Interview with Kerrie Droban – S. 10, Ep. 14

This week’s Crime Cafe interview features journalist, attorney, podcaster, and true crime writer Kerrie Droban.

We talk about psychopaths and writing about them. And other stuff.

You can download a copy of the interview here.

Debbi: Hi everyone. My guest today is an award-winning true crime author, podcaster, attorney, and television journalist. She writes about violent subcultures such as outlaw motorcycle gangs and about criminal pathology. She has appeared on numerous television documentaries and shows. Her books have been adapted to create the show Gangland Undercover and have been optioned for film. It’s my pleasure to have Kerrie Droban with me today. Hey, Kerrie. How are you doing?

Kerrie: Good. Thank you so much for having me.

Debbi: I’m so glad you’re here with us today. I was just checking your website and I was fascinated to see that you grew up in a “spy family”. What was that like?

Kerrie: I did. I know. Everybody asks me that. It was actually the perfect backdrop for true crime and really sort of set the ball in motion, unbeknownst to me until a lot of years later. I grew up in a family of secrets and undercover operations and I really didn’t know anything about what my parents did until I was 17. And so it really just sort of set this whole career in motion of what does that do to somebody who lives in a duplicitous world where you’re not really sure what’s real, what isn’t real? What are the stakes of keeping secrets and living in a family where you at one point, on one occasion you have to protect them while they’re trying to protect you at the same time. You know, you really just don’t really know who to trust and who your confidences are. It was an interesting world. I had two brothers, and my brothers and I, none of us really knew what the other knew. So it was one of those sort of compounded duplicity. You couldn’t really ask, and so we sort of lived in a world of walking on eggshells, not really knowing who knew what and what was real.

I grew up in a family of secrets and undercover operations and I really didn’t know anything about what my parents did until I was 17. And so it really just sort of set this whole career in motion of what does that do to somebody who lives in a duplicitous world where you’re not really sure what’s real, what isn’t real?

Debbi: Oh my gosh. What a background to have as a person getting into crime writing of any sort.

Kerrie: Yes, yes. It was perfect.

Debbi: Yeah. And you had a Masters in writing, essentially from the writing seminar program at Johns Hopkins University first before you went to law school.

Kerrie: Yes. I started out actually as a poet. I mean, that’s a very circuitous route into true crime, but I wound up honing my skills as a poet and realized you really can’t make a living as a poet, and unless I wanted to be a poetry professor, I really wasn’t going to go very far with poetry. So that’s what launched me into law school.

Debbi: That’s interesting, because I had a similar story except it was with history. I was a journalism major, and I thought about getting a Masters in History and decided I don’t really plan on teaching history and ended up in law school.

Kerrie: Oh, wow.

Debbi: Funny how that happens.

Kerrie: I know. It’s sort of like your practical brain says, okay, how are you going to actually feed yourself, you know?

Debbi: Exactly.

Kerrie: Poverty was not fun.

Debbi: Oh, God. I can name some classes that were totally not fun. I hated Estates and Trusts for one thing. Lord, Lord. I read your guest post and I thought it was really good. I wanted to recommend that everybody read it. What struck me about it was kind of the general sense that psychopaths can’t really be fixed as such, in any sense that we would normally think of “fixing” a person. And in fact, we have to be better educated to avoid being in danger from them. That’s kind of what seemed to be your point. I just wondered if you had any thoughts on how environmental factors might affect persons in becoming a psychopath.

Kerrie: Yeah. I mean, it’s a subject that has fascinated me for a very long time, and of course, it blends in really well with true crime writing, and being a criminal defense attorney and being a family law lawyer. What struck me really starkly in practicing in this area, is that people really didn’t have an understanding of that kind of pathology. And when you don’t understand psychopathy, then you really don’t know how to – number one – litigate it, address it. Judges don’t know how to give appropriate sentences. Victims don’t know how to survive this. I mean, it becomes this sort of escalating ball that really can take you into areas that are not even helpful.

What struck me really starkly in practicing in this area, is that people really didn’t have an understanding of that kind of pathology. And when you don’t understand psychopathy, then you really don’t know how to – number one – litigate it, address it.

So to answer your question, it’s a whole nature/nurture question. Are psychopaths born? Are they made? And I think the consensus, and in fact most of the research that I’ve done, is they are really born that way, and so because of that, they’re different. It’s a very nuanced personality disorder. Oftentimes it’s sort of interchanged with verbiage like sociopaths or narcissists, or people will just say it as sort of hyperbole. Oh, he’s such a psychopath. But I think it’s really important to understand what that personality disorder is in order to know how to address it, particularly in the litigation area.

I’ve seen people – lawyers, judges, victims – become re-traumatized, re-abused by the very system that’s designed to protect them. So and, and the reason it’s important to understand that environment doesn’t necessarily play a factor is because you don’t want to wind up blaming the victim, blaming the parents of the child who might be born that way, or what do you do when you’re faced with them? We have so much teen violence now, which is really hard to comprehend, hard to wrap your brain around. I mean, what do you do with them? Do you try them as adults? Do you rehabilitate? We’re a nation that really wants to rehabilitate criminals, and I know this sounds weird coming from a defense attorney, like an imposter defense attorney.

I don’t believe that rehabilitation can actually help somebody who is a psychopath, and the common other terminology for this – antisocial personality disorder. When I was a capital lawyer, that was sort of the kiss of death diagnosis where if somebody had antisocial personality disorder, there was no cure. There was no helping them. And so then you talk about, well, how do you keep other people safe from them?

Debbi: Yeah. That’s a very good question. Where do you land on something like the death penalty?

Kerrie: Interesting, because I was a capital lawyer for about 15 years and really started litigating in those areas mostly on the appellate post-conviction side, and so I would see them after they were convicted, and after they had gone through these lengthy mitigation hearings where you would see the lawyers presenting really umpteen factors in their childhood that could have contributed to the way they became. Things like they had domestic violence in the family. They had abuse, they had trauma, they had sexual abuse, you name it, and how did that impact the later crime?

I actually stopped being a capital lawyer when I got to the one case that just I couldn’t do anything with. And I had to get off of that case because in my opinion, it was the first time that I actually encountered what I would describe as a true psychopath. There was no way to help this person, and I felt, just from a moral/ethical standpoint, there was really nothing that I could authentically argue to help my client.

I actually stopped being a capital lawyer when I got to the one case that just I couldn’t do anything with. And I had to get off of that case because in my opinion, it was the first time that I actually encountered what I would describe as a true psychopath.

I really believed – and this was sort of my moral crisis at the time or my ethical crisis – I really believed that if I continued to … I couldn’t represent him because I really believed that he deserved to die. That is so stunning for me to be able to say that as a defense attorney, but it really sort of flipped everything on its head for me and I started to really reevaluate the work that I was doing, why I was doing it, why this particular defendant was different from the other ones that I had represented, and what made him different. And so that’s what sort of launched me on this whole trajectory of, well, maybe there’s another way of analyzing these cases.

Debbi: This is great. I mean, I just love hearing this from a defense lawyer because we don’t get to hear enough from defense lawyers, I think. A lot of people have this picture of them as sleazy or something like that, and they’re not.

Kerrie: They’re not. It is such a tough job. It’s a really tough job.

Debbi: It’s a tough job. Yes.

Kerrie: Actually it sort of launched me into a whole other sort of area of like the ripple effect of representing people like this, representing psychopaths. What does it do to the lawyers? I think lawyers need to be trained in that area as well, and