THE BRAIN BURGLAR

Lobotomies; burglary; suicide; punishment; heists

In the last newsletter, we considered at the case of Phineas Gage and his explosively violent frontal lobotomy. We saw how damage to the brain affected Gage’s personality: changing him from the reliable, diligent, punctual fellow he had previously been, to someone who was, well, quite the opposite. Some psychologists have argued that certain types of crime can be explained by damage to the frontal lobes, rendering the victim more impulsive and aggressive than before. Such criminals, they suspect, fail to be law abiding simply because they lack the appropriate hardware. Just as a car with faulty brakes fails to stop, so do criminals with faulty frontal lobes fail to resist the temptations of petty theft, vandalism, or violence.

They say that ‘replication is the heart of science’. For that reason, we’d like to find more examples.

Here are some headlines from Pittsburg newspapers: Brain Surgeon Would Free ‘Career Bandit’ for Test, says the first. Brain Operation May Open Door of Decent Society to Burglar, says the second. Brave Experiment Failed to Stop ‘Brain Burglar’, says the third.

There is a fourth headline, too: ‘Brain Burglar’ Kills Self In Cell for ‘Evil Deeds’.

Those headlines summarise a pitiful life and an even more pitiful death. Millard Wright was never much more than a petty criminal, vagabond, and desperate penny-ante show-off. He’d be forgotten by now were it not for his unique contribution to Psychology.

Wright’s life was passed traipsing in and out of prison, in and out of the madhouse. He had a desolate early life, virtually empty of love or money. He was a failure at school; a victim at home, where he was regularly abused. He made regrettable friends, played truant, picked a career in petty crime. He went to reformatory and then prison. Released, Millard became a burglar, or tried to. He was utterly talentless, far too absent-minded for the job. He’d forget his tools, lose his shoes, and find himself back in the pen. When we call someone ‘a bad criminal’, we usually mean that he is particularly ruthless or violent. In the case of Millard Wright, we simply mean one he was not very good at being a criminal.

Eventually, a judge released Wright on probation. He took up with a woman who cheated on him. When he found out, his pride was terribly hurt. To make himself feel better, he set off on a three-state burglary spree. It was no more successful than anything else he tried. Back he went to prison again, this time under a pseudonym. If John Livengood had been a model prisoner who earned parole, Millard Wright returned straight to crime. It was the Depression, there was no work anywhere, and perhaps Millard was too arrogant to want it anyway. Arrogance too often plays bedmate to incompetence.

It was the era of professional bandits. Their names appeared daily in impressive block type, up above the fold where no one could miss them: Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine-Gun Kelly, John Dillinger. Millard, (that grandstanding failure, that prancing success-repellent,) wanted to emulate his heroes. But he could not. He didn’t have the sense. He didn’t have the talent. He didn’t have a clue.

When we say that someone is ‘never going to get anywhere’, we usually mean that they are clearly going to make no impression on the world. In Wright’s case, we mean it literally. His idea of masterminding a heist was to jab an optimistic finger at a random town on a map.[i] It was never going to work. The Depression, after all, was a story of pros and cons. If Floyd, Kelly, and Dillinger were the pros, Millard was destined to be a con.

Millard found himself in a hospital for the criminally insane. He made a brilliant, daring escape-plan, but it turned out not to be brilliant or daring enough. Soon, he was back in county gaol. His lawyer, Louis Little, had been reading about lobotomies. Millard borrowed his magazine. If he’d been Alice, this would have been his rabbit-hole. ‘I’m for it,’ said Millard Wright. ‘Let me talk to the doctor’.[ii]

The surgeon, Yale David Koskoff, was excited. This was a unique opportunity for science. Koskoff said yes.

So did the judge. He agreed to postpone the trial until the operation was done. His decision may have been influenced by an enthusiastic article in American Weekly Magazine. It claimed that a recent lobotomy on an ‘incorrigible criminal’ had converted her into a ‘rational, decent woman’. In retrospect, we have to agree that seems unlikely.[iii]

Scalpel Versus Cellblock, said the Post-Gazette. Felon to Have Operation on Brain to End Crimes, said the New York Times. Heroic Koskoff was about to ‘cut evil from a man’s brain’.[iv]

At length, the patient was back in court. He faced a different judge this time. The judge with whom he’d made the original agreement was dead. Imagine the replacement judge’s dilemma: He was being asked to free this convict for no better reason than to find out whether an admittedly experimental operation had worked. Remember, the words ‘admittedly experimental operation’ can always be replaced by the words ‘hare-brained crackpot scheme’. Remember, too, that not one thing in Millard’s life had ever been a success before now. Fortune was surely not about to reverse itself. Sad to say, Lady Luck has no time for the Millard Wrights of this world. Worse, no one would be able to judge the results until Wright was living in a normal home under normal circumstances. But Millard did not have a normal home and his circumstances had never been remotely normal. As far as anyone knew, he was just as dangerous as ever. There was only one decision the judge could make. He sentenced Millard to between two and ten years in prison. You can see that this story is not going to end well. Three months later, perhaps full of regret, the judge killed himself.

Millard Wright was back in prison. When at length he emerged, it was to begin almost afresh: new job; new relationship; new hopes. He’d been free less than a year when police traced stolen goods back to him and his girlfriend, Roberta Stuckey.[v]

A better burglar: that’s all the lobotomy had made of Millard. This time, he’d managed perhaps forty crimes before being caught. It was about as many as he’d ever managed in his career till then. Wright’s haul was impressive. In his apartment, police discovered a hidden attic. It contained racks for stolen coats, cooled by electric fans to keep the furs fresh. There was also a textbook called Psychology. ‘Who’, asks Koskoff, ‘but a lobotomised burglar was interested in psychology?’[vi]

In squalls and flurries, reporters rushed to a small-town police station that found itself briefly and unexpectedly famous. Millard saw his disgrace spread across the front pages, his future stacked up lamely on the newsstands. He fled, and then surrendered abruptly. Perhaps he’d had enough. He killed himself the same night. Had he waited six months, he would have died anyway of cancer. A pathologist discovered the tumour at his autopsy. It was 1952. Millard Wright never saw his forty-third birthday.

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[i] Koskoff, Yale David MD & Goldhurst, Richard: The Dark Side of the House, Leslie Frewin, London, 1969,, p59

[ii] Millard Wright, quoted in Koskoff, Yale David MD & Goldhurst, Richard, op cit, p83

[iii] Mayer, Edward E: “Prefrontal lobotomy & the courts”, Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, Vol 38(6), 1948, p577

[iv] Koskoff, Yale David MD & Goldhurst, Richard, op cit, pp105-6

[v] Persaud, Raj: ‘The Lobotomist’, British Medical Journal, vol 330, 28th May,2005, p1275

[vi] Koskoff, Yale David MD & Goldhurst, Richard, op cit, p181