Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [85]
Park Elliott Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist and FBI consultant in La Jolla, California, studied Paladin Press and its peers. In 1983 he set up a dummy company, Hawkeye Industries, through which he corresponded with Paladin and other companies in what he calls the “violence industry.” He used this oblique approach, he said, “because I thought these people were dangerous. Some of them are.”
He no longer placed Paladin in that category, however. “Paladin is so aboveboard in selling the worst of information for profit that there’s no need for any subterfuge with them.” His scrutiny earned him a dedication in one of Paladin’s books—George Hayduke’s Payback: Advanced Back-Stabbing and Mudslinging Techniques. Hayduke’s dedication reads, in part: “Park Baby, this book’s for you.”
Dr. Dietz estimates that he is called on to serve as a forensic psychiatrist in fifty to seventy-five criminal cases a year. When he interviews defendants, he said, he asks about the movies and TV shows they watch, the books they read. “And when one asks them,” he told me, “one learns that a large proportion of offenders of the type I’m asked to see are aware of and interested in these materials. I’ve come to expect bombers, killers using exotic weapons, mass murderers, and political-extremist offenders to have a level of familiarity with the violence industry, including Paladin Press, equivalent to the familiarity of sex offenders with pornography.”
The effect of Paladin’s books and pornography is similar, Dr. Dietz argued. “People with a preexisting interest in tying and torturing women gravitate to such pornography. People with a preexisting interest in mass destruction gravitate to titillating descriptions of that.”
His work brought him into contact with at least two multiple murderers who had read books by Paladin and its competitors: George Banks, who killed thirteen people in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and Sylvia Seegrist, who killed three people and wounded seven in Media, Pennsylvania.
In an article in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, Dr. Dietz argued that books sold or published by Paladin—in particular the How to Kill series, Get Even, and The Poor Man’s James Bond—may have been the inspiration for the Tylenol killings of 1982 and subsequent product-tampering cases. As early as 1972, he wrote, The Poor Man’s James Bond described how cyanide could be substituted for the drugs in medicinal capsules. The first murder using cyanide in capsules occurred in 1982 in Chicago, in the Tylenol case. Nine other murders followed, six more in Chicago, three others in 1986 in Seattle and Yonkers, New York.
In 1973, Dr. Dietz’s report continued, Paladin’s How to Kill suggested adding acid to eyedrops. A few years later a pharmacist allegedly used a similar technique.
In 1981, Get Even described a novel means of contaminating a bottled drink. Four years later, someone used the approach in a Santa Clara, California, grocery store.
In 1983, Paladin’s Hit Man noted a way of tampering with tea bags to make them deadly. Four years later, Dr. Dietz wrote, a New Jersey man was convicted of placing similarly contaminated tea bags in a grocery store.
“One of the usually ignored concerns about this industry that 1 would underscore is the effect of exposure on vulnerable members of the community,” Dr. Dietz told me. “It’s the same concern that I have always emphasized ought to be foremost in our thinking about the effects of pornography. It is not relevant what