kind of capacity.
We were the ones that Bundy trusted.
♪ ♪
Bill Hagmaier: I was assigned to the Behavioral Science Unit,
and they had already started to do
some research on murderers,
and Bundy's name came up.
So I wrote him a letter, just general letter,
and Ted invited me to visit him.
Gibney: Were you able to get Bundy to talk much
about his family and his childhood?
Hagmaier: We talked about it quite a bit.
He wasn't telling the truth on all this, I know.
Everything was cotton candy for him and his family.
He didn't want to say anything bad about his family at all.
Or his mother.
Dorothy: Bundy's mother was impregnated
by someone, we're not sure who it is.
I asked her something about how she felt
when she knew she was pregnant.
And I don't know if I actually said abortion
or if she brought it up, but she said, "He,"
now meaning the father,
"He took me to a doctor.
"The doctor gave me pills for an abortion,
but nothing happened."
-Gibney: So it was an attempted abortion that didn't succeed? -Yeah, yeah.
Which is not supposed to be so good for the baby.
Her father made arrangements
for her to go up to a home for unwed mothers,
called the Lund Home.
She was at the Lund Home for two months,
and then gave birth to him.
She wouldn't allow her father to come up at all
until after the baby was born,
and she signed papers
saying he could be put up for adoption.
And then, her father came up
and brought her home, back to Philadelphia.
However, for two months, he kept saying,
"We have to get the baby back. We want the baby back."
And finally, she gave in.
She went and picked the baby up, brought the baby home,
and then her father insisted
that he be known as the baby's father,
and that the baby call him Father,
and that Louise be known as his sister.
♪ ♪
He was an incredibly violent man,
and, apparently, a very, very disturbed man,
according to interviews that I've had with relatives.
Dorothy (on tape):
Bundy (on tape):
(traffic noise)
Dorothy: The whole family
knows the story that in the car
while the grandfather was driving,
one of his younger brothers, I believe,
said, "Oh! Tell us about Ted's real father."
And, apparently,
the grandfather was out of his mind, filled with rage.
He had total control over Bundy's mother.
He had total control over how this child was gonna be raised,
and, um, and the family told Dorothy that
they had to help the mother and the child, Ted,
escape from the father and go cross-country
to get away from him.
Dorothy: Things were horrendous for Bundy
from conception onward.
♪ ♪
(birds chirping)
(papers rustling)
Several years after Bundy was executed,
I got a phone call from his wife, and--
who I had never spoken to, never heard from before,
and I think I couldn't even contact her while he was alive.
And she said a friend of hers was coming to New York.
She was going to give her a packet of love letters
that Bundy had written to her.
The handwriting was all very much alike.
But the signatures were different.
See look. This would be a-- an ordinary thing.
An ordinary writing, yeah.
But, uh, here, look at the difference.
That is so aberrant
and out of control and, uh, different.
He often signed different names to his letters,
but the most important one is that some of them
are signed "Sam."
Oh look, here's Sam.
Here's Sam.
Here's another Sam.
No, it's a Sambo. It's a version of Sam.
Sambo.
It turns out that
Sam was the name of his grandfather.
People who are multiples, or who have DID,
it's very common for them to have an alter
who is the abuser.
When I saw that, I thought, how did I so miss this?
We realized that Sam was the grandfather,
and that he had taken on this persona...
With all the work that we have been doing,
there are numerous data that show
he is somewhere on the continuum
of Dissociative Identity Disorder.
When he was going to be sentenced,
-he said to the judge... -Bundy: I'm not asking for mercy,
for I find it somewhat absurd
to ask for mercy for something I did not do.
Dorothy: And there was one time after he had told me
about many of the murders.
He came in and he sat down,
and his demeanor was different.
And he said, "The person sitting before you
never killed anyone."
I don't think that he is kidding
or pretending that he's innocent.
I think that there is a Bundy state
where he did not do any of those murders.
♪ ♪
In fact, he referred to the person who killed,
he called that The Entity.
Bundy (on tape):
(indistinct tape chatter)
Dorothy: I had a clue then
that he might suffer from a dissociative disorder,
but then when I saw the writing,
and I saw that he did, at times,
seem to become his grandfather,
who was a very violent kind of person,
that's when I got interested.
So yeah, uh...
I'm not the first to have
wondered whether his grandfather was indeed his father.
♪ ♪
May I ask you a question?
There are a lot of reasons that I think this would--
and you've heard this also before.
Other people who have thought that--
I've said he's his own father, but he isn't.
I-I think the grandfather may have...
Hagmaier: I-I don't know.
I know that was one of the first things that Louise said to me
when she met me. She just said, "I just want you to know
right now that my father is not his father."
-(laughing) -I didn't-- I didn't even ask her the question.
That is amazing 'cause I did not...
(voice fading)
A number of people have suspected
that there was incest, but nobody has ever come out
and said that there is incest in the family.
If we were to get blood,
we could look at the genes
in the blood sample, the DNA.
We all have a certain number of identical matching genes.
But, if you have more than
a certain number of identical genes,
it is an indication of incest
because you have too much from the same family.
♪ ♪
Basically, what you're getting to, does incest
influence serial killer development?
(stammers): I doubt that the FBI's lab
is going to give out that for that purpose.
Not saying it wouldn't help us understand behavior
in people with it, but it's just...
Gibney: So were you able to get DNA from the FBI?
Dorothy: Oh no. The FBI isn't generous that way.
But I was able to get a sample
elsewhere, and according to that report,
his grandfather was not his father.
He was not the product of incest.
Gibney: Was there some actual disappointment when you--
-Dorothy: Oh yes. Oh, oh yes. -Gibney: And why would it be
so important to know whether or not Bundy's grandfather
was also his father?
I don't think genetically it matters.
That I really don't believe.
Uh, you know, it might.
It may be that he had more, uh,
a greater likelihood of having a bipolar disorder,
but, uh, I think that--
I think he was treated
throughout his lifetime as though
he were some kind of child that
you don't want to have around.
♪ ♪
His mother, when I spoke with her,
she said, "I can't wait till it's all over."
-Gibney: You mean the execution? -Yeah.
I-I find it hard to interpret it any other way.
Yeah. But can you imagine? "I can't wait till it's all over."
Uh...
Reporter: There was the atmosphere of a public hanging as
hundreds of singing, chanting death penalty supporters
gathered at the Florida State Prison,
demanding the execution of serial killer
Ted Bundy be carried out.
And when the official witnesses came out of the prison,
signaling the death of Bundy,
-there were cheers. -(crowd cheering)
(rumbling)
Dorothy: You know, it's taken me 30 years
to get to this point,
but we could've learned a whole lot more from him.
If he were not killed, we could've learned a lot about
serial murderers, but, uh...
they killed him. They, uh...
♪ ♪
(wind blowing)
Female Reporter (on TV): And we have breaking news today
from the Justice Department.
A new directive from Attorney General Bill Barr to reinstate
executions of federal death penalty prisoners
for the first time in nearly two decades.
But Attorney General Barr says it's time to restore
the death penalty for the sake of victims
and their families. He points out that
under administrations of both parties,
attorneys general have approved seeking...
Dorothy: When I heard that, I thought that all of
the advances that we had made in terms of
being humane, uh, were lost.
♪ ♪
Barr, he puzzles me.
These five people. If indeed,
they've done the most grotesque things,
we know that the most disturbed, the most psychotic,
or the most brain-damaged killers,
do the most bizarre, grotesque, horrendous kinds of things.
So he was picking
the sickest of the sick to execute.
You know, I'm not sure that we've come as far as we think we have.
It feels as if all the work
that I had done, that Dick Burr had done,
that, for the moment, it had been--
It was like flushed down the toilet.
(mob chattering)
As if we'd gone back to like the Middle Ages.
(chatter continues)
♪ ♪
I remember one time, someone asked me,
"When you see in a movie
"or read about a witch being burned,
are you watching it, or are you the witch?"
(inaudible)
I'm always the witch.
-I think, what a horrible, horrible thing. -(flames roar)
And picture the flames coming up around me,
and wondering how someone could do that to someone else.
It appalled me and it fascinated me.
It reminds me of taking a tour of death row.
First, it was the area where the visitors watch.
And then, they took us around
to go right into the execution room.
This wooden chair with leather belts.
I did picture myself there.
♪ ♪
Narrator: Ted Bundy, Johnny Garrett,
Marie Moore, Jonathan, me.
Could any of us become a murderer?
Could anyone in the world become a murderer?
I think so.
Murderers are made, not born.
The more we understand about the genesis of violence,
the harder it is to draw a line between guilt and innocence,
sanity and insanity.
(click, electricity zapping)
Dorothy: As human beings, we struggle to cope
with the need for protection,
the desire for revenge,
and decency and morality.
But to understand sometimes means to forgive,
and these days, people aren't in a very forgiving mood.
Maybe Ted Bundy was right.
We are all far more curious about what the murderer did,
the gory details of the crime,
than about why they did it.
It's the act of murder that fascinates us
and tickles our own limbic systems.
No wonder people fight for seats at executions.
(fireworks blasting)
Is that, at least in part, why I do the work I do?
-(projector clicking) -Maybe.
I wouldn't be surprised.
(projector stops)
♪ ♪