I’ve interviewed death-row prisoners and found human beings, not monsters

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Even after Cathy Ames has killed her parents and burned their house to the ground, shot her husband and abandoned her two children, and poisoned the owner of a brothel who adores her like she’s her own daughter, she still elicits a degree of sympathy.

That was never the intention of John Steinbeck, on whose 1952 novel East of Eden new Netflix adaptation is based. “It is my belief that Cathy Ames was born with the tendencies, or lack of them, which drove and forced her all of her life,” his narrator says. But choosing to give Cathy a backstory – an abusive father; victim of childhood sexual assault and of a predatory schoolteacher was a deliberate choice by the show’s creator, Zoe Kazan, and by actor Florence Pugh, who plays Cathy in order to provide an explanation for what she does . And it’s a decision that is dividing critics.

In more than two decades living in America and reporting on crime and criminal justice, I’ve interviewed countless people that the world thinks of as monsters – child murderers, serial killers, mass shooters, and hit men. In that time, I can’t recall one person who didn’t have a backstory, like Cathy Ames, that went some way to explaining – not justifying – why they did what they did.

This week, while the world reels from the botched execution in Tennessee of Christa Pike who survived two doses of lethal injection and regained consciousness after six days, it’s worth acknowledging her backstory too.

When Pike was sentenced to death for the torture and murder of Colleen Slemmer, she became the youngest woman to receive a death sentence in the modern era. According to the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, she was a victim of parental neglect, child sexual abuse, and multiple rapes. She first attempted to take her own life when she was twelve.

And on Thursday, US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth announced that the execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, the former army officer convicted of a mass shooting at an army base in Texas, would be live-streamed. We’ve reached a point in America where its monsters are dispatched as a public spectacle. This also happens in Iran, Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and North Korea.

In her Reith Lecture for the BBC in 2024, forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist Dr Gwen Adshead asked: “Was W. H. Auden right when he wrote in 1939, ‘Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return’?”

Adshead explained that studies showed high levels of trauma in childhood can make someone vulnerable to developing a range of physical and mental health problems in adulthood; that exposure to trauma, especially maltreatment by adults, can result in a range of social problems, including violence.

“People who kill were not mindless monsters who’d been born to kill or who had murderousness running through their minds like a black thread in a complex carpet,” she said. “More often, they seem to be people like myself who struggle with shame and guilt and other normal human emotions.”

While not everyone who experiences childhood trauma becomes violent, research suggests that early abuse and neglect can increase the risk of violence later in life. The more difficult question is why some people repeat the harm they experienced, while others spend their lives determined never to inflict it on anyone else.

A little over a decade ago, for a series of articles for the Texas Observer, I sent a questionnaire to each of the 292 inmates then on Texas’s death row. It contained a host of questions about the impact of solitary confinement, whether they’d found religion in prison, what books they read – and what their childhoods were like.

I quoted a paper published by the American Psychological Association that looked at the life histories of 43 men on death row and found that each of them reported having been neglected when they were young. “94 per cent had been physically abused, 59 per cent sexually abused, and 83 per cent had witnessed violence in adolescence.”

I wrote about Willie Trottie, who told me he had an abusive and violent mother “who beat him and his siblings with extension cords until they bled”; that he was abandoned in hotel rooms, and placed in foster care when he was six or seven years old. I wrote about Jeff Wood, who said his father used to hit him with a razor strap, and Clinton Young, who said his father beat him with a piece of wood and kicked him with steel-toe-capped boots.

Mark Stroman also had a terrible childhood. His mother, an alcoholic, gave birth to him at 15; he was beaten by a man he believed was his father; and he ended up in juvenile detention. By the time Stroman carried out a horrific racist killing spree as revenge for the 9/11 attacks on New York, he already had a long rap sheet for burglary, fraud, and theft – and a tattoo of a swastika.

Ten days after the September 11 attacks, Stroman walked into three petrol stations in Dallas and shot employees who he later said looked Muslim. Two of them, Waqar Hasan and Vasudev Patel, died. The third, Rais Bhuiyan, not only survived but campaigned against Stroman’s impending execution.

Over time, Stroman began to feel remorse for his crimes. A filmmaker I know who ended up making a documentary about him told me he was “haunted” by what he had done.

In 2011, he had an execution date, and I was the last journalist to interview him. In almost a decade spent on death row, he’d seen 200 inmates be taken from the prison to the death chamber. He told me that the man from 2001 no longer existed and that he replayed the murders over and over in his head each day.

But, he also told me, “It’s hard to explain, but there’s a feeling of peace come over me. There’s no more fear, no more hate inside me. And it’s a surreal feeling but it’s amazing because the closer I get to death the more at peace I am.” He was executed that summer.

It’s understandable that ‘monster’ and ‘Angel Resendiz’ would be used in the same sentence. Given the moniker The Railroad Killer, he was a Mexican drifter who told me on death row in Texas in 2003 that he could easily have killed as many as 40 people. I ended up making a podcast series, Dead Man Talking, investigating his many confessions. But what rarely made the cut when it came to reporting around Resendiz and his crimes was his mental health.

The first time I drove four hours from my then home in Austin to the small logging town of Livingston in east Texas to interview him, I came back empty-handed: he made no sense at all, mumbling incomprehensible words and staring into space. I went back a few weeks later, and he told me he was now on medication. A corrections officer said he had tried to mutilate his genitals, and at one point he offered to show me until I stopped him.

Resendiz was a cold-blooded killer who crisscrossed the United States by freight train, got off at random, and bludgeoned his unsuspecting victims to death. His victims included a children’s doctor, a schoolteacher, a student out walking with his girlfriend, and a church pastor. But, at the time of his murders, Resendiz also believed he was half-man, half-angel, sent from God to cleanse the world of sinners.

Was he a monster? Or should he have spent the rest of his life in a psychiatric ward?

“I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents,” Steinbeck’s omniscient narrator tells us in East of Eden. “If a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?”

It’s the classic nature-versus-nurture argument, and in his seminal novel, Steinbeck came down firmly in support of the former.

But as Adshead argued in her lecture, “Denigrating, othering and calling perpetrators monsters does nothing to decrease risk and may even make the problem worse, either because it gives perpetrators a kind of awful status that may excite some people to further violence or because it dehumanises perpetrators in ways that mirror what they did to their victims.”

In fact, Christa Pike’s botched execution and the public outcry at the idea of a public, livestreamed execution of Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood mass shooter who was convicted on 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder, have only reignited the debate over whether the death penalty should exist at all. According to a report released late last year, support for execution in the US has dropped to its lowest level in 50 years – just 52 per cent.

After more than twenty years sitting in the same room as killers, I no longer believe in monsters. Steinbeck wrote that monsters are born in the world to human parents, but I think he had it backwards. It is the human parents – and everything that comes after – who can make us who we are.

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