Free The Runner by David Samuels

of the flight, he pretended to sleep, occasionally peeking out at his captors.

    Allergic to penicillin, the fugitive Donald Eugene Webb is a lover of dogs, a flashy
    dresser, and a big tipper. I first encountered Webb, a darkly handsome fellow with deep-set eyes and a prominent forehead, on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Poster, a relic from the days of John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde, which I read from top to bottom while hanging around the
    entrance to the Mountain Village police department. Described as “a career criminal and master of assumed identities,” Webb is being sought by the FBI in connection with the murder of a
    police chief. He specializes in robbing jewelry stores. Killing the police chief in the course of a robbery was probably a mistake, I thought. As of this writing, Webb has been on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list for over twenty-five years without being caught. I wonder, for a moment,
    whether Donald Eugene Webb is someone you might become by accident.

    My reverie was interrupted by Robert Walraven, a big, crew-cut Texan wearing a blue
    denim shirt, blue jeans, and a green fleece jacket. The detective who pursued Hogue to Arizona, Walraven has the broad shoulders and blunt manners of a Texas football coach. A certificate from the “National Institute for Truth Verification” pronounces him a “Certified Fraud
    Examiner.” He tells me that Jim is a career criminal who is unlikely to ever change.

    “Honestly, somebody needs to know where he is at all times just like you track a sex
    offender, because if he’s in your community, a crime’s likely being committed,” Walraven said.
    What he told me about Jim is a version of a theory that has dominated police work in America for the last sixty years, which rests in large part on a fascinating and quietly hilarious book that I have been reading off and on late at night in the room that I have rented in Telluride. It is no knock on Robert Walraven or other hardworking practitioners of the fine art of criminal justice to note that few working police officers have heard of The Mask of Sanity or of its author, Hervey Cleckley, a name whose clattering syllables sit uneasily in any normal sentence, just as Cleckley’s subjects— psychopaths—have trouble fitting in to human society. While Hervey
    Cleckley never attained the widespread fame of contemporaries like Karl Menninger, his
    influence on the use of applied psychology in the American legal system has arguably been
    greater than that of anyone besides Freud. It is to Cleckley that judges, lawyers, and pulp-fiction writers alike owe our fondness for psychopaths and sociopaths, those lone rangers of the psyche whose existence on a plane outside normal conceptions of good and evil is an affront to more ecumenical notions of a shared morality.

    Written in courtly, antique prose, Cleckley’s book is a fascinating and highly entertaining collection of firsthand accounts of the author’s experiences working with deeply recalcitrant and incorrigible patients in asylums and hospitals in the American South, particularly in the state of Georgia. Through these case histories, Cleckley distinguishes a population of “forgotten” human beings, intelligent and not suffering from any of the classical psychological disorders, who nonetheless fail to demonstrate any noticeable adherence to the moral codes by which the rest of mankind ostensibly chooses to live. One subject was a habitual drunkard and screwup. Another man, whose name is given as Stanley, induced five teenage girls to shave their heads for no apparent reason. Absent any natural inclination to abide by the law, or to feel guilty when violating even the most basic codes of human behavior, Cleckley wrote, this population lived a separate existence of its own, like a tribe of space aliens among the run of more or less normal or abnormal human beings, who are regularly beset by conformity and guilt:

    It becomes difficult to imagine how much of