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In Brief: In Crazy, Not Insane, On HBO, Getting Into The Minds Of Serial Killers

 


This year alone, prolific Alex Gibney took on COVID-19, in Totally Under Control; Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, in Agents of Chaos; and a wrongful conviction by the judiciary in The Innocence Project, he now turns to the psychopathology of serial killers in his gripping, provocative Crazy, not crazy.

One of the most disturbing is not Ted Bundy but Sam Jones who when asked how many people he killed says, I don’t know the exact number, 18 or 19, I lose count. Interviewed by the subject of the film, Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, a psychiatrist who has been investigating the reasons people kill for decades, he tells her he doesn’t feel it. I sleep well at night.

Jones doesn’t sleep on death row but in a trailer in Louisiana. He is an itinerant executioner, paid by the state to kill. Lewis wonders if she has finally found a true sociopath, someone with no empathy, no conscience, and no personal history of abuse, trauma or brain injury to account for it. But as she continues to question him, he drops the fact that he was beaten by his parents and repeatedly suffered violent assault and served time for assault and battery.

Then he tells her that after each execution, he paints a canvas in acrylic. He shows her some of the paintings: They are nightmarish, exploding in violent colors, with tormented faces like that of Edvard Munchs. The Scream. They are as scary as a John Wayne Gacy painting of a clown.

Dorothy Otnow Lewis in
Dorothy Otnow Lewis in “Crazy, Not Insane”.HBO

I saw 22 serial killers and a lot of old killers, Lewis says. In almost all cases, she argues, these criminals acted not because they were essentially evil, but because they themselves were victims of criminal violence, often as children at the hands of their parents or other people.

Lewis never planned on making a career of interacting one-on-one with some of the nation’s most heinous criminals. Although she was fascinated by the Nuremberg Trials as a child and wondered if anyone, even herself, was capable of becoming a Nazi and a killer, she entered the medical profession with the Intended for a career in psychoanalysis, listening to neurotic patients talk about their dreams and complexes. But in the early 1970s, she was working at the New Haven Juvenile Court Clinic and found that many violent offenders had been the victims of horrific abuse. She pursued this idea and determined that it not only affected them psychologically, but also physiologically, which MRIs showing abnormalities in their brains would confirm.

After further research, Lewis discovered that some serial killers, perpetrators of the most heinous crimes, suffered from dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder), a controversial diagnosis. To defend against the pain and degradation of past experience, Lewis argues, victims subconsciously create new personalities, with names and characteristics that embody their rage and helplessness. They are possessed by these entities when they commit their horrific crimes.

His work has attracted defense attorneys, particularly those whose clients faced the death penalty, who sought his testimony to establish extenuating circumstances. In one case, Lewis testified on behalf of an accused on an appeal for his death sentence; and while she was in the witness stand, she noticed that the man was changing his personality. Lewis pointed this out to the judge, and he was so impressed that he reduced the sentence to life imprisonment.

Dr Dorothy Otnow Lewis testifies at the murder trial of accused serial killer Arthur Shawcross, 1990. From
Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis testifies at the murder trial of accused serial killer Arthur Shawcross, 1990. From “Crazy, Not Insane”.Kevin Higley / Democrat and Chronicle-USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Content Services, LLC

But in a 1990 case reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcocks Psycho (1960), Lewis suffered an embarrassing setback. Arthur Shawcross had been charged with 10 counts of murder, in one of which he cut up and ate the victim’s vagina. Lewis testified for the defense, who argued Shawcross was not guilty by reason of insanity. She showed a video of his interview with Shawcross as he moved on to his abusive mother’s personality, speaking in her voice as she claimed responsibility for the crimes.

The defense failed to back her up with crucial neurological evidence, and the politically ambitious prosecutor insisted on making fun of her on the stand. The jury found Shawcross guilty after less than two hours of deliberation.

Park Dietz, a renowned forensic psychiatrist who is one of the profession’s old guardians who rejected decades of groundbreaking research in Lewiss, testified for the prosecution in this case. It’s a hoax, he says when asked by Gibney about Dissociative Identity Disorder. He points out that his use of hypnosis manipulated his subjects. Lewis, however, maintains that she uses this procedure sparingly and always with corroborating evidence.

She was a pioneer and pioneers are often treated badly, insists Richard Burr, a defense attorney who was one of the first to enlist Lewis as an expert witness in a death penalty case. What she had to say bore heavily on the truth, and the truth was not necessarily what prosecutors wanted to hear.

Crazy, Not Insane can be seen on HBO starting November 18.

Go to www.hbo.com/documentaries/crazy-not-insane.

Peter Keough can be reached at [email protected].



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