Which leads to the question: Should serial killers be locked away forever, maybe institutionalized (which is what Lewis believes), or should they be given the death penalty? Her view is that no matter how barbaric their crimes, no society that considers itself moral should execute the insane. But beneath the legal question lies a philosophical one: How do we view this kind of personality - as sick or as evil? Do we simply judge the horrific actions? (In that case the verdict is easy.) Or do we take into account, in some way, the circumstances that led to someone becoming this twisted and extreme? It’s a serious legal question - one that could probably be debated forever - how much serial killers are ultimately “responsible” for their actions. Yet as Lewis became a media star, getting called on as a witness by defense teams who argued that their pathologically deranged clients were ruled by forces beyond their control, she was often excoriated as if she’d become an apologist for murder. Her thesis is that “murderers are made, not born,” which means that in her view it’s virtually impossible to find a serial killer who wasn’t abused in some unspeakable way when he was a child. We see excerpts from these tapes, and look on as killers like Arthur Shawcross, a lumpy-looking night-shift cafeteria cook who haunted the Rochester area in the ’80s, enter what Lewis calls their “alter” selves (in his case, he sometimes channeled his mother berating him, just like Norman Bates). Lewis based the core of her perceptions on close encounters with her subjects: the multiple hours of conversations that she conducted, and videotaped, with more than 20 serial killers (and more run-of-the-mill murderers as well). None of this totally explains serial killers (maybe nothing could), but it colors in their dread-soaked enigmatic visciousness with a fair amount of clinical evidence and behavioral data.
Many of them have organic brain damage, as evidenced by their MRIs. In her view, nearly every one of them has dissociative identity disorder, which used to be called multiple personality disorder (which now sounds corny - very “Sybil” - though it basically means the same thing), leading them to possess at least one inner identity that’s “responsible” for committing the crimes. She wanted to know what made serial killers tick.
And when she became a psychiatrist she transferred that curiosity. She grew up in 1940s New York hearing news about the Nuremberg trials and wondered, as a nice Jewish girl, what made those Nazis tick. Lewis, now in her 80s, still has a perky, scampish vibe - she’s a sprite navigating the darkness. She courted controversy every step of the way her views were seen as subversive and unconventional. Yet part of the fascination of “ Crazy, Not Insane,” Alex Gibney’s ominously absorbing documentary about the forensic psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow Lewis, is that Lewis didn’t just become well-known for arguing that serial killers are mortally scarred, traumatized individuals whose personalities are divided off from themselves.
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