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The triarchic model of psychopathy features meanness, boldness and inhibition.

Male research subjects who recalled childhood chaos were more callous and reckless.

This finding supports the notion that a form of psychopathy derives from an adverse environment.

I’ve written about two men from the same family who separately became serial killers, Danny and Larry Ranes. Larry, the youngest brother by a year and a half, killed five men over two months in 1964. Once caught, he confessed to them all. Eight years later, Danny raped and killed four women, three of them with a teenage accomplice. He insisted he was innocent but got convicted. Although Danny thought Larry exaggerated their father’s brutality, both recalled his unpredictable behavior, random abuse, arbitrary punishments, and paternal indifference. He abandoned the family when they were 9 and 10, leaving his wife to raise four kids (the other two were girls). In court, the oldest sister acknowledged that their early home life had been chaotic and lacking in moral guidance.

I have long believed that the father’s erratic behavior, coupled with the mother’s passivity, had influenced their sons’ later antisocial behavior. Larry developed a persona of callous indifference, coming across as a sociopath to a professor who interviewed him in prison. The same professor thought Danny wasn’t as bad, but his coercion of a teenage boy into rape and murder was highly manipulative and the crimes were more brutal and predatory than Larry’s string of robbery-homicides. Both brothers had been impulsive, Larry worse than Danny.

Recent research validated my sense of the influence of an unstable household on the development of........

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