In Cold Blog: "Thou Shalt Not Kill"

In Cold Blog: "Thou Shalt Not Kill"

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By Stephen Singular

I’ve been spending time in prisons lately speaking with murderers in Colorado and Kansas, which raises fundamental questions for me as a journalist. What’s the job of a reporter in this situation -- to challenge the false or outlandish things a killer is saying or simply let him or her talk? “In Cold Blog” obviously gets its name from the gold standard of all true crime writing, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and I’ve often thought about Capote having a full five years to sit in a cell with Dick Hickock and Perry Smith before they were executed in 1965. Capote spent most of his time with Smith, the actual killer of the four members of the Clutter family, and the impression we have decades later is that not only didn’t he judge Smith, but grew quite fond of the man over time. One criticism of In Cold Blood was that Capote was too sympathetic to someone who’d slaughtered four innocent people.

When I’m in prison with inmates who’ve done the worst possible things, I find that I’m not judgmental, either. I usually feel empathy toward them and never walk out of a jail without thinking that but for the grace of God, there go I. This does not alter my view of their guilt or that they should be incarcerated, perhaps for life. Sometimes, my feelings in this arena bother me and I’m haunted for days after I’ve left inmates behind in their cells. I’ve also had trouble breathing after exiting some prisons, as if I’ve been standing too close to evil or being too accepting of it. I’ve never known how to reconcile all this inside myself, but I do know one thing: I can’t change my visceral and emotional response to being around killers.

Over time, I’ve decided that these feelings have something to do with being a writer and the role we assign ourselves, for better or worse, as members of society. We have lawyers, judges, and courtrooms to determine the guilt or innocence of those arrested for crimes (by and large, I think our system of due process, for all its shortcomings and tediousness, is the best in the world). We have prison chaplains and other religious functionaries to offer inmates forgiveness or salvation, if that’s what they’re looking for. We have psychiatrists to decide it those behind bars are legally sane or not. But we don’t have anyone inside the criminal justice industry who’s primarily interested in why tragedies happen or what might be learned about the nature of human violence. That’s what I go into prisons looking for and that’s why I let the killers talk and talk without much interruption, even if I know some of what they’re saying isn’t true: I want to know more about now they think and feel (or can’t feel), and why they’ve done what they’ve done.

Having visited prisons for the past 25 years, I’ve been repeatedly struck by how there seems to be little or no correlation between intelligence and brutal behavior. Very bright and articulate people do horrific things and then rationalize their actions with clouds of elaborate language. I’m always most unsettled by encountering truly smart criminals who have no compunction about taking other lives. There’s an entire school of thought today that says criminal behavior is the result of bad genes and chemical imbalances in the brain. I’d like to believe this because it might make humans more predictable, but I have some doubts. I’ve come to believe that the underlying reality of much of the violence I’ve observed or written about is grounded in emotional processes we still understand very little about. Why do people stop feeling? Why can they snuff out a stranger, but feel deeply about their children or a pet? We’re going to be exploring and uncovering emotional mysteries here for decades and centuries to come, just as scientists are doing with physical matter.

I recently spoke with a man who’d gunned down another man and the unmistakable feeling the killer conveyed was that he was greatly relieved to have committed the murder. This was the only way he’d seen to lessen his anxiety, when he had a thousand other alternatives. Crime teaches me that we are still in the primitive stages of human development.

Stephen Singular is the author of nineteen books which range in topics from high-profile crimes and social criticisms, to business and sports biographies. He currently resides in Denver, Colorado. You can find out more about this author by visiting his website at stephensingular.com

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