Dr. Jeffrey Smalldon

Had he, instead of having an alcoholic, abusive father, you know, some nurturing teacher or something like that?

Maybe.

I mean, maybe it is possible.

course toward a serial killer could have been interrupted in that way.

You know, he had skills.

He could have succeeded in business.

But there's a book by one pretty well-known psychiatrist.

I won't mention her by name, but she has actually floated the possibility that one day we'll identify a serial killer gene and identify serial killers before they're born.

I mean, I think that's a very wild – I don't think many people believe that that's true.

Yeah, and I think that's what most mental health professionals would say.

If they could specify exactly what that weird alchemy is that produces the killer eventually.

Yeah, I do.

I mean, certainly not all of the death penalty killers that I evaluated are psychopaths.

I mean, the formal diagnosis of psychopathy comes with the use of Robert Hare's psychopathy checklist.

And most forensic psychologists, particularly in death penalty cases, don't use that because if you come up with a number and it says, you know, someone's a psychopath or they're not, and to use the term psychopath here,

in court is so inflammatory, the thought is that as soon as the jury hears that word, they'll stop thinking about everything else.

Most mental health professionals use the only instrument that you really can use to diagnose psychopathy.

Typically, if I was a death penalty defendant, I would use the DSM, which is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, at least in the United States, that's used for diagnosing all kinds of conditions.

And the closest thing in that to psychopathy, though they're not equal, is

is antisocial personality disorder.