Into The Darklands

By Nigel Latta

Would you recognise a child molester standing in a supermarket queue? And if you did, would you understand what went on in his - or her - mind?Nigel Latta is a forensic psychologist. He spends his working life with the sort of people most of us would prefer to pretend didn't exist. In this ground-breaking book, Nigel takes us inside the minds of some of the most chilling characters to walk our streets. the journey is challenging, and though Nigel has trodden the path many times, he offers no sense of familiarity or contempt. Rather, there is a palpable sense of danger as he treads carefully through the present and past psychological mines strewn through the lives of his clients. His challenge is to make these people confront and admit the damage their actions have caused, and so minimise the risk of them reoffending. It is not an easy task. the case studies in this book, all based on reality, will shock, unnerve and disturb. Yet it is compulsive reading - once you have visited the Darklands, you will never be able to leave.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Oct 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780730491767

Nigel Latta

Respected clinical psychologist, bestselling author, and father of two boys of his own, Nigel Latta specializes in working with children with behavioural problems, from simple to severe. A regular media commentator, he has presented two television series adapted from his books - Beyond the Darklands (which screens in both New Zealand and Australia) and The Politically Incorrect Parenting Show - and has a regular parenting segment on National Radio’s Nine To Noon.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

HE’S NOT A BIG MAN, but there’s something about him. It’s hard to say what exactly, but I feel it just the same. Something wrong.

We’re sitting in a small interview room at a probation office. Mt Eden Prison squats uncomfortably across the road, pretending not to notice us. The sunlight is streaming in through the window behind me, making me feel hot and uncomfortable. I’m originally a South Islander and I hate Auckland summers.

For some reason the sunlight seems to stop at his feet, almost as if it’s afraid to touch him, as if the sunlight feels it too. There’s poison inside this man, and if you get too close it’ll get inside you, like some kind of parasite.

‘I fucking hate them,’ he says, and as he speaks his face curls into a sneer with the easy familiarity of a cat. Clearly this is somewhere his face has been many times before.

‘Who?’ I ask.

‘Fucking kids.’

‘Why?’ I’m keeping my voice neutral, not wanting to disturb his flow at this point.

‘They make too much fucking noise.’

He’s dressed in black—black jeans, black singlet, black leather jacket and black leather boots. His hair is shaved almost to the bone. One of his front teeth is dying, slowly rotting in his mouth. He’s been out of jail for two months, after completing the Te Piriti Special Treatment Programme for sexual offenders at Auckland Prison. The report said, in the careful way people in my profession say such things, that this is a bad bugger.

High risk, the report said.

Bad bugger, however carefully you say it.

Five years ago he sexually abused two kids, children of an acquaintance of his. In treatment he talked about more children. Other names.

They always do.

‘What do you mean?’ I ask, carefully, trying to find my feet in the conversation.

‘I mean they’re too fucking noisy. I’d like to fucking kill them.’

He says it seriously, not offhand. Blinking at this point would be a tactical error, understandable maybe, but an error just the same.

‘You want to kill them because they’re noisy?’

‘Yeah.’ He answers as if I’m stupid, as if that was the only conclusion a thinking person could reach.

‘That’s nice,’ I say, changing my tone, pushing back just a little.

‘I killed a dog when I was a kid,’ he says.

‘Really?’ I’m trying to sound unconcerned. It’s never good to show your colours too soon. Don’t react, enact, is my motto.

He smiles, and I feel myself pulling back from him. He’d never see it though, because on the outside I don’t move a muscle. All he’d see is this thirty-something shrink in jeans and a red shirt looking back as if this was just another day at the office. Which it is, but inside I draw back from that smile just the same.

‘I flipped it on its back and pulled its front legs apart till its chest caved in,’ he says, demonstrating the movement for my benefit.

Fuck me, I think.

‘Really?’ is all I say.

‘Uh huh,’ and he sits there smiling at me, close enough to lean out and touch.

It’s time to start dancing now. He’s playing with me, and whatever else you do, you can’t let the bad guy play with you.

‘And you want to do that to kids?’ I ask, mimicking his chest-splitting trick with my hands in the stuffy air.

He smiles wider. ‘No, it wouldn’t work on kids. Only works on dogs.’

‘So how would you kill all these noisy children?’

‘I’d stab them.’

‘What kind of knife would you use?’ I ask, wanting to see how far down this particular road he is. ‘Do you have one?’

‘I’m a cook,’ he says. ‘I got lots of knives. Big ones.’

He smiles again and it’s like looking at a wall of blackness.

‘That’s pretty fucked up,’ I say.

‘They shouldn’t make such a fucking noise,’ he replies.

At times like this I wonder how my life ever travelled down this dark road. I don’t know what’s worse, the fact that he says these things, or the fact that I know what he’s really doing. The problem is, he’s overplayed his hand, he’s too evil, almost a caricature. In short, I don’t buy whatever he’s trying to sell me.

‘So what is this?’ I ask, injecting a little more edge into my tone. ‘I’m supposed to be scared? I’m supposed to think you’re this big psycho-killer? You want to freak me out, is that it? Truth is, I know who you are better than you do. You want me to believe you’re a kid killer? I don’t think so. You’re fucked up, absolutely. That part I do believe.’

He’s still smiling, but the easy, fluid nastiness is draining away.

And I’m on the road now, the box is open, pulling him in with my voice, focusing it all down so it’s just him and me and the darkness that’s suddenly fallen in the middle of a sunny afternoon.

‘You’re fucked up and you have been your whole life. Normal people don’t say this kid-killing shit. You talk like this because that’s how you keep the world away, and you keep the world away because you’re a lonely fucked-up man. Someone hurt you a long time back, and you couldn’t stop it so you told yourself you’d never be hurt again, you’d never let anyone get close enough to hurt you like he hurt you.’

I’m talking now as if there’s nothing else but him and me, and only this one chance to reach down into the darkness and find him. God knows where this stuff comes from. Once you’re on the road you just open your mouth and out it comes.

‘So don’t give me this bullshit about killing kids, James, because I don’t buy it. But if you want to talk about what’s really messing you up, if you want to talk to me about whatever it is inside you that makes you hate the world so much—and hate yourself so much—if you want to talk about that shit, then I’m here.’

I pause, letting the moment drag out.

He’s not smiling now.

‘But if you just want to talk about killing dogs and kids then you can do that somewhere else, ‘cause I don’t do that game-playing bullshit. Life’s too short.’

James is different now. The psycho-killer smile is gone. If it’s ever going to happen with him and me, it’ll happen now. These are the moments when you hold your breath, and hope the angels are with you.

‘No one ever gave a shit about me,’ he says at last, his voice small. ‘My whole life is shit.’

Now I don’t see a psycho-killer. Now all I see is a man. And I feel a familiar sadness. Just another day at the office.

‘Tell me about that shit,’ I say.

And just like that, we’re off…into the Darklands.

MUNDANE HORRORS

IT WAS ONLY WHEN I sat down to write this book that I realised how far I’ve come. It feels like a long way from where I first started—some days it feels like a lifetime. Officially I’m a clinical psychologist, and I’ve spent a great deal of my career, almost 13 years, working with people who do bad things to other people. Over that time I’ve interviewed literally thousands of offenders, young and old, who between them have committed every kind of crime you could imagine, and some you probably couldn’t.

I’ve also worked with their victims. The cruelty I’ve seen has at times left me numb.

Over the course of writing this book I’ve opened up places that haven’t seen the light of day for a long time. I’m usually good at forgetting things, just ask my wife. I forget to ring the plumber, get the milk, post the letter, pick up my socks. The ability to forget is important when you do what I do—there is simply too much hurt for any one person to bear.

Every day I go to work and walk around in places most people don’t even know exist. ‘You must have such an interesting job,’ a woman once said to me. ‘I’d love to spend a day watching what you do.’

‘You wouldn’t,’ I replied. ‘The stuff I do is pretty awful most of the time.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I really would.’

She didn’t understand, but then how could she? We live in a marketing-driven world, where everything is cool and everything has a soundtrack—even wars and elections. Hell, I’m no better, most of this book was written with The Eminem Show blasting in my ears, either that or U2 singing ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’. Murder is sexy in these media-drenched times. Oddly enough, sex crimes aren’t.

The Bad Man has become an almost mythical figure. He is reviled and feared more now than ever before. And he’s so busy. Two pretty little blonde girls abducted, murdered and buried in a field in England. The local school caretaker and his girlfriend are arrested and charged with their murder. Two boys take guns and bombs into a school in Columbine. A disgruntled ex-scout leader shoots 16 children and a teacher at a school in Dunblane. Between 1989 and 1992 Ivan Milat, ‘the Backpacker Murderer’, abducts, tortures and mutilates seven backpackers in the Belango State Forest south of Sydney. Martin Bryant goes on a shooting rampage in Port Arthur that leaves 35 dead, including children. Closer to home a father is convicted of bludgeoning his wife and daughter to death with a tomahawk. Before his arrest he is filmed being carried from the funeral service, apparently overcome with grief. A stepfather brutally stabs his two young stepdaughters to death and then fakes being attacked. He is alleged to have killed them because he was afraid they were going to report him for sexual abuse. Evidence given at his trial suggested one of the little girls may have lived for up to an hour after being stabbed in the chest. Another rather nerdy-looking young man is convicted of shooting his whole family.

And these are just the ones that made the papers. Underneath them are the bread-and-butter tragedies, the ones too boring to make the news; the mundane murders, the unremarkable rapes, the everyday sexual abuse of anonymous children.

Despite what the media tells you, it’s the mundane horrors that should really scare you. Forget the headline-grabbing celebrity killers, it’s Mr Nobody you should worry about, because he lives in every town.

Want to do something absolutely chilling? Log on to the Internet and go to any of the missing children sites, then just click through the pictures, one after another. Children are dying as you sit here reading this.

I’ve spent my career working with the Bad Man. He and I have spent many hours together, and I’ve gotten to know him fairly well. We’ve even shared a joke or two. Up until the last couple of years I’ve never really talked much about my work with anyone except colleagues. It’s just easier with people who know the territory.

So why this book?

For a long time now I’ve felt an increasing sense of frustration. Everyone has a theory about how to stop the Bad Man. Mostly it’s a variation on a very old scene: the villagers gather in an angry mob, replete with burning torches, pitchforks, axes. As one they surge up the mountain towards Frankenstein’s castle.

When the Bad Man hurts us, we want to hurt him back. We want our pound of flesh. We want him to bleed. If we can just get tough enough, the Bad Man will stop. He’ll give up his evil ways and let us be. If we hurt him badly enough, he’ll stop hurting us.

Let me tell you something right now. If we want to really stop the predators, the state has either got to kill them, or fill them up. It’s as simple as that. We either have to put them in a hole—literally or figuratively—or we have to find some way to fill the hole inside them that makes them want to hurt the rest of us.

You can frighten the wolf as much as you like, but when the hunger in his belly starts to gnaw, he’ll take your young the first chance he gets. When his stomach rumbles he won’t think about the shepherd’s rifle—the wolf will do what his nature tells him. He’ll wait till it’s dark, or your back is turned, and then he’ll take them.

Kill them or fill them, that’s the only choice we have.

Unfortunately I don’t have the luxury of being able to lose myself in that stuff for very long. I feel the urge to seek retribution just like everyone else—but I can’t indulge it the way most people can. I’m one of the people you send the Bad Man to—I’m one of the people who tries to decide how dangerous he is, and how to make him stop. Sometimes I might be the only person between the wolf and his next meal. I have to try and fill the hole inside him with little more than a conversation and a smile.

I have absolutely no qualms about keeping the ones we do catch in jail for a long time. In fact there are some people I’ve met whom I believe should never be let out of jail. Some people give up the right to walk around with the rest of us. If it were up to me these people would spend the rest of their lives behind bars.

But don’t think for a moment that it will make you any safer, because for every Bad Man you put down the hole, another will take his place.

And he won’t care that the last guy got a 20, 30 or even 40-year minimum non-parole period. He wouldn’t even care if you’d taken the last guy out into a field and shot him in the back of the head. All he cares about is the pretty little girl he wants to take off to some quiet lonely place. For him, ‘getting tough’ has a whole different meaning. He lies in bed at night thinking of her face, and masturbating to his own version of ‘getting tough’.

It’s dangerous, all this simplistic talk of toughness. It’s dangerous because if too many people believe that’s the only answer, we’ll stop looking in the directions we really should be looking. If all we do is get tough, then good people will continue to die.

In large part I wrote this book because I hope that by showing people what it’s like to work in this area, more people might begin to understand the true nature of the debate a little more.

However, it isn’t going to be a conventional journey. When you travel with me you’ll see a different kind of psychology, hopefully without the preciousness and stuffy ‘professionalism’ that matters so much to the bureaucrats and the ladder-climbers. People are not machines. We’re not a series of widgets that can be identified and filed in some logical order passed directly to psychologists from God.

Let me also state clearly that this is not dispassionate work. To the contrary, this is intensely passionate work, where everything matters. All I have when I’m sitting in a room with a bad guy is me and him, nothing more, nothing less. So I’m not going to pretend to be anything other than what I am, just a guy trying to get some shit done. I’m not going to talk much like a psychologist, because that careful polite language doesn’t work here. It holds no currency. I can’t talk about the things I’ve seen if I have to worry about offending anybody’s delicate sensibilities. Polite society this is not, and will never be.

BEWARE THE ROAD OUTSIDE YOUR DOOR

MY FAVORITE LINE from The Lord of the Rings is one I use in my work all the time. Bilbo, the old hobbit, warns Frodo, his nephew and the ring bearer, of the perils of the road: ‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door…there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.’

Good advice.

We should all be wary where we tread.

First I need to tell you a little bit about how I came to be doing what I do, about the road I’ve travelled. Don’t worry, I won’t bore you with stories about childhood exploits and the annual family caravan trip in the Christmas holidays. These stories are only interesting if you were there, otherwise it’s just other people’s dust you have to politely endure.

There is the dead man who vomited in my mouth though, you probably need to know about that, and an old black Imperial typewriter, and an interruption. All three were life-changing, although in quite different ways.

The typewriter first, because that’s what led to the dead man, and by a longer and more winding path to the interruption, and finally to this book. Doors are where you find them, and they hardly ever look as you’d expect.

I grew up in Oamaru, a small town on the east coast of the South Island of New Zealand, one of those small towns where the locals pronounce the name differently to how the weather people say it on the telly. I’m the second of four children, with an older brother, a younger brother and a younger sister.

I was blessed with the best of parents. My mother is a strong woman. She takes people as they are, and isn’t afraid to stand up for the things she believes in. She is both compassionate and kind, and was always there for us as kids, day and night, without fail. My father was—amongst a host of other remarkable things—a passionate musician. He was a good man who lived his life for all it was worth, and he loved us in a quiet unassuming way that I never fully appreciated until I became a father myself. He died shortly before this book was finished, and even though I miss him terribly, I know his life echoes on through mine. Whatever good things I do are only possible because of where I came from. I had the very best of starts.

They were also patient, my parents. In truth I don’t know how they got through my teenage years without hitting me on the head with a brick, burying me in the garden and telling the neighbours I’d run off to join the circus. Like all kids with loving parents, I took them completely for granted. There isn’t a day that goes by now, as I listen to the horror stories of other people’s childhoods, when I don’t think of my own parents and feel profound gratitude for all they did for me.

When I was 13 I found an old black Imperial typewriter at the back of a second-hand shop. I can’t remember why I went in there, but I do remember it was sitting between two battered office chairs, brooding in the shadows as if it was pissed off I’d taken so long to get there. It cost $50, which was a lot of money for me back then, but I bought it without even stopping to think. How could I not?

That old black Imperial looked positively evil, as if it couldn’t wait for my fingers on its keys. In truth it looked as if it wanted to eat me whole. It was a real Stephen King moment, and back then Mr King was da man in my eyes.

I lugged that old Imperial all the way home. It was so heavy it felt as if it already had all the words stacked inside. By the time I got it home my arms were aching, but I set it up and started writing, and it felt wonderful. Really wonderful. Just like the real thing.

I still have some of those old stories hidden away. Odd little bits and pieces, like the one about a tree with human heads for fruit, and a man sitting in the hot sun who gets turned into a giant cocoon by a freaky little caterpillar. Arguably one could say that my gaze has always fallen a little outside mainstream.

After a while though, I started to feel as if I needed to know more about the world. I needed to experience a bit of life if I was going to write about it. So, without too much thought, I set out trying to find the world, to see what was there. Which is what brought me—some six or eight months later—to the dead man.

Here’s the thing—if you really want to find the world you often don’t have to go very far. Heaven and hell are usually just around the corner. In my case I found it in a bedroom in a house which, by a strange coincidence, was only about a hundred yards from the second-hand store where I bought my old typewriter.

I can still remember the room—two single beds, one on each side, a window set back in an alcove. Old-people carpet, old-people curtains. On the wall over the body a watercolour painting of some Chinese junks. For some reason that picture is the clearest detail of all, even though this scene took place over 20 years ago. Perhaps it’s because I stared at it so hard for the 10 or so minutes I was up there alone with him. Some things stay with you, I guess.

And then there’s the dead man, lying sprawled across the bed in a dressing gown. He’s old, 70-something probably. Mouth hanging open, eyes too. Staring at nothing, or maybe he’s staring at something the rest of us can’t see. His skin is grey. Whatever the case he looked dead to me, but what did I know? I was only 14 and this was pretty much my first real live dead guy.

It was a fluke my being there, one of those unforeseen things. I was visiting someone who worked for the local ambulance service when the hospital called to tell him about the dead man. We went round to see if we could help. I went because I was a cadet in St John’s and aspired to working on the ambulance with the big boys and girls.

An old woman greeted us at the gate, upset, babbling something. I don’t remember much about her, probably because at that age babbling old ladies weren’t as cool as cardiac arrests. Then next thing we’re upstairs and I’m doing CPR.

‘You start and I’ll see where the ambulance is,’ said the other guy, disappearing out the door.

Oh shit, was all I thought back then.

Fifteen compressions to two breaths. It sounds easy, except in real life it’s anything but. What the books and the plastic resuscitation dummies don’t give you is the real deal, and that beats just about everything. You do chest compressions on a dummy and you don’t feel the click of ribs breaking the first time you push down too hard because you’re too juiced and not thinking. You also don’t get the noises. The dead man groaning as you one-one-thousand two-one-thousand three-one-thousand your way through the drill. Life leaking out in little protesting grunts. And then there’s the smell, the stomach-turning acidic stink of vomit. And the taste. Except it’s so much more than just the taste, it’s the slick feel as you try and seal his mouth with your own. The slippery rubbery cave of an old dead man’s mouth.

Breathe…one-one-thousand two-one-thousand three-one-thousand…

And you can’t stop, because that would be weak. There’s no room for weakness here. This old man’s life was in my hands, a stupid boy who wanted to find the world and then discovered when he did that it was too late to cry stop.

On and on, the taste of vomit filling my mouth. Staring at that picture on the wall as if my life depended on it, two Chinese junks sailing down a grey river. Trying not to think, willing myself to keep going. The old man was dying, and I couldn’t stop trying to save him.

Except there was a moment when I paused, simply unable to continue. The stench and the taste were horrific. I remember kneeling over him, trying to contain a desperate urge to bolt, not wanting to put in another breath. Feeling revolted, scared, guilty and useless at the same time, all in a swirling mess. This man was dying because I was too chicken-shit to keep going.

And then, at the very edge of my ability to function, it happened. Something inside moved. Actually it felt like it reached out and pushed me. In that moment I discovered something fundamentally important that would carry me through many more dark places in my life: I discovered that when shit came to shovel, I didn’t fold, I shovelled.

I leaned down and sealed his mouth with mine, closing my eyes. Breathe.

Soon after that the ambulance arrived. They burst in with all the gear and went to work. It was no good. Ten minutes after they arrived a local GP turned up and pronounced him dead, saying he was probably dead before we got there.

I felt like crying and giggling all in the same breath. Instead I tried to look as if I was cool with the whole thing.

‘You OK?’ one of the ambulance officers asked me later outside.

‘Sure,’ I replied, lying as all 14-year-old guys do about such things. ‘It was kinda gross was all.’

Now, whilst I’m not arguing that this sort of experience is necessarily a good thing for kids of that age, I know that in the long run it was good for me. People often comment about how ‘laid-back’ I am, how I don’t seem to get ruffled by things. In