By Skye Andrews
Michael Stone is a forensic psychiatrist and professor at Columbia, Stone has cataloged and classified evil acts into a 22-point scale. This scale is loosely divided into three sections.
1. Justified homicide Those who have killed in self defence and do not show psychopathic features
2. Jealous lovers, non psychopathic Committed crimes in the heat of passion
3. Willing companions of killers Some have antisocial traits and an aberrant personality
4. Provocative "self defence" These people kill in self defence, but are not entirely innocent
5. Desperate measures These are traumatised, desperate killers of abusive relatives or others but they lack significant psychopathic traits and are genuinely remorseful.
6. Hot heads Killers who act on an impetuous moment, yet without marked psychopathic features
7. Narcissists Highly narcissistic killers who are often possessive, not distinctly psychopathic but "with a psychopathic core". They typically kill loved ones or family members out of jealousy.
8. Fit of rage Non-psychopathic people, who live with an underlying, smouldering rage, then kill when that rage is ignited
9. Jealous lovers, psychopathic These killers are jealous lovers but with marked psychopathic features
10. "In the way" killers, not fully psychopathic Killers of witnesses or people who are simply "in the way". These evildoers are egocentric, but not totally psychopathic.
11. "In the way" psychopaths Psychopathic killers of people "in the way". Premeditation is not usually a major factor in their killing
12. Power-hungry and cornered Power-hungry psychopaths who kill when "cornered" or placed in a situation they wont be able to escape with their power intact.
13. Inadequate and rageful Murderers with shortcomings that follow them throughout life, who also express psychopathic impulses and are prone to rage
14. Schemers Ruthlessly self-centred and psychopathic, schemers stop at nothing to deceive, con and steal
15. Cold-blooded spree Murderers who kill multiple people calmly and with a psychopathic motive. Often pathological in their denial or guilt or inability to confront reality
16. Vicious psychopaths Those who commit multiple vicious acts that may also include murder, rape or mutilation
17. The sexually perverse Serial killers with some element of sexual perversion in their crimes. In males, rape is usually their primary motive and killing follows to hide the evidence. Torture is not the primary motive.
18. Torturing murderers Though psychotic, they do not typically prolong their torture. Murder not torture is their primary motivation.
19. Non-homicidal psychopaths Psychopaths who fall short of murder, yet engage in terrorism, subjugation, intimidation or rape
20. Murdering torturers Psychotic (legally insane) and primarily motivated by their desire to torture
21. Pure torturers Not all torturers murder. These psychopaths (evaluated to be in touch with reality) are preoccupied with torture "in the extreme" but never convicted of murder
22. Psychopathic torture-murderers Defined by the primary motivation to inflict prolonged, diabolical torture. Most in this category are male serial killers
Reproduced as Skye Andrews wrote it for issue 27, with the scale in her own wording. Three typing slips have been corrected because they obscured the sense: levels 20 and 21 read "Murdering tortures" and "Pure tortures" in the manuscript, where the word is torturers, and level 21 ended "never convicted of murderers" for murder. Nothing else has been altered.
One inconsistency has been left standing. Level 18 reads "Though psychotic", where the surrounding logic and Stone’s own published scale indicate psychopathic; the two words describe quite different conditions and the manuscript is not clear enough to correct with confidence.
The scale is Michael Stone’s, set out in his 2009 book The Anatomy of Evil and in the Discovery series Most Evil. It is one clinician’s framework rather than a diagnostic standard, it has no formal status in psychiatry, and it was built by reading case histories rather than by examining the people it classifies. Readers should treat the levels as a way of organising a discussion, not as a finding about any individual. The archive holds a different typology in CLASSIFYING DARKNESS.