Free Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives by Marilee Strong Page A

without any thought or plan,’’ juror Jane
    Palermo said after the verdict. Under Massachusetts law, jurors could
    have convicted Romano for first-degree murder on the basis either
    of premeditation or that he acted with extreme cruelty. But the
    panel discounted the dismemberment as evidencing extreme cruelty
    because Katherine was already dead when her husband cut her up.
    In another case demonstrating a killer’s incredible lack of empathy,
    Gerald Miller offered nothing but shrugs and sarcasm in response
    to the ‘‘mysterious’’ disappearance of not just one but two different
    wives. First his childhood sweetheart and wife of twenty-nine years,
    Crystal, disappeared without a trace from the Oregon farm where they
    were living in 1984. Then, in 1989, his second wife, Carol, vanished
    from the ranch where he was employed. Miller was not investigated
    in the disappearance of his first wife until his second wife followed
    the first into the ether. Neither body has been found. No physical
    evidence was discovered indicating that a crime had occurred, and
    Miller denied having anything to do with their disappearances.
    Unlike Scott Peterson, who at least attempted to appear to be a
    grieving husband in front of the police and media, Miller could not
    bring himself to act as though he cared that either of his wives went
    missing. Both before and after each disappearance, he was pursuing
    other women he met in local country-western bars, plying them with
    offers of marriage and money. He made no real effort to search for
    either wife, gave away some of their possessions soon after they went
    missing, and made contradictory and cavalier statements about what
    may have happened to them—claiming sarcastically that one had
    been abducted by aliens. Only because he had the nerve to erase
    a second wife was he ever charged with a crime. In 1993 he was
    convicted of murdering both women based wholly on circumstantial
    evidence.

    The Dark Triad
    4 5
    Peterson was a better actor than Romano and Miller, but his
    publicly expressed concern for his missing wife—noticeably absent
    in his discussions with Amber or with the sister with whom he
    spent so much time after the crime, Anne Bird—was an act. As
    Robert Hare has noted, ‘‘Some psychopaths are more concerned with
    the inner workings of their cars than with the inner worlds of their
    ‘loved’ ones.’’
    These are not merely theoretical observations. Numerous scientific
    studies have measured the actual autonomic response in individuals
    exposed to a series of distressing images, such as a photograph of
    a crying child, and watching others receive what the participants
    believed to be electric shocks. In all the studies, psychopaths showed
    markedly less distress about the suffering of other people than control
    subjects.
    Physiological studies of skin conductance, startle response, and,
    before such studies were banned, actual electric shock have also
    shown that psychopaths experience fear and anxiety at far lower
    levels than the rest of us. This complete indifference to the feelings
    of others, coupled with a lack of fear, may account for how Scott
    Peterson could spend time dawdling on the Internet on Christmas
    Eve morning before embarking on the task of disposing of his wife’s
    corpse. As Cleckley noted in The Mask of Sanity , psychopaths are
    almost as incapable of anxiety as they are of empathy and remorse.
    Q
    Many men experience some ambivalence about having children,
    but for eraser killers these feelings seem to be particularly acute.
    A pregnancy, its impact on the relationship, and the impending or
    already strained responsibilities of fatherhood seem to have been
    a primary motivation for the murders committed by Peterson,
    Mark Hacking, and numerous other eraser killers profiled in this
    book.
    These men felt nothing for their children, whose lives they took
    along with their mothers’: no warmth, no empathy, no sense of
    responsibility. The