Clinical and forensic psychologist Dr Kevin Lambe. Pictures by Mark Condren
February 13 2022 02:30 AM
What makes some people go out and commit savage acts of violence? Dr Kevin Lambe has dedicated his life to searching for answers to this question.
“This type of work affects every bone in your body. It affects your waking and sleeping thoughts,” says the forensic psychologist.
Lambe has worked on hundreds of cases for the State involving Ireland’s most disturbed minds. One man threatened to bring a gun to their next meeting. He conducted psychological assessments on Boy A, one of the teenagers who murdered schoolgirl Ana Kriégel. More recently he assessed Slawomir Gierlowski, the violent sex offender who waited at the end of the Luas lines to grab women walking home alone at night — before raping them in his van.
“I am trying to understand the cruelty within people. The madness as well as the badness,” he says when we meet at his office in Dublin city.
Most of his work takes place in prisons — but today he takes me to the room he uses to interview young people out on bail. It is stark white, with orange chairs. Pictures of sailing boats hang on the walls. Formality trumps a relaxed setting, it seems. “Anxiety can be a helpful tool,” he says.
Lambe is usually called upon at the point of sentencing “to help the court understand what has gone wrong in the minds of offenders — sometimes women but usually men.” In his experience “a mix of factors” can bring about the evil act. “A series of events which seem to occur, that we don’t fully understand yet.”
His role often draws him to the “inappropriate things” that happened in an offender’s childhood.
“It might look on the surface as if there is nothing. It might appear the person has had a normal life with no risk indicators. But somewhere in a therapy encounter, after significant time, there might be an expression of something from childhood — some fantasy, some urge — that lay dormant all these years. And the quest then becomes the need to understand where that comes from.”
What does he say to those who would argue that many traumatised people don’t inflict violence?
“Yes, it is very true. However, when I think about a sexual murder and the most serious level of crime, I think about it in terms of not just one or two things that have gone wrong.
“I often use the analogy of a combination lock with four numbers. Many people walk around with two or three things that have gone wrong in their past — traumatic childhood abuse, neglect. These things can happen to any of us, to a certain degree.
“We can have one, two, even three really serious traumas — but it’s the fourth number on the combination that unlocks the evil act, and that last piece is usually something which is currently happening for the person.”
'None of us know what anyone else is thinking or feeling,' says Dr Lambe
Why is it typically men who commit these crimes?
“I don’t know the answer to that,” he says. “But I can speculate a little. A lot of these men, if not all, arrive at a point where there is a general misogyny. Their emotions towards women are misplaced.
“And so the thoughts that the man will have about women become more and more negative as time goes on.
“Not always, but sometimes it can be linked to their mother or another important female caregiver in childhood, or it may not.
“In saying that, I want to stress that the mother is not the cause for these crimes, but it would be one risk factor we look out for — inappropriate maternal sexual conduct with the boy.”
Other risk factors include animal cruelty and repetitive fire setting. “When I see a fire in the news, I wonder about the psychology of the person who has set it. Because, by and large, they are never found.”
Lambe works within the care system with children who have come to the attention of authorities. “It can take school professionals to maybe recognise it first,” he says.
The reality is that most sex attackers aren’t caught until it’s too late. Neither violent rapist Larry Murphy nor Mark Hennessy — who snatched student Jastine Valdez (24) off the street and murdered her, before being shot dead by gardaí — had shown warning signs before their acts of brutal violence against women.
“Unfortunately none of us know what anyone else is thinking or feeling. There isn’t a psychological test that can fully uncover another person’s thoughts, unless that person is prepared to talk,” says Lambe.
“So reoccurring thoughts of rape or strangulation or mutilation can remain just thoughts and stay hidden — and surface only at the time the fourth digit in the combination clicks. We won’t know until it happens.”
What would he say to people who believe all misogyny is part of the same ‘spectrum’ of behaviour?
“With the ‘cat call’, for example, you can see the person doing it. It’s what we don’t know — the hidden and secretive — that is most concerning. The monstrous behaviour I deal with is very different to cat calling. And yet I fully appreciate how low-threshold behaviour is hugely problematic and frightening for women, and it needs to be addressed in its own way.”
The nature of his work means his safety is an ongoing concern. What did he say to the man said he’d bring a gun the next time he saw him? “I said if he did I’d call the guards. I think he was testing me. He was talking about his childhood abuse. It was very raw and he hadn’t had a therapy session until then that had helped him with the language.
“It brought him to a heightened state of defence and, feeling threatened, he turned it on me.”
Labels such as ‘monster’, he says, can create barriers to fully understanding the problem. “There is a difference between ‘the monster’ and ‘monstrous’ behaviour. These are people like you and me — but something has gone wrong in their psychology.
“If we see them as monsters we think we can easily identify them. But they are fighting an internal war. Some emotional deprivation or abuse that happened in childhood has left them with pent-up anger and rage, until it finds an outward expression.
“We never know, when we’re walking past people on the street, who is in that state of internal conflict”.