A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

carving on her dead body with the knife until he completed the hideous post mortem wound on her right thigh, and then adding to his message on the mirror in black eyebrow pencil: ‘PS. 1 MORE.’ No one knows what that means, but the possibilities which come to mind are chilling. It’s all too possible he has told us he will kill again if given the chance.”
    Darkenwald had written down a statement that would survive for decades. “In a sense, writing the statement is like preparing a document for a time capsule to be opened in the year 2000—because I cannot conceive of the question of eventual parole even arising before then . . .”
    The year 2000 seemed so far away in 1976. But remembering the terrible tale told in his courtroom, Judge Henry sentenced Charles “Buddy” Longnecker, Jr. to life imprisonment for first degree murder
and
life imprisonment for first degree rape, both with an additional five years for the use of a deadly weapon during the crimes. He specified that the sentences were to run
consecutively.
The lowest minimum term which could possibly be set in Buddy’s case would therefore be thirty years.
    As this is written, Buddy Longnecker is in the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla. He is now forty-one years old. His release date has been calculated as September 28, 2031.
    Sharon Mason would have been sixty years old this year, but she did not live to see her thirty-eighth birthday.

Born to Kill?
    In the sixties and seventies, prisons seemed to have revolving doors. Too many sadistic sociopaths were finding their way back into a society that had naively believed that life in prison really
meant
life in prison. In most cases, it meant anywhere from ten to seventeen years in prison. While the vast majority of convicts are neither violent nor without conscience, the sadistic sociopath is compelled to hurt other people; cruelty is an integral part of his emotional blueprint. He usually makes an ideal prisoner—because he will do what he has to do to get free. But even in prison, he doesn’t change inside. And all the counseling, job training, and support doesn’t make one iota of difference to him (or, to be fair,
her).
When the sadistic sociopath is released, he will murder again.
    What makes sociopaths this way? Most forensic psychiatrists and psychologists agree that there is no one answer. Early abuse certainly contributes to a child’s development into a criminal later on. Quite possibly a physiological defect in the brain adds to the problem. Some researchers believe that criminals have a break in the linkage between the frontal lobe (that gives humans the ability to think and feel) and the limbic system that
we share with animals. The latter says, basically, “Take what you want when you want.” Some experts thought for awhile that murderers had an extra male chromosome, and that the added
“Y
chromosome” made them more violent than normal men. That theory, however, proved untrue when tested. In fact, Richard Speck, the Chicago mass murderer of nine student nurses, was the only infamous subject found to have an extra Y chromosome.
    It is more likely that some babies are born with a genetic predisposition to violence—just as some are born with an innate talent for music or math or for athletics. If a child has an inherent tendency to be violent
and
he is born into an abusive situation, the perfect soil is there for growing an antisocial personality. I don’t believe in the “bad seed” theory that holds that some babies are absolutely slated for a disastrous future from the moment of birth. There are too many variables, and a warm and loving home can work wonders.
    The story that follows is more indicative, however, of what can happen when a child comes into the world with two strikes against him and things only get worse from there.

M ichael Andrew Olds never had anything that he could call his own, not even his name. His fourteen-year-old mother was attacked in a dark alleyway in Seattle in the late summer of 1942, and he was conceived during the rape. The rapist was neither identified nor apprehended. Michael’s natural father may well have been a man of inherent violence who passed it on to the son he never even knew existed. But there was also the reality that the child’s first decade was as horrific as anything Charles Dickens wrote about in
Oliver Twist.
Michael was a boy nobody wanted, and he lived in sixteen foster homes before he was seventeen.
    His