The gangly youth nodded. “Yeah, like, I saw this documentary on Charles Manson. They said he had what they called ‘indescribable power’ over his family of followers, and they saw him as the modern-day messiah. He had to be pretty smart to manipulate all those people into killing other people for him, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” replied Verraday, “Charles Manson is so smart that he’s spent approximately eighty-seven percent of his adult life in jail. He got caught within three months of ordering people to kill for him and won’t be eligible for parole until he’s ninety-two. He didn’t even get the house address right. He didn’t make any significant income off his criminal activities nor did he wield any real power, except over a handful of social misfits and certain areas of the media that benefitted from peddling his story. For the record, his IQ is reportedly one hundred and nine—slightly above average, but not exactly rocket scientist material. I would wager most of the people in this room would score at least that high on an IQ test. Not everyone, but most.”
There were scattered giggles in the room. The other students were as sick of Koller as Verraday was. But Koller showed no signs of giving up.
“But don’t you think he must have had something going for him to persuade people to kill for him?”
“Yes. What he had going for him is that he is a psychopath who, because of his neurology, is incapable of feeling emotional empathy for other people. He used techniques he read in a book by Dale Carnegie called How to Win Friends and Influence People. But his shtick didn’t work on most well-adjusted human beings. The members of his so-called ‘family’ were unbalanced and emotionally vulnerable. You don’t have to be a genius to influence weak people. You just need to be completely unscrupulous. Gary Ridgway, a.k.a. the Green River Murderer, killed forty-nine women right here in Washington. He had an IQ of eighty-four. That’s only five points above what’s considered impaired. I wouldn’t have trusted him to rotate my tires. Richard Macek was a serial killer from Illinois. Along with raping and killing his victims, he liked to bite them while in a state of sexual frenzy, so not a particularly rational behavior. He bit his victims so hard that he left distinctive wounds all over their bodies. When he finally realized that the marks he left would enable police to identify him, he took the rather extreme precaution of having all his teeth pulled out and replaced with dentures so the bite marks couldn’t be matched to him. In my book, yanking out your teeth is a long way to go just to indulge a momentary impulse and definitely not indicative of high intelligence. My point is that it’s not superior intellect that gives psychopaths power over other people. What gives psychopaths power is that they don’t have feelings for the people they hurt, and they don’t play by the same rules as the rest of us.”
Koller still wasn’t done. “But then doesn’t that make them more successful than other people from an evolutionary standpoint?”
“That’s a common impression perpetuated by some media,” said Verraday. “In reality, yes, certain psychopaths do extremely well because they’re intelligent enough to make it work for them. But they’re not killers. At least not directly. They might run a hedge fund, for example, and buy the rights to a lifesaving drug and jack up the price by twelve hundred percent to increase profits and share value. People who then can’t afford the drug might die as a result. But no one will call the hedge fund manager a serial killer. In fact, they’ll say he’s a genius and give him a two-million-dollar bonus. Or he might be the CEO of a company that closes down manufacturing operations here, throwing thousands of Americans out of work. Then he exports the jobs to China, where people who live under a brutal totalitarian regime are forced to work seventy-hour weeks for two hundred dollars a month. So many workers there kill themselves that they have to put up suicide nets around the factories. But we don’t call that guy a serial killer either, do we? No, we give him a multimillion-dollar bonus too. Now that’s a successful psychopath. Not some loser who has to have his teeth pulled out because he couldn’t control his impulse to strangle someone and bite them in the ass.”