The Psychology of Dexter - Bella DePaulo [96]
Duch, who commanded a prison called Tuol Sleng, otherwise known as S-21, when Pol Pot was in power, presided over the deaths of anywhere between 12,000 and 14,000 men, women, and children. These people were incarcerated, horribly tortured, and finally executed. Only seven prisoners who entered the prison came out alive. Children were bayoneted, women had their babies cut from their wombs, and men were chained to the floor of their cells until they died of starvation or suffocated in their own excreta.
The torture was so gruesome and so prolonged that those who received it would eventually confess to anything that their torturers put to them. Peasants who had never been outside their villages in the backblocks of rural Cambodia would admit to being CIA agents trained in Washington to spy for the U.S.A. Others would agree with their tormentors’ belief that they had plotted to murder Pol Pot or some of his inner cabinet when in reality they didn’t have the faintest idea who Pol Pot or his inner cabinet were. Indeed, the victims of Duch’s torturers would admit to almost anything just to stop the torture from continuing.
Some prisoners in S-21 would be tortured or executed simply because they wore clothes made in Europe, a sign of Western decadence, or just because they were teachers or professionals and not workers or peasants—considered the only people worthy of living in Pol Pot’s new utopia. The Khmer Rouge regime determined that Cambodia was to become a pure communist paradise regardless of how many hundreds of thousands of people were exterminated in the process.
Most of those subjected to this horrible ritual of torture, confession, and then murder were of course not guilty of anything. But the confessions were dutifully recorded, their photographs taken before execution, and the files with their confessions and photos safely archived, a model of bureaucratic efficiency that would be the envy of many Western government departments.
Duch, as commander of S-21, presided over this terror and was proud of his skills in organizing such a complex operation as mass murder on such a grand scale. He was born in 1942 into a poor Cambodian family, but as a school pupil was soon noticed for his intelligence and his interest in scholarly activities. He was described as studious with a particular interest in mathematics but with no political inclinations. After graduating from school Duch taught mathematics at a college, and one of his pupils told an academic who studied Duch’s life that he was renowned for “the precision of his lectures as if he were copying texts from his mind onto a board.”
Despite his obsessive nature Duch was otherwise pretty ordinary in every sense of the word. He married, regularly left the S-21 prison every day and went back to his wife and family, and was apparently a good father. During his trial some of his former pupils gave evidence that he was a kindly man who often helped them with extra tuition or would offer assistance in other ways, as well.
If Dexter were ever to come to such a trial, we could imagine others testifying similarly to his character. He, too, has a family, works efficiently, and is accepted by his colleagues and the police as just a normal guy. The difference with Duch was that, rather than simply appearing normal, he really was normal without a trace of psychopathy or mental illness in him. We know this because Duch was subjected to quite a detailed psychiatric examination by two psychiatrists who were appointed by the International Tribunal to assess him.
What the psychiatrists noted in their assessment (and what I also observed when I sat in the courtroom watching Duch give his crisp and remarkably honest accounts of his time as commander of S-21) was that he was a very ordinary, almost mundane person. There was absolutely no sign of the psychopathic characteristics that we usually associate with serial killers or with other types of predators. Duch, for example, did not appear to have enjoyed the