Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives by Marilee Strong Page B

with her for hours on end about nothing and everything
    but the fact that he was married and had a wife who was missing.
    When Amber discovered that her purportedly single boyfriend was at
    the center of a massive missing persons investigation, she contacted
    police and offered to help.
    For a while, she played along, pretending not to know anything
    about Laci as Scott told her lie after lie, fantastical story after fantastical
    story about his exciting bachelor life. Eventually, at the direction of
    the police, she confronted him. Scott continued to call her on an
    almost daily basis—even after she was presented to the world at a
    press conference held by Modesto police, a plan detectives hastily
    conceived after learning that the media was about to reveal Amber’s
    identity, hoping to turn the situation to their advantage by ratcheting
    up the pressure on their suspect.
    A high-scoring psychopath would not have taken such news
    well. In fact, personal betrayal, whether real or imagined, is often a
    key triggering mechanism for psychopathic violence. A full-fledged
    psychopath would have immediately realized that Amber was working
    with the police and ceased contact with her to protect himself—just

    The Dark Triad
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    as his attorney ordered him to do. Scott kept right on talking to her,
    sending her gifts, talking of a future between them, all to his ultimate
    peril. Not very smart for a guy who prided himself on his intelligence.
    Interestingly, he did experience a gut-level reaction to this unex-pected development. But he immediately spun the momentary fear
    he felt into an attempt to continue manipulating Amber and to win
    back her trust. He told her the next day that as he listened to the
    press conference on his car radio, he had to pull over and throw up
    because he was so ‘‘proud’’ of her ‘‘amazing character.’’ That wasn’t
    pride—it was cold-sweat panic.
    These kinds of anomalies are seen in other eraser killers. For
    example, Mark Hacking’s strange but dogged pursuit of a ‘‘double
    life’’ as an imaginary doctor certainly involved pathological lying,
    conning others, and a failure to accept responsibility. ‘‘Classic’’
    predatory psychopaths do not pretend to be doctors. They grab
    women off the street, hold up liquor stores and execute the compliant
    clerk for no reason, kill for laughs or to satisfy a $2 debt. Something
    more complex and more subtle had to be driving these very controlled
    and otherwise high-functioning eraser killers.
    The puzzle of seemingly ordinary people who engage in bad
    acts but who do not have a history of easily identifiable antiso-cial behavior—the kind that would usually earn them a criminal
    record— is a problem that another research psychologist has been
    working on for many years.
    Delroy Paulhus, a colleague of Robert Hare at the University of
    British Columbia, has been studying such behaviors as cheating,
    lying, and a phenomenon he calls overclaiming—a technique some
    people use to enhance themselves in the eyes of others by willfully
    exaggerating or fabricating their knowledge or experience. He believes
    that a combination of three closely related negative personality factors
    explains the behavior of a wide range of people who may never have
    been to prison but who consistently deceive, manipulate, and take
    advantage of others, and do so without any sense of guilt or shame.
    Paulus has named the cluster of toxic traits—psychopathy, narcis-sism, and Machiavellianism—‘‘the Dark Triad.’’ Although the three
    personality constructs overlap a great deal, each has its own partic-ularities that influence different aspects of behavior. As they have
    for psychopathy, psychologists have developed scales for measuring
    degrees of narcissism and Machiavellianism. Someone who possesses
    any of the three traits to a significant degree has the capacity for

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E R A S E D
    violence. An individual with a disturbing