When Your Child Is A Psychopath

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

The Atlantic has visited the San Marcos, Texas Medical Center, where they are taking a new approach to problem children - heartless, indifferent, unemotional - full of the hallmarks of a true psychopath.

Today is a good day, Samantha tells me, ten out of ten. We're sitting in the meeting room at the San Marcos Center, south of Austin, Texas. The walls of this hall remember countless difficult conversations between problem children, their anxious parents and the clinic's doctors. But today promises us pure joy. Today Samantha's mom comes from Idaho, as always, every six weeks, which means lunch in the city and a trip to the store. The girl needs new gins, yoga pants and nail polish.

11-year-old Samantha is one and a half meters tall, with black curly hair and a calm look. A smile flashes on her face when I ask about her favorite subject (history), and when I talk about the unloved one (mathematics), she makes faces. She looks confident and friendly, a normal child. But when we enter uncomfortable territory - we talk about what brought her to this hospital for teenagers 3000 km from her parents, Samantha begins to hesitate and looks down at her hands. “I wanted to take over the whole world,” she says. "So I did a whole book on how to hurt people."

From the age of 6, Samantha began to draw murder weapons: a knife, a bow and arrow, chemicals for poisoning, bags for suffocation. She tells me that she tried to kill her stuffed animals.

- Have you practiced on stuffed toys?

She nods.

- How did you feel when you did it with toys?

- I was happy.

- Why did it make you happy?

- Because I thought that someday I would do it with someone.

- And you tried?

Silence.

- I choked my little brother.

Samantha's parents Jen and Danny adopted Samantha when she was 2. They already had three children of their own, but felt they should add to the family Samantha (not her real name) and her half-sister, two years her senior. They later had two more children.

From the start, Samantha seemed like a wayward child, tyrannically hungry for attention. But that's how all kids are. Her biological mother was forced to abandon her because she lost her job and home, and could not provide for her four children. There was no evidence of child abuse. According to the documents, Samantha corresponded to the mental, emotional and physical level of development. She had no learning difficulties, no emotional trauma, no signs of autism or ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder).

But even at a very young age, Samantha had bad features. When she was about 20 months old, she got into a fight with a boy in kindergarten. The caregiver reassured both of them, the problem was resolved. Later that afternoon, Samantha, already potty-trained, walked over to the boy, pulled off her pants and urinated on him. "She knew exactly what she was doing," says Jen, "There was this ability to wait for the right moment to carry out her revenge."

As Samantha grew older, she pinched, pushed, tripped her siblings and laughed when they cried. She broke her sister's piggy bank and tore all the bills. When Samantha was 5, Jen scolded her for mistreating her brothers and sisters. Samantha went up to her parents' bathroom and flushed Mom's contact lenses down the toilet. “Her behavior was not impulsive,” Jen says. "It was deliberate and deliberate."

Jen, a retired elementary school teacher, and Danny, a physician, realized that they had exhausted all their knowledge and skills. They turned to therapists and psychiatrists. But Samantha became more and more dangerous. By the time she was six, she had gone to a mental hospital three times before being sent to an asylum in Montana. One psychologist assured her parents that Samantha just needed to grow out of this, the problem was only a delay in the development of empathy. Another said that Samantha was too impulsive, and that medications would help her. A third suggested that she had reactive attachment disorder and needed intensive care. But even more often, psychologists blamed Jen and Danny, arguing that Samantha was responding to abuse and lack of love.

On a frosty December day in 2011, Jen drove the kids home. Samantha has just turned 6 years old. Suddenly Jen heard a scream from the back seat, and when she looked in the rearview mirror, she saw Samantha's hands around the throat of her two-year-old sister, sitting in the child seat. Jen separated them, and on arrival home took Samantha aside.

- What were you doing? Jen asked.

“I tried to strangle her,” Samantha replied.

"Do you realize it would kill her?" She couldn't breathe. She would die.

- I know.

- What would happen to us?

“I would like to kill all of you.

Later, Samantha showed Jen her drawings, and Jen was horrified to see her daughter demonstrate how to strangle soft toys. "I was so scared," says Jen, "I felt like I completely lost control."

Four months later, Samantha attempted to strangle her baby brother, two months old.

Jen and Danny had to admit that nothing works - not love, not discipline, not therapy. “I read and read and read trying to find a diagnosis,” Jen says. "What describes the behavior that I observe?" She eventually found a suitable description, but this diagnosis was avoided by all mental health professionals as it was considered rare and incurable. In June 2013, Jen took Samantha to see a psychiatrist in New York, which confirmed her concerns.

“In the world of child psychiatry, this is an almost fatal diagnosis. That is, it means that nothing can help,”says Jen. She recalls how she went out on that warm afternoon on the street in Manhattan, everything was like a fog, passers-by pushed her as they walked by. Feelings flooded her, overwhelmed her. Finally, someone recognized the despair of her family, her need. There was hope. Maybe she and Danny can find a way to help their daughter.

Samantha was diagnosed with conduct disorder with heartlessness and unemotionality. She had all the hallmarks of a future psychopath.

Psychopaths have always been with us. In fact, certain psychopathic traits have survived to this day, because they are useful in small doses: the cold-bloodedness of surgeons, the tunnel vision of Olympic athletes, the ambitious narcissism of many politicians. But when these properties exist in extreme forms or in the wrong combination, they can produce a dangerous asocial individual or even a cold-blooded killer. Only in the last quarter of a century have scientists identified early signs signaling that a child could be the next Ted Bundy.

Researchers refrain from calling children psychopaths, the term has become a stigma. They prefer to describe children like Samantha with the phrase "heartlessness-unemotionality", which means a lack of empathy, remorse and guilt, shallow emotions, aggressiveness and cruelty, indifference to punishment. Heartless and unemotional children have no problem hurting others to get what they want. If they seem caring and sympathetic, they are probably trying to manipulate you.

Researchers say about 1% of children have similar characteristics, about the same as autistic and bipolar children. Until recently, this disorder was rarely mentioned. It wasn't until 2013 that the American Psychiatric Association included cold-heartedness-unemotionality in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) list of mental disorders.

The frustration is easy to overlook as many adorable kids with these traits are smart enough to disguise them.

More than 50 scientific papers have found that children with heartlessness-unemotionality are more likely (three times, according to one work) to become criminals or express aggressive, psychopathic traits in adulthood. Adult psychopaths make up a microscopic proportion of the general population, but they are responsible for half of all violent crimes, research says. Adrian Rein, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, says that if we ignore the problem, blood will be on our hands.

There are two paths leading to psychopathy, researchers say: one is innate and the other is nurtured. Some children can be made violent and indifferent by their environment - poverty, bad parents, dangerous neighborhoods. These children are not born that way, many experts believe that if removed from this environment, they can be turned away from psychopathy.

And other children show a lack of emotionality even when raised by loving parents in safe areas. Research in the UK has found that the condition is hereditary, embedded in the brain, and therefore particularly difficult to treat. “We like to think that the love of a mother and father can make everything right,” says Rein. "But there are times when parents do everything and a bad child is just a bad child."

The researchers emphasize that an indifferent child, even one who was born that way, does not necessarily turn into a psychopath. By some estimates, four out of five children do not grow up to be psychopaths. The mystery that everyone is trying to solve is why some of these children become normal people, while others end up on death row.

An experienced eye can recognize an emotionless child by 3-4 years of age. While normally developing children by this age are worried if they see crying children, and either try to console them or run away, emotionless children show cold detachment. Psychologists can trace these traits back to infancy.

Researchers at King's College London tested over 200 five-week-old babies, tracking whether they preferred to look at a person's face or a red ball. Those who preferred the red balloon showed more unemotional traits after 2.5 years.

As the child grows older, more obvious signs appear. Kent Keel, a psychologist at the University of New Mexico and author of The Psychopath Whisperer, says that the first dangerous harbinger is an offense or crime committed by an 8-10 year old child alone, in the absence of adults. This reflects an inner drive for harm. Criminal versatility - committing different offenses in different places - may also indicate future psychopathy.

But the most obvious sign is early cruelty. “Most of the psychopaths I have met in prison started out with fights with teachers in elementary school,” says Keel. “I asked them: What's the worst thing you've done in school? And they answered: I beat the teacher until he lost consciousness. And do you think this is really possible? It turns out that this is a very common case."

Largely thanks to Keel's work, we know what the brain of an adult psychopath looks like. He scanned the brains of hundreds of prisoners in maximum security prisons and recorded the difference between ordinary people convicted of violence and psychopaths. In general, Keel and others argue that there are at least two features in the psychopath's brain - and these same features are observed in the brains of heartless, unemotional children.

The first feature exists in the limbic system, which is responsible for processing emotions. In a psychopath's brain, this area contains less gray matter. "Looks like weak muscles," says Keel. A psychopath may mentally understand that he is doing the wrong thing, but he does not feel it.“Psychopaths know words, but not music,” is how Keel describes it. "They just have a different scheme."

In particular, experts point to the amygdala, which is part of the limbic system, as the culprit for composure and destructive behavior. A person with an under-active or underdeveloped amygdala may not feel empathy or contain violence. For example, many adults and children with psychopathy cannot recognize the expression of fear or stress on a human face. Essie Wieding, professor of psychopathology at University College London, recalls showing cards with different expressions to one inmate with psychopathy.

When it came to the cards with a frightened face, he said: "I don't know what you call this emotion, but this is how people usually look before stabbing them with a knife."

Why is this neural thing so important? Abigail Marsh, a researcher at Georgetown University, says signs of stress, expressions of fear and sadness are signals of submission and reconciliation. “This is a kind of white flag to prevent further attacks. And if you are insensitive to this signal, then you will attack the one whom other people prefer to leave alone."

Psychopaths not only fail to recognize stress and fear in other people, but they also don’t experience them. The best psychological indicator that a young person may become a criminal in adulthood is a low resting heart rate, says Adrian Rein of the University of Pennsylvania. Long-term studies of thousands of men in Sweden, the United Kingdom and Brazil indicate this biological feature. “We think a low heart rate reflects a lack of fear, and a lack of fear can push someone to commit fearless crimes,” Rein says. There is also an “optimal level of psychological arousal,” and people with psychopathy seek stimulation to raise their heart rate. "For some children, theft, gangs, robberies, fights are this way of achieving arousal." Indeed, when Daniel Washbuch, a psychologist at Penn State Hershey Medical Center, gave stimulants to emotionless children, their behavior improved.

The second feature of the psychopathic brain is an overactive reward system that targets drugs, sex, and anything else that gives pleasure. In one study, children were asked to play a computer game of chance, which allowed them to win first and then gradually lose. Most of the subjects stopped playing at a certain stage in order to stop incurring losses. And the psychopathic, emotionless children continued to play until they lost everything. “Their brakes just don't work,” says Kent Keel.

Broken brakes may explain why psychopaths commit violent crimes - their brains ignore signs of danger or impending punishment. “We make a lot of decisions based on threat, danger, that something bad could happen,” says Dustin Pardini, psychologist and professor of criminology at the University of Arizona. “If you are not too concerned about the negative consequences of your actions, then you are more likely to continue doing bad things. And when you get caught, you won't learn from your mistakes."

Researchers observe this indifference to punishment even in infants. “There are children standing in a corner completely unperturbed,” says Eva Kimonis, who works with these children and their families at the University of New South Wales in Australia. “So it’s not surprising that soon they’ll end up there again, since such punishment is ineffective for them. While the reward is oh, they are very motivated by it."

This observation led to a new treatment. What does the doctor do if the child's emotional, empathic part of the brain does not work, but the reward system in the brain continues to function? “You start collaborating with the system,” says Keel."Working with what's left."

Every year, nature and upbringing continue to push the heartless, unemotional child to psychopathy and block his exits to a normal life. His brain becomes less malleable, the environment forgives him less and less antics, as his parents exhaust their strength, and teachers, social workers and judges begin to turn away. By adolescence, he is not yet lost to society, since the rational part of his brain is still building up, but he can already be quite dangerous.

Like this guy standing five meters away from me at the Teens' Treatment Center in Mendota, Wisconsin. A thin and lanky teenager has just left his cell. Two officers handcuff him, shackles, and begin to take him away. Suddenly he turns to me and starts laughing menacingly - this laugh gives me goosebumps. Other young people start shouting curses and knocking on the metal doors of their cells, some just silently look through the narrow plexiglass windows, and it seems to me that I have entered the world of "Lord of the Flies."

Psychologists Michael Caldwell and Greg van Riebroek felt the same way when they opened the establishment in Mendot in 1995, trying to fight the epidemic of youth violence in the 90s. Rather than putting young criminals behind bars until they get out and commit even more violent crimes, the Wisconsin legislature has opened a new center to break the circle of pathology. The Mendota Center works with the Department of Health, not the Department of Correction and Punishment. It is not guards and overseers who work here, but psychologists and psychiatrists. There is one employee for every three children - a ratio four times that of other adolescent correctional facilities.

Caldwell and van Riebroijk tell me that juvenile correctional facilities for high-risk offenders were supposed to send in the most deeply insane boys between the ages of 12 and 17. What they did not expect was that the boys sent in would be the most notorious villains. They recall their first interviews.

"The child left the room, we turned to each other and said:" This is the most dangerous person I have ever met in my life. " Each next looked even more dangerous than the last.

“We looked at each other and said, 'Oh no. What are we getting ourselves into?”Adds van Rybroijk.

Through trial and error, they achieved what most thought was impossible: they may not have cured psychopathy, but they managed to curb it.

Most of the teenagers in Mendota grew up on the street, without parents, beaten, sexually abused. Retaliatory violence has become a defense mechanism. Caldwell and van Rybroijk recall a group therapy session where a boy described how his father tied his wrists and hung them from the ceiling, then cut them with a knife and rubbed pepper into their wounds. Several children said, "Hey, something similar happened to me." They called themselves the Piñata Club.

But not everyone in Mendota was born in hell. Some of the boys grew up in middle-class families whose parents were only guilty of paralysis at the sight of their terrifying child. Regardless of the background, one of the secrets of saving children from psychopathy was waging an ongoing war to be around them. The Mendota staff call this "decompression." The idea is to allow a teenager living in chaos to surface and acclimate to the world without resorting to violence.

Caldwell mentions that two weeks ago, a patient became enraged when he felt he was being neglected. Every time staff visited him, he would urinate or throw feces through the door (a favorite pastime for many patients in Mendota). The staff dodged and returned 20 minutes later, and he did it again. “It went on for several days,” Caldwell says. “But the essence of decompression is that sooner or later the child will get tired of doing this, or he will run out of urine. And then you will have very little time to try to establish positive contact with him."

Cindy Ebsen, the operations director and also a nurse, is giving me an examination of Mendota. As we pass a row of metal doors with narrow windows, the boys look at us and cries are replaced by pleading. "Cindy, Cindy, can you get me some candy?" "I'm your favorite, am I not, Cindy?" "Cindy, why don't you come to me anymore?"

She stops at every door to chat playfully with them. Young people behind these doors killed and maimed, stole cars and committed armed robbery. “But they are still children. I love working with them because I can see progress, unlike adult criminals,”says Ebsen. For many of them, friendship with the staff is the only safe acquaintance they have ever had.

Forming attachments in heartless children is very important, but it is not the only area of work in Mendota. The real breakthrough of the center lies in the transformation of the deficiencies of the brain for the benefit of the patient, namely, in lowering the meaning of punishment and increasing rewards. These guys were kicked out of school, placed in boarding schools, arrested and imprisoned. If the punishment affected them, it would be noticeable. But their brains react, and with great enthusiasm, only to rewards. In Mendota, boys accumulate points to join prestigious "clubs" (Club 19, Club 23, VIP). As their status grows, they receive perks and rewards - chocolates, baseball cards, pizza on Saturday, the ability to play Xbox, or stay up late. By hitting someone, urinating on someone, swearing at the staff, the boy loses his glasses, however, not for long, since the punishment does not work on them.

To be honest, I'm skeptical - will the boy who knocked down an elderly woman and took her pension (the real case of one of the residents of Mendota) be motivated by the promise of receiving Pokémon cards? I walk the corridors with Ebsen. She stops at one of the doors. “Hey, can I hear internet radio?” She calls.

“Yes, yes, I'm in the VIP club,” the voice replies. "Show you my basketball cards?"

Ebsen opens the door to reveal a skinny 17-year-old with a mustache. He puts out his collection. "There are, like, 50 basketball cards," he says, and I can almost see his reward center light up in his brain. "I have the most cards and they are the best." Later, he briefly describes his story: his stepmother constantly beat him, and his stepbrother raped him. Even before entering adolescence, he began to sexually harass the little girl and boy who lived in the neighborhood. This went on for several years until the boy complained to his mother. “I knew it was wrong, but I didn't care,” he says. "I just wanted to have fun."

In Mendota, he began to realize that short-term pleasure could lead him to jail, while delayed pleasure would bring more lasting dividends in the form of work, family, and most importantly, freedom. This revelation descended on him while chasing basketball cards.

After he explained to me the scoring system (something from the field of higher mathematics for me), the guy said that such an approach should mean success in the outside world - as if the world also works according to the prize points system. Just as good behavior brings basketball cards and internet radio here, it also brings him promotion at work. “Let's say you're a waiter, you can become a chef if you do well,” he says. "This is how I see it all."

He fixes his gaze on me, seeking confirmation. I nod, hoping the world will cooperate with him. And even more, I hope that he will retain this view of things.

In fact, Mendota's program has changed the trajectory of many young people, at least in the short term. Caldwell and van Rybroijk traced the path of 248 young renegades after their release. 147 of them were released from a regular correctional institution, and 101 (more complex, psychopathic cases) from Mendota. After 4.5 years, Mendota boys committed far fewer repeat crimes (64% versus 97%) and far fewer violent crimes (36% versus 60%). What is most striking is that young criminals from ordinary correctional institutions killed 16 people, and the boys from Mendota - none.

“We thought that as soon as they walked out the door, they would last a maximum of a week or two and then do something again,” Caldwell says. “And then the results came showing that nothing like this was happening. We even thought there was a mistake in the results. For two years they tried to find errors or an alternative explanation, but in the end they came to the conclusion that the results were real.

Now they are trying to address the next question: can Mendota's treatment program change not only the behavior of adolescents, but also their brains? Researchers are optimistic, in part because the decision-making part of the brain continues to develop until around the age of 25. According to Kent Keel, the program is similar to pulling weights, only in the neural sense. "If you train your limbic system, its performance improves."

To test this claim, Keele and the Mendota staff are now asking 300 residents of the center for mobile brain scans. The scanner records the shape and size of key areas of the brain in children, as well as its response to tests of impulsivity, decision-making and other qualities inherent in psychopathy. Each patient's brain will be scanned before, during and after the program, providing researchers with data on whether corrected behavior affects brain function.

No one expects Mendota alumni to develop full-fledged empathy or warmth. “They can't go from Joker and turn into Mr. Rogers (preacher, songwriter and TV host, starred in a children's television series - Lamps ed.),” Laughs Caldwell. But they can develop a conscious conscience, an intellectual awareness that life can be more fulfilling if they obey the rules.

“We’ll be happy if they just don’t break the law,” says van Rybroijk. "This is a huge achievement in our world."

How many of them will be able to adhere to this course throughout their lives? Caldwell and van Rybroek have no idea. They have no contact with former patients - this is a policy that requires staff and patients to adhere to certain frameworks. But sometimes alumni write or call telling them about their progress. Among the people who left such reviews, 37-year-old Karl stands out.

Karl (not real name) sent van Ribreuk an email of thanks in 2013. Except for one conviction for an armed attack, after Mendota, he did not get into any alterations for 10 years and opened his own business - a funeral home near Los Angeles. His success is especially significant because his case was one of the most difficult - he was a boy from a good family, born to abuse.

Karl was born in a small town in Wisconsin. The middle child of a computer programmer and teacher, “he turned out to be vicious,” his father recalls on the phone. His acts of violence started small - hit a boy in kindergarten, but quickly escalated - tore off the head of his beloved teddy bear, cut the tires on his parent's car, made fires, and killed his sister's hamster.

His sister recalls how Karl, when he was 8, unwound the cat, holding its tail, faster and faster, and then let go. "I heard her hit the wall and Karl just laughed."

In hindsight, even Karl is taken aback by his childish rage. “I remember how I bit my mother, she was bleeding, she was crying. I remember that I was very happy with this, I was filled with joy, I felt complete satisfaction,”he tells me on the phone.

“It's not that someone beat me and I tried to answer. It was a strange, inexplicable feeling of hatred."

His behavior worried and frightened his parents. “He grew up and it only got worse,” his father recalls. “Later, when he became a teenager and was sent to prison, I was delighted. We knew where he was and that he was safe - it was like a stone fell from our souls”.

By the time Karl arrived at the Mendota Teen Treatment Center, he was 15 years old, with a psychiatric hospital, a boarding school, and correctional centers under his belt. His personal file with the police had 18 charges, including armed robbery, three “crimes against the person,” one of which sent the victim to hospital. Lincoln Hills Teen Correctional Facility sent him to Mendota after committing over 100 violations of the regime in less than 4 months. On his youth psychopathy checklist, he scored 38 out of 40 points, five more than the average for Mendota's patients, who were considered some of the most dangerous young men in the state.

Karl did not have a smooth start to life in Mendota: for weeks he bullied the staff, threw feces around the cell, screamed at night, refused to take a shower, spent more time locked up than outside. Then slowly, but his psychology began to change. The staff's imperturbable calm weakened their defenses. “These people were like zombies,” Karl recalls with a laugh. "You could have hit them in the face, but they didn't do anything to you."

He began to speak in therapy sessions and in class. He stopped snarling and calmed down. He forged the first real relationship in his life. “The teachers, nannies, staff - everyone seemed to be imbued with this idea that they could change us,” he says. “Like, something good can come out of us. They said that we have potential."

After two terms in Mendota, he was released just before his 18th birthday. He got married and was arrested at 20 for beating up a police officer. In prison, he wrote a suicidal note, made a noose, for this attempt he was put in solitary confinement under supervision. While there, he began reading the Bible and fasting, and then, in his words, "there was a powerful change." Karl began to believe in God. Karl admits that his life is far from the Christian ideal. But he attends church every week and thanks Mendota for the journey that led him to gain faith. He was released in 2003, his marriage fell apart, and he moved from Wisconsin to California and opened his funeral home there.

Karl cheerfully admits that he enjoys the funeral business. As a child, Carl says, “I admired knives, cutting and killing, so it's a harmless way to express my morbid curiosity. I believe that the highest degree of morbid curiosity makes people serial killers. I have the same attraction. Only in a very moderate way."

Of course, his profession requires empathy. Karl says he has trained himself to show empathy for his grieving clients, and it comes out quite naturally. His sister agrees that he has made great emotional progress. “I've seen him interact with families, he's incredible. He shows deep compassion and lends his shoulder to them,”she says. “And this does not fit into the framework of my idea of him. I'm confused. Is it true? Does he really sympathize with them? Or is it all fake? Does he realize it?"

After talking to Karl, I begin to see him as a great success story. "Without Mendota and Jesus, I would have become Manson, Bundy, Dahmer or Berkowitz."Of course, his infatuation is a little creepy. But nevertheless, he remarried, became the father of his adored one-year-old son, his business is booming. After our phone call, I decide to meet him in person. I want to personally witness his rebirth.

The night before my flight to Los Angeles, I receive a hysterical letter from Karl's wife. Karl is at the police station. His wife tells me that Karl considers himself polygamous - he invited one of his girlfriends to his house (the woman denies that he and Karl were romantically involved). They were playing with the child when his wife returned. She flew into a rage and took the child. Karl grabbed her by the hair, pulled out the child and took away the phone so that she would not call the police. She got through to them from a neighbor's house. As a result, he was charged with three charges - beating of his wife, intimidation of a witness, neglect of parental responsibilities. The psychopath who had become a good now went to jail.

I still fly to Los Angeles, naively believing that he will be released on bail after the hearing. At half past nine in the morning we meet with his wife in court and a long wait begins. She is 12 years younger than Karl, a petite woman with long black hair and a fatigue that is only noticeable when she looks at her son. She met Karl through an online dating service two years ago when she was visiting Los Angeles, and after a couple of months romance, she moved to California to marry him. Now she sits in court, looking after her son and answering calls from clients of the funeral home.

“I'm so tired of this drama,” she says as the phone rings again.

It's hard to be married to a man like Karl. The wife says that he is funny and charming, he is a good listener, but sometimes he loses interest in his funeral business and leaves everything to her. Brings other women home and has sex with them, even when she's at home. Although he hadn't seriously hit her yet, he slapped her in the face.

“He asked for forgiveness, but I don't know if he was upset about it,” she says.

"So you wondered if he felt remorse?"

“To be honest, I’m now in a state where I don’t care anymore. I just want my son and me to be safe."

Finally, after three o'clock in the afternoon, Karl appears in court, handcuffed, in an orange robe. He waves at us with both hands and gives us a carefree smile that melts when he hears he won't be released on bail today, despite his admission of guilt. He will remain in prison for another three weeks.

Karl calls me the next day after he was released. “I shouldn't have had a girlfriend and a wife at the same time,” he tells me with uncharacteristic remorse. He insists that he wants to save the family, that the court-ordered classes on preventing domestic violence will help him. He looks sincere.

When I describe the latest news from Karl's life to Michael Caldwell and Greg van Riebroek, they emit an understanding laugh. “This is considered a good development for the Mendota guy,” Caldwell says. “He will never fully adapt to life, but so far he manages to stay mostly within the law. Even this offense is not an armed robbery or shooting at people."

His sister evaluates her brother's progress in the same way. “This guy got the lousiest cards in the deck. Who deserves a life like this? The fact that he is not an insane sleepwalker, has not received a life sentence, has not died - it's just a miracle."

I ask Karl if it's hard to play by the rules, to be just normal. “On a scale of 1 to 10, how difficult is it for me? I would say 8. Because 8 is difficult, very difficult."

I start to like Karl: he has a lively intellect, a willingness to admit his mistakes, a desire to be good. Is he sincere or is he trying to manipulate me? Is Karl's case proof that psychopathy can be tamed, or is it proof that psychopathic traits are so deeply ingrained that they cannot be eradicated? I dont know.

In downtown San Marcos, Samantha has new yoga pants, but they brought her little joy. In a few hours, Mom will leave for the airport and fly to Idaho. Samantha chews a slice of pizza and offers to watch a movie on Jen's laptop. She looks upset, but more of a return to a boring routine than her mother's departure.

Samantha snuggles up to her mother while they watch the movie Big and Kind Giant, this 11-year-old girl who can pierce her teacher's palm with a pencil at the slightest provocation.

As I watch them in the darkening room, for the hundredth time I reflect on the fickle nature of good and evil. If Samantha's brain is born heartless, if she cannot express empathy or feel remorse for her lack of a brain, can she be said to be angry? “The kids can't do anything about it,” says Adrian Rein. “Children don't grow up wanting to be a psychopath or a serial killer. They want to be a baseball player or a soccer player. It's not a choice."

Yet, Raine says, even if we do not call them evil, we must try to ward off their evil deeds. It is a daily struggle, sowing the seeds of emotion that is so natural - empathy, concern, remorse - into the stony ground of a heartless brain. Samantha has been living in San Marcos for over two years, where employees are trying to shape her behavior through regular therapy and a Mendota-like program of limited and quick punishments and a system of prizes and privileges - candy, Pokemon cards, late lights on weekends.

Jen and Danny have already noticed the first seeds of empathy. Samantha befriended the girl and recently comforted her after her social worker quit. They found traces of self-awareness and remorse: Samantha knows that her thoughts about harming others are wrong, she tries to suppress them. But cognitive training does not always cope with the urge to strangle an annoying classmate, which she tried to do only yesterday. “It just builds up and then I feel like I have to take it and strangle it. I can't help it,”explains Samantha.

It wears out both Samantha and the people around her. Later, I ask Jen if Samantha has any positive qualities for which she can be loved and forgiven for all this. "Isn't it all that bad?" I ask. She hesitates to answer. "Or bad?"

"It's not all bad," Jen finally replies. "She's cute and can be funny and enjoyable." She plays board games well, has an incredible imagination, and her siblings say they miss her. But Samantha's mood can change dramatically. “The thing is that its extremes are too extreme. You always expect something to happen."

Danny says they are counting on her selfishness to prevail over impulsiveness. "Our hope is that she will develop a mental understanding that her behavior must be appropriate if she wants to enjoy any of things." Due to her early diagnosis, they hope that Samantha's young, developing brain will be able to nurture moral and ethical principles. And parents like Jen and Danny will help her with this - researchers believe that a warm family atmosphere and responsible parents can help a heartless child become less indifferent as he gets older.

On the other hand, as a New York psychiatrist told them, the fact that her symptoms started so early and so badly may signal that her heartlessness is so deeply ingrained in her that there is little that will help her get rid of it.

Samantha's parents try not to think about what would have happened if they had not adopted her. Even Samantha asked them if they regretted it. "She asked if we wanted her," Jen recalls. “The real answer to that is: we didn’t know how high the demands she would make on us. We had no idea. We don't know if we would have done the same if we had to adopt her now. But we answered her that she was always ours."

Jen and Danny are planning to bring Samantha home this summer - plans that give the family some anxiety. They took several preventive measures, such as installing an alarm on Samantha's bedroom door. Older children are bigger and stronger than her, but the family will still have to look after children 5 and 7 years old. And yet, they believe Samantha is ready to return as she made great progress in San Marcos. They want to bring her home, give her another chance.

But even if Samantha at 11 can return to normal life at home, what will the future hold for her? "Do I want a kid like that to have a driver's license?" Jen asks herself. Will she go on dates? She's smart enough to go to college, but can she enter a complex social society without becoming a threat to it? Will she be able to build a lasting romantic relationship, let alone fall in love and get married?

Jen and Danny have reimagined the concept of success for Samantha - now they just want her not to go to jail.

And yet, they love Samantha. “She is ours and we want to raise our children together,” Jen says. Samantha spent almost 5 years in various medical institutions, almost half of her entire life. They won't be able to keep her in institutions forever. She must learn to communicate with the world, better sooner rather than later. “I believe there is hope,” Jen says. “The hardest part is that you can never get rid of it. This is high stakes parenting. And if we lose, we will lose big."

By Barbara Bradley Hagerty, The Atlantic