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slight build, and the braces on his teeth jolted me as his handcuffs were removed and he was seated at his defense counsel’s table. Had I met Royster in Central Park and seen him flash his silver smile at me as I jogged by, I would not have felt the slightest breath of fear.
    From June 4 through June 11, 1996, John Royster destroyed the lives of four women by grabbing them from behind, throwing them to the ground, and repeatedly smashing their heads against pavement, concrete, and cobblestone until he thought they were dead. He was cool and calculating enough to put down his knapsack and take off his coat before each assault. As his victims lay bleeding on the ground, battered beyond recognition, he raped them if he could. Then he calmly gathered up his belongings and left the scene. Bashing a woman’s head to mush was sexually exciting to him, and he admitted to the police that he felt no remorse.
    In the late 1880s, this sort of antisocial behavioral disorder—an insipid phrase—was diagnosed as “moral insanity,” which ironically is a defense that recently has been tried in court. In his 1893 book on criminology, Arthur MacDonald defined what we would call a psychopath as a “pure murderer.” These people are “honest,” MacDonald writes, because they are not thieves “by nature” and many are “chaste in character.” But all are “unconscious” of feeling “any repulsion” over their violent acts. As a rule, pure murderers begin to show “traces of a murderous tendency” when they are children.
    Psychopaths can be male or female, child or adult. They are not always violent but they are always dangerous, because they have no respect for rules and no regard for any life but their own. Psychopaths have an x-factor unfamiliar if not incomprehensible to most of us, and at this writing no one is certain whether this x-factor is genetic, pathological (due to a head injury, for example), or caused by a spiritual depravity beyond our limited understanding. Ongoing research into the criminal brain is beginning to suggest that a psychopath’s gray matter is not necessarily normal. In the general prison population of murderers, it has been shown that more than 80% of them were abused as children, and 50% of these offenders have frontal lobe abnormalities.
    The frontal lobe is the master control for civilized human behavior and is located, as its name implies, in the frontal part of the brain. Lesions, such as tumors or damage from a head injury, can turn a well-behaved person into a stranger with poor self-control and aggressive or violent tendencies. In the mid-1900s, severe antisocial behavior was remedied by the notorious prefrontal lobotomy, a procedure accomplished by surgery or by hammering an ice pick through the roof of an eye orbit to shear the wiring that connects the frontal part of the brain to the rest of it.
    The psychopathic brain, however, cannot be wholly accounted for by traumatic childhoods and brain lesions. Studies using PET scans (positron emission tomography), which show images of the living brain at work, reveal that there is noticeably less neural activity in a psychopath’s frontal lobe than there is in a “normal” person’s. This suggests that the inhibitions and constraints that keep most of us from engaging in violent acts or giving in to murderous impulses do not register in the frontal lobe of the psychopathic brain. Thoughts and situations that would give most of us pause, cause distress or fear, and inhibit cruel, violent, or illegal impulses don’t register in the psychopath’s frontal lobe. That it is wrong to steal, rape, assault, lie, or do anything else that degrades, cheats, and dehumanizes others does not compute with the psychopath.
    As much as 25% of the criminal population and as much as 4% of the entire population is psychopathic. The World Health Organization (WHO) now classifies “dissocial personality disorder” or antisocial personality disorder or