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interview for this book.
    Few mental health professionals are willing to call someone a psychopath before they reach the age of eighteen. Eric would have been eighteen years old a mere eleven days after he calmly shot his classmates and teachers.
    “You don’t call someone a psychopath until they have given a lot of evidence and they have grown up… . After age eighteen and in the adult range, they have a series of behaviors that can be observed,” Ochberg said in a short film produced by Joyce Boaz, What Is a Psychopath? 56 While Eric’s crimes prevented him from graduating from high school, they were also evidence that he appeared to have graduated into adult psychopathy before his eighteenth birthday.
    “Some psychopaths become sadists,” Ochberg continued. “Being sadistic means you enjoy hurting another person. Not every psychopath becomes a sadist but if they stumble into sadism, they have absolutely no regret, no empathy, no remorse as a product of their being a psychopath. And they practice and they get better.
    “The worst are the serial killers who are not only psychopaths and sadists, but they have learned to enjoy their own grandiosity. They’re narcissist. They care about themselves. They want to outwit the police. They want to humiliate logical, decent people. They hold us in contempt.
    They are ‘the worst of bad.’” Eric was not a serial killer, but his personal
    history and his status as a mass murderer suggest he had the traits Ochberg describes. Mass murderers kill multiple people during a single violent event, while serial killers commit a series of murders over an extended period of time. Between murders, they often do not attract attention. Spree killers murder multiple people in a series of violent, related events.
    Eric’s parents have since come to accept that their son was a psychopath. He had fooled them, as he had fooled a psychiatrist he had once been sent to visit. 57 But being fooled by a psychopath is nothing to be ashamed of. Experts who have spent their careers working with psychopaths, experts like Dr. Robert Hare, attest to the fact that even they, for a time anyway, have been fooled by the appearance of normality that psychopaths can convincingly present. 58 It can take time to see behind what psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley referred to as “the mask of sanity.”
    It is fair to document a person’s psychopathic characteristics or traits, but it is up to the reader to realize that psychopathy requires documentation of more than a few such traits before the label “psychopath” can be authoritatively applied to an individual. One nasty comment, spiteful act, fist fight, theft, lawsuit, or self-serving action doesn’t amount to psychopathy. A lifetime pattern of antisocial behavior, such as Eric was well on his way to establishing just before his eighteenth birthday, may—providing the determination is made by a professional trained to evaluate a person’s behavior as well as his or her legal and medical history.
    Eric’s personal history, his journals and videos, combined with his many traits characteristic of psychopathy, convinced the experts who examined his writings and life that he was either well on his way to being a psychopath or had already become one, a “textbook psychopath.”
    “I am higher than you people,” he announced. “If you disagree I would shoot you … some people go through life begging to be shot.”
    And some people go through life without a conscience. Scientists are accepting the difficult challenge of trying to figure out why an estimated one out of every hundred adults share this deficit with Eric. Not all of them are killers, but so many are criminals that they make up an estimated 15 to 25 percent of the prison population in the United States. And criminal psychopaths, by one estimate, commit half again as many crimesas non-psychopathic criminals. 59 Criminal or unsuccessful psychopaths may be a subgroup in the heterogeneous population