The Psychopath I Knew as a Kid

A true story about growing up around evil

Warning: there are parts of this story that depict wicked acts some may find distressing

He wasn’t one of the faces from our rag-tag mix of street urchins. He belonged to another group; one we occasionally found ourselves sharing the same space with and swapping stories on who was at whose party wearing what sneakers and fighting with whom. This was made possible through two brothers: Johnny and Mike. Mike was in our group and Johnny in theirs.

Johnny’s group was a year or two older. We called them the red-eyes on account of getting high and smoking weed was what held their crowd together. Occasionally, they would drift down to Unwins convenience store, where our crew played football, to buy booze and sate the “munchies” they had from smoking tightly packed bongs and fat spliffs made from twenty papers.

Leo was a regular with the stoners; he was slim, unremarkably dressed in jeans and cheap t-shirts, and wore a heavy blue coat when the weather said so. His oversized, almond-shaped eyes had little interest in others; they were half mooned by heavy lids, blotting out that part of the world that didn’t concern his needs — but opened wide when rattled. Occasionally he would cock one of his cutlass-shaped eyebrows into a dagger when questioning something that didn’t benefit him in some way, but apart from that, his face rarely changed from that of indifference. He was slow-talking and uninteresting and always had something smoking between his fingers. On the few occasions I met him he was either spaced out or on some higher frequency, communicating with beings unknown — undoubtedly the former with the thought he was doing the latter. We never really interacted one-on-one: I didn’t smoke pot, and he wasn’t interested in hanging out by the 7-Eleven to play football. He never made much in the way of conversation. I think I saw him laugh once.

There was a story that Leo had taken his mum’s car out one night with a boy called Bobby, the stoner’s tough guy. They were driving down a lane when Leo decided to bet Bobby he would drive full speed into the house on the bend they were approaching. I guess Bobby saw it as a good bet because the car, barreling down the lane, mounted the curb and careened straight through the garden fence and up to the house, where it crashed to a halt. They both survived.

Many years later, when all but the most shocking of stories had begun to fade, I was thumbing through my local newspaper and came across a crime piece about a violent home invasion and robbery of an elderly couple. The burglar threatened them both with a hammer and demanded to know where they kept their jewellery. The elderly man fought back but was thrown to the floor, bloodied. On the intruder’s way out, he doubled backed on himself to the kitchen where the pensioner lay on the floor, to give him one last kick, sinking his boot into the old man’s ribs as punishment for fighting back. The newspaper reported the burglar was a known drug addict with no fixed address. He went by the name Leo.

A few weeks after reading the news article, I bumped into Johnny from the stoner’s group. Johnny was a typical space cadet, but he had some semblance of a moral code he lived by, which made little sense but meant he was mostly harmless. I asked him if he had heard about Leo and read the news story; Johnny said, “He’s no friend of mine doing that!” It was soothing to hear Johnny say those words. I had no real reason to think Johnny would explain away Leo’s crimes, apart from they were once friends, but I needed to hear the disgust from someone who once knew Leo. It meant his disease hadn’t travelled, infecting the brains of those Leo had, at one time, called friends.

Johnny told me Leo had reached out to the old gang, years after they had disbanded and were each living their own lives, to invite them over for a “smoke.” Leo had progressed to smoking heroin by this time and tried to push it onto them — but they weren’t interested. They saw his ruse for what it was: Leo’s attempt to use them to raise money for bigger buys to support a growing addiction and make a little on the side.

Then Johnny told me a story about Leo that cemented in my mind we were not discussing your average lowlife junkie.

The stoners, being stoners, were all high one evening, and Leo had taken his mum’s car. They were parked up in a cul-de-sac off the main road, where two kittens played in the street. The colour of the kittens and where they came from I’m not sure… They may have belonged to a neighbor… Details I failed to ask Johnny. Details that had little meaning once you heard the punchline.

Leo lured the two kittens towards him. Gathering them up in his arms, he put them in a black, plastic refuge bag and turned to the group, who was sitting on a wall, smoking themselves to oblivion, and said, “watch this!” He placed the plastic bag holding the kittens under the wheel of his mum’s car, started the engine, and ran them over…

My eyes widened, and after drawing a deep breath, I said “What a sicko!”

Johnny told me Leo would amuse himself by following his mum around the house clapping in her ears, to send her crazy. Hearing all this left me with an ice-cold feeling in the pit of my stomach, like I’d swallowed a popsicle whole, yet my mouth was dry.

There wasn’t any broken home or abuse to make sense of how Leo came to be. He was the scorpion on the frog’s back, an evil person that did evil things and didn’t think the way regular people do.

His impulsiveness and recklessness in crashing his mother’s car, the violent home invasion, his substance abuse, and the killing of two kittens all pointed to a sociopath. Although, unlike psychopaths, sociopaths are capable of empathy for people they’re close to. I’m not sure Leo had anyone like that, however, but then again, I didn’t know him that well. Sociopath or psychopath, all I knew was, I didn’t want to be anywhere near him or anyone like him again.