finding out when he would be paroled, and when I learned that it was after the time I would be no longer be on earth I felt bolder.”
“You talk about him as if you really knew him, as if he were a real person,” I said. “But actually he’s a character in a book. Everything we know about him we know from McGinniss’s text.”
Stone said nothing for a moment, and I wondered whether my remark had been imprudent. In asking a character in one text to comment on the ontological status of a character in another text, was I alerting Stone too soon—as I had alerted McGinniss too soon—to the dangers of subjecthood? Stone wavered, but—obviously made of hardier metal than McGinniss—resolutely went on with his mission of self-disclosure. “He’s not a Dickens character,” he finally said, correctly, if irrelevantly.
“You really don’t like him,” I said.
“No. It’s hard to like a man who stabs his pregnant wife to death. It takes more—what shall I say?—love of mankind than I possess. I’m more of the school of ‘You get what you earn, and you have to earn what you get.’ ”
Stone had spoken earlier of the chain of abuse and brutalization that links generations of violent people. I asked him, “Isn’t it possible that bad things were done to MacDonald in his early years? That his childhood wasn’t all that idyllic, and that he repressed what happened?”
“Yes.”
“If you knew that to be so, would you feel more benign toward him?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s a liar. Because he’s not man enough tosay, ‘I committed those murders because I was under the influence of amphetamines. I didn’t know what I was doing. Colette was taking a course in psychology, she was going to wear the pants in the family. This was threatening to me; I felt left out. I was beginning to fondle the older girl too much, and she caught me’—this is Colette’s stepfather’s theory; he told me about it during the trial—‘so in a moment of frenzied feeling that ruined my whole life I just killed the whole lot of them.’ If he could say all that, I’d still want him put away for the rest of his life, but at least I’d have some respect for the fact that he could be honest about what happened. No way. He can’t do that. He’s not built to do that.”
“You take a very harsh view, which is unusual for a psychotherapist in our culture.”
“Unfortunately, it is unusual. I am at odds with many of my colleagues as a result of that. I feel that the profession has too much of this
‘Tout comprendre, tout pardonner’
attitude. And there is also the ‘We can fix it’ attitude—the notion that if we can send a man to the moon surely we can make a psychopath go straight. But a person who has a propensity to murder is beyond the pale of psychotherapy. It is folly to think that a person like that could be corrected through the process of one-to-one therapy. He is a lost soul.”
A S M ICHAEL S TONE’S office had astonished and mystified me, so did Ray Shedlick’s windowless office in a security firm on the outskirts of Durham, North Carolina, seem immediately familiar, with its dark-wood panelling, framed certificates, athletic trophies, and a poignant sort of bareness and neatness—the emblems of rural Americanofficialdom. Shedlick, a retired New York City police detective, was hired by MacDonald in 1982 as an investigator. A tall, slender man of fifty-five, with a very agreeable manner, wearing a red jersey shirt and tinted glasses, he had met me at the Durham airport on a Saturday in the winter of 1988 and driven me to the empty office building, a few miles away, where we now sat waiting for a third member of the party, a writer and professor named Jeffrey Elliot, who taught at nearby North Carolina Central University. Elliot was preparing a book on the MacDonald case and had appeared in the McGinniss trial as a rebuttal witness to Buckley and Wambaugh. Bostwick was at first reluctant
“You talk about him as if you really knew him, as if he were a real person,” I said. “But actually he’s a character in a book. Everything we know about him we know from McGinniss’s text.”
Stone said nothing for a moment, and I wondered whether my remark had been imprudent. In asking a character in one text to comment on the ontological status of a character in another text, was I alerting Stone too soon—as I had alerted McGinniss too soon—to the dangers of subjecthood? Stone wavered, but—obviously made of hardier metal than McGinniss—resolutely went on with his mission of self-disclosure. “He’s not a Dickens character,” he finally said, correctly, if irrelevantly.
“You really don’t like him,” I said.
“No. It’s hard to like a man who stabs his pregnant wife to death. It takes more—what shall I say?—love of mankind than I possess. I’m more of the school of ‘You get what you earn, and you have to earn what you get.’ ”
Stone had spoken earlier of the chain of abuse and brutalization that links generations of violent people. I asked him, “Isn’t it possible that bad things were done to MacDonald in his early years? That his childhood wasn’t all that idyllic, and that he repressed what happened?”
“Yes.”
“If you knew that to be so, would you feel more benign toward him?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s a liar. Because he’s not man enough tosay, ‘I committed those murders because I was under the influence of amphetamines. I didn’t know what I was doing. Colette was taking a course in psychology, she was going to wear the pants in the family. This was threatening to me; I felt left out. I was beginning to fondle the older girl too much, and she caught me’—this is Colette’s stepfather’s theory; he told me about it during the trial—‘so in a moment of frenzied feeling that ruined my whole life I just killed the whole lot of them.’ If he could say all that, I’d still want him put away for the rest of his life, but at least I’d have some respect for the fact that he could be honest about what happened. No way. He can’t do that. He’s not built to do that.”
“You take a very harsh view, which is unusual for a psychotherapist in our culture.”
“Unfortunately, it is unusual. I am at odds with many of my colleagues as a result of that. I feel that the profession has too much of this
‘Tout comprendre, tout pardonner’
attitude. And there is also the ‘We can fix it’ attitude—the notion that if we can send a man to the moon surely we can make a psychopath go straight. But a person who has a propensity to murder is beyond the pale of psychotherapy. It is folly to think that a person like that could be corrected through the process of one-to-one therapy. He is a lost soul.”
A S M ICHAEL S TONE’S office had astonished and mystified me, so did Ray Shedlick’s windowless office in a security firm on the outskirts of Durham, North Carolina, seem immediately familiar, with its dark-wood panelling, framed certificates, athletic trophies, and a poignant sort of bareness and neatness—the emblems of rural Americanofficialdom. Shedlick, a retired New York City police detective, was hired by MacDonald in 1982 as an investigator. A tall, slender man of fifty-five, with a very agreeable manner, wearing a red jersey shirt and tinted glasses, he had met me at the Durham airport on a Saturday in the winter of 1988 and driven me to the empty office building, a few miles away, where we now sat waiting for a third member of the party, a writer and professor named Jeffrey Elliot, who taught at nearby North Carolina Central University. Elliot was preparing a book on the MacDonald case and had appeared in the McGinniss trial as a rebuttal witness to Buckley and Wambaugh. Bostwick was at first reluctant
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