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dominant in males than females and statistically five times more likely to occur in the male offspring of a father suffering from the disorder. Symptoms of psychopathy, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, include stealing, lying, substance abuse, financial irresponsibility, an inability to deal with boredom, cruelty, running away from home, promiscuity, fighting, and lack of remorse.
    Psychopaths are uniquely different from one another in very much the same way that individuals differ from one another. A psychopath might be promiscuous and lie but be financially responsible. A psychopath might fight and be promiscuous but not steal, might torture animals but not abuse alcohol or drugs, might torture people and not animals. A psychopath might commit multiple murders but not be promiscuous. The combinations of antisocial behaviors are countless, but the most distinctive and profound characteristic of all psychopaths is that they do not feel remorse. They have no concept of guilt. They do not have a conscience.
    I had heard and read about a vicious killer named John Royster months before I actually saw him in person during his murder trial in New York City in the winter of 1997. I was shocked by how polite and gentle he seemed. His pleasant looks, neat clothes, 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