How to spot a psychopath

Psychopathic behaviour
And since North American culture celebrates aggressively successful characteristics seen in people like Conrad Black or Donald Trump, psychopaths are also getting tougher to spot. "Psychopathic behaviour is more common, but it’s not psychopathy," says Hare. This is, he says, "actually making it easier for real psychopaths to function and look normal, while making it harder to detect them from people who are just unprincipled."

That was the situation with Michelle Ann Drake. The Dartmouth, N.S., woman made headlines last March when convicted of stealing in scams of breathtaking mendacity. In one case, Drake, then 37, faked being pregnant with triplets. Shortly before a planned caesarean, she told her boyfriend’s family the babies died in labour and were cremated. They borrowed $19,000 to help her sue the hospital, only to discover they’d been set up.

Psychopathic or just grossly unprincipled?
The key to telling the difference, says Martha Stout, a clinical psychology instructor at Harvard Medical School and author of The Sociopath Next Door (Broadway, 2005, $14.28), is an utter lack of conscience. Sociopaths have one, but it’s full of holes and works on their own set of rules. Narcissists have one, too, but are so self-interested it’s hard to tell. "What distinguishes [psychopaths] from the rest of us is an utterly empty hole in the psyche, where there should be the most evolved of all humanizing functions," she says.

Charm, lies and threats
Without conscience is one way corporate communications consultant Louise Gallagher now describes Peter*, a dashing 44-year-old replica car builder who used charm, lies and threats to ensnare her for nearly five years. In August 1998, Louise was an insecure, 45-year-old single mother of two girls. Seeing him at a conference, she asked if they’d met before. He looked deep into her eyes. "Impossible," he responded. "I’d never have forgotten you if we had." Within weeks, he proposed. "It got intense, fast. That was a red flag I missed," she says. "I was just divorced so I said we had to go slowly."

Then he revealed the sad "truth." He couldn’t wait because he had a rare heart condition. His sympathy-seeking lies (his only heart problem was a lack of one, she later discovered) should have been another red flag, indicating he was a psychopath ready "to prey on people in a vulnerable state," says Hare.

'He drew her back in'
Feeling overwhelmed, Louise considered ending it. Yet, he drew her back in, saying he was in an organized crime family, a grandiose claim typical of a psychopath’s "often theatrical, yet convincing stories," says Hare. Appalled, Louise distanced herself, but he had her followed and called to say the "family" would harm her children unless she kept quiet about his background. "I couldn’t believe I put my daughters in that situation," she says. She reported the incident to police, but nothing came of it. When the Canada Revenue Agency coincidentally investigated him, Peter convinced her she’d triggered it, in a technique Stout calls "gaslighting," or making the victim doubt her own perceptions. It worked. "I felt guilty for ruining his life."

Even after he was assessed as a psychopath during a brief stint in jail for assault and criminal harassment, she let him coerce her into leaving the province, breaking the conditions of his release. "He said there was no cure for psychopathy, but he could beat it and he could be a better man, but he needed me," and her money, she recalls.

Page 2 of 3 - Find out what happened to Louise and Peter on page 3!