LETTER FROM NEW ZEALAND
mind game
When a murderous shrink moved to a trusting coastal town, both had a surprise in store.
BY CARL ELLIOTT
D unedin, New Zealand—the second
city of the South Island, and the
home of the University of Otago—is an
uncommonly peaceful place. Once, at tea
in the university’s Bioethics Centre (where
I’ve had a visiting appointment for some
years), a nurse leaned toward me and said,
“In Dunedin, we have only interesting
murders.” She had a point. Rates of vio-
lent crime here are similar to those in the
more placid European countries, such as
Denmark and the Netherlands. But,
when Dunedin does have a murder, it is
spectacular. In November of 1990, three
months after my wife and I first arrived in
Dunedin, a mentally disturbed man
named David Gray shot thirteen people
in a nearby village, the deadliest murder
toll in New Zealand’s history. In June,
1994, a former missionary teacher named
Robin Bain and his wife and three of their
children were shot dead in Dunedin very
early one morning. The oldest son, David,
was eventually convicted of the murders,
but there was never a good explanation
for the crime, and the conviction was
overturned last year. In July, 2009, Clay-
ton Weatherston, a tutor in the Otago
economics department, was convicted
for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, a re-
cent graduate. She had been stabbed two
hundred and sixteen times.
Even in Dunedin, however, a psycho-
pathic psychiatrist stands out. What is
striking about the case of Colin Bouwer,
who was once the head of psychiatry at
the University of Otago Medical School
and is now a convicted murderer, was the
man’s ability to fool his colleagues, many
of whom would have studied psychopaths
in their medical training. It’s hard to say
whether his success reveals more about
the nature of psychopathy or more about
the character of New Zealanders.
I n November of 1999, an internist at a
New Zealand hospital faced two mys-
teries. One had to do with Colin Bouw-
er’s ailing wife, Annette. A forty-seven-
36 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 6, 2010
year-old physiotherapist, she had been in
good health until a few weeks earlier,
when she began experiencing dizziness,
blurred vision, and problems with coördi-
nation. She made an appointment with an
optician and got a prescription for glasses.
Annette’s symptoms did not seem espe-
cially alarming, until the morning of No-
vember 20th, when Bouwer reported that
he had awoken to find her unconscious in
bed. An ambulance took Annette to
Dunedin Hospital, the main teaching
hospital for the University of Otago.
It was quickly determined that she was
in a hypoglycemic coma, which is most
commonly caused by self-administered
glucose-lowering drugs that diabetics use,
such as insulin. But Annette did not have
diabetes. Dr. Andrew Bowers, a specialist
in internal medicine, was managing her
care at the hospital, and he asked Colin
Bouwer to search the house for drugs. He
also ordered a lab test for the presence of
such drugs in Annette’s blood. The tests
came back negative, and, during the next
few days, Annette’s blood sugar stabi-
lized. Why it had been so low in the
first place remained baffling.
The other mystery was Colin Bouw-
er’s behavior. Bouwer, who had moved
from South Africa two years earlier, was a
stout, self-assured psychiatrist with an Af-
rikaans accent. “He gave me a warm, hard
handshake, and said he was a physician, a
psychologist, and a pharmacologist,” An-
drew Bowers says. “He said it in an intim-
idating way, as if to establish that he was
the one in charge.” Soon, though, Bouw-
er’s attitude shifted. “It was like hot and
cold taps: He tried to overbear me at first,
but that didn’t work, so then he tried
being friendly.” Even more puzzling was
Bouwer’s lack of medical knowledge: he
had described himself as an expert in in-
ternal medicine, yet he seemed unable to
discuss the diagnostic tests associated with
hypoglycemia.
Four days after Annette was dis-
charged from the hospital, she went into
 another coma, and was readmitted. After had to be buried within forty-eight hours. on the couch, unresponsive, while Bou-
an extensive workup, the endocrinolo- Bowers offered to have the postmortem wer did all the talking. He also made an
gists consulting on the case came to done right away, but the psychiatrist still unusual choice of music for the funeral,
think that Annette might have an insu- resisted. It was only when Bowers refused Mann says—not a hymn, or anything that
linoma, a rare neuroendocrine tumor, to sign the death certificate without a Annette was especially fond of, but a song
but a pathology report later revealed no postmortem that he relented. Bowers at- about going over a cliff.
sign of one, and her condition, once tended Annette’s funeral, the following For Andrew Bowers, the most
more, had stabilized. About a week after week, and he was surprised to find that alarming sign came on the morning of
she was discharged again, Annette’s the ceremony was not Jewish. It was con- Annette’s death. Dr. Anne Walsh, one
symptoms returned. ducted by an Anglican priest, Helene of Bouwer’s colleagues in the Depart-
Andrew Bowers is a genial, ment of Psychological
dark-haired man in his mid- Medicine, was at the
forties, with the tired eyes and house when Bowers ar-
the slightly doughy skin of rived. Bowers wondered
someone who has spent too what she was doing there
much time indoors. “Annette so early in the morning.
was scared,” he says. She had As he was leaving the
lapsed into two comas in nine house, he later testified,
days, and no one could tell her Walsh pulled him aside

FPO
why. At the time, Bowers was and said, “It will be good
only three years out of training. to get all this settled, espe-
“I was feeling insecure about cially since Annette had
what was going on,” he says. “I accused Colin of trying to
was thinking, Is there anything murder her.”
that I’m missing?” His insecu-
rity colored his interactions
with Colin Bouwer, who, as
head of the Department of Psy-
I
n most medical schools,
it is not hard
to identify the stars, the
chological Medicine, was sev- charismatic figures whose
eral notches higher than Bow- charm and enthusiasm
ers in the academic hierarchy. draw in students and resi-
Annette was discharged for dents. It’s not just that
the third time, on Christmas they radiate energy and
Eve. Early on the morning of excitement about their
January 5, 2000, Bowers got a work; it’s that the excite-
call at home. “Annette is dead,” ment seemingly extends to
Bouwer told him. He asked the you, personally. Colin
internist to come to his house Bouwer was this sort of
and sign the death certificate. figure. “He was a brilliant
This was an unusual request. Dr. Colin Bouwer dazzled and deceived his colleagues with ease. doctor,” a former patient
Signing a death certificate is says. “He had this way of
normally a job for the patient’s general Mann, and at one point Annette’s closest embracing his patients. He made me
practitioner, not a hospital consultant. friend, a South African expatriate living in feel important.” The psychiatric resi-
When Bowers arrived, it was clear that Auckland, spoke movingly about the faith dents (or “registrars,” as they are known
Annette had not died peacefully. The in Jesus that she and Annette shared. in New Zealand) found him dazzling.
bedroom was a mess, and Annette’s body Later, Annette’s body was cremated. “He made each one feel they had some
was splayed across the bed. The bed- Bowers was not the only person puz- special knowledge or intelligence that
clothes were soiled with vomit. Bowers zled by Bouwer’s behavior. The Reverend was not being recognized or put to full
suspected that she had undergone a sei- Mann prepared for a number of funerals use,” Dr. Jubilee Rajiah, a Dunedin psy-
zure. Yet Bouwer said that he had no- that week, but says that her visit to the chiatrist who trained in Bouwer’s de-
ticed nothing out of the ordinary until he Bouwer house was unlike anything she partment, says.
found Annette dead early that morning. had ever experienced. “It felt like a chem- Bouwer was born in Bloemfontein,
“We slept in different rooms,” Bouwer istry laboratory,” she says. “Sterile, as if it South Africa, in 1950. He graduated
later explained to the police. had been disinfected.” Mann usually talks from medical school at Pretoria Univer-
Bowers wanted to order a postmortem to the children of the deceased, because sity in 1975, and spent a number of
ANDREA VENTURA

exam to find out why Annette had died so they often have stories that she can use in years in South Africa as a general prac-
unexpectedly, but Bouwer objected. Both her eulogy. But, when she tried talking to titioner. At a meeting of Mensa, the
he and Annette were Jewish, he said, and, Colin and Annette’s two teen-age chil- high-I.Q. society, he met Annette
according to Jewish law, Annette’s body dren, Greg and Anthea, they sat silently Langford, who was then working as a
THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 6, 2010 37
physical therapist, and they married in the coast among steep, intensely green
1981. Later, Bouwer specialized in psy- hills, which swoop down unexpectedly to
chiatry at Stellenbosch University, the reveal sandy white beaches. The effect is a
most illustrious of the country’s Afri- cross between Ireland and Fiji. The Bou-
kaans-speaking universities. Dr. Sarah wers lived in a cliffside house overlooking
Romans, a former head of Otago’s De- St. Clair Beach, known as the best surfing
partment of Psychological Medicine, spot on the South Island.
remembers meeting Bouwer at a con- Bouwer was hired by the University of
ference in Spain: “Here I am, an aca- Otago, New Zealand’s oldest university,
demic head of department, looking for as a senior lecturer in psychiatry, and he
good staff, and here is this unpolished swiftly rose to the top administrative post.
diamond. He seemed like a great catch.” When I spent a sabbatical at the universi-
Dan Stein, Bouwer’s research partner at ty’s Bioethics Centre, in early 2000, his
Stellenbosch, now head of the depart- office was across the street. Our paths
ment of psychiatry at the University of never crossed, but I knew several of his
Cape Town, sent an enthusiastic letter colleagues. They describe him as an ebul-
of recommendation: “On a personal lient, down-to-earth rugby fan who was
level, I regard Dr. Bouwer as a man of always good for a laugh or a story. He had
enormous integrity. He has a wonderful decided to emigrate, he said, because of
sense of humor and ability to commu- worries about violent crime. Bouwer had
nicate with others, so that he is held in a paunch and a bushy beard, and though
warmest esteem by patients from all his hair was thinning on top, he wore it
walks of life.” long and unkempt; it gave him, as one
In early 1997, Bouwer arrived at colleague said, “rather an Einstein look.”
Dunedin; Annette and the two children He came across as deeply caring. “He’s the
soon followed. The town was founded in sort of guy where you’d let your child sit
the nineteenth century by Scottish set- on his lap and open a present,” a former
tlers. Its streets are named for those of Ed- assistant in his department told me. “He’s
inburgh, and at its center is a statue of sort of a cross between Santa Claus and
Robert Burns, looking wistfully out to- your old uncle.”
ward Otago Harbor. When Mark Twain By all accounts, Bouwer was an excel-
visited Dunedin, in 1895, he wrote, “The lent psychiatrist. “He has this amazing an-
people are Scotch. They stopped here on tenna,” Sarah Romans says. “He can reach
their way from home to heaven—think- out and just size people up and know
ing they had arrived.” It would have been where their vulnerabilities and their
an easy mistake to make. Dunedin sits on strengths are, and, chameleon-like, adapt
“How about, for God’s sake, this one?”
himself to what people want to hear.” He
was often willing to experiment with
higher doses of drugs and non-standard
combinations. His research was on anxi-
ety disorders—social anxiety, panic disor-
der, post-traumatic-stress disorder.
“Colin had this fascination with things
that terrify people,” Romans says. “People
being suffocated, being exposed to water
torture, or drowned.”
Some colleagues may have thought
that this was the result of Bouwer’s own
experiences. Bouwer told them that he
had been involved in the South African
resistance struggle during the apartheid
era—joining the African National Con-
gress in the nineteen-sixties, as a teen-
ager—and had even counselled Nelson
Mandela when he was released from
Robben Island. Bouwer described how,
when he was a young man, the South
African police had detained him with-
out a trial for six months and tortured
him for his political beliefs. He would
bring up his torture casually, at confer-
ence receptions or over a beer, and then
provide graphic details. A doctor who
had seen Bouwer as a patient gave this
testimony: “He said the torture con-
sisted of standing naked with a brick
being hung from his testicles, sleep de-
privation, exercised to exhaustion with a
hessian bag over his head, then dunked
in water until drowning, electric shock
administered to the penis and anus, sod-
omized and being confined to a single
cell.” The doctor added, “He said he
communicated to others by Morse code
at night and practiced meditation and
self-hypnosis.”
Few of Bouwer’s colleagues knew An-
nette. This was unusual in a city as small
and friendly as Dunedin, but Bouwer
rarely brought her with him to social
events, and told some colleagues that she
had social phobia. Still, he seemed de-
voted to her, and also to his two children,
whom he spoke about with obvious
warmth. One colleague told me that she
once spotted Colin and Annette walking
together down the street, holding hands,
and she remembered being moved by
their quiet affection.
On September 15, 2000, nine months
after Annette’s death, the Dunedin police
arrested Bouwer on murder charges. By
this time, the police had been tapping his
telephone and bugging his house for
nearly three months. His genial air was so
convincing that his colleagues were
stunned. Just about the only person who
wasn’t surprised was Andrew Bowers, the
internist. Despite pressure from superiors
to drop the matter, he had worked quietly
with the police for months.
Bouwer’s method of murder was sim-
ple. He had written prescriptions for glu-
cose-lowering drugs, ground them up
with a mortar and pestle, and given them
to Annette, most likely in her food. (Al-
though Annette was tested for such drugs
in the hospital, the test was only sensitive
enough to detect the drugs shortly after
they had been administered.) The day be-
fore Annette died, Bouwer picked up a
prescription for a thousand-unit vial of
Humalog insulin, a dose large enough to
kill her.
The legal proceedings against Bou-
wer left his colleagues wondering what,
if anything, they knew about him. Who
was he, really, and why had he killed his
wife with such methodical precision?
A lthough Bouwer was indeed a
qualified psychiatrist, much of his
autobiography was constructed out of lies
and half-truths. He did not have a gradu-
ate degree in pharmacology, or any spe-
cialized training in internal medicine, or a
relationship with Nelson Mandela. On
official papers, he lists his religion as
Methodist. Annette was not his first wife,
as he told some people; she was his third.
Bouwer had two children from the first
marriage: an adopted daughter, Henri-
ette, who was the child of his first wife,
Mariette Kruger, and a biological son,
Colin, Jr.
Many people tell lies to protect them-
selves. Bouwer lied even when nothing
was at stake. Still, there was a certain
consistency to the lies. They were often
told in an offhand manner, seemingly
without any calculation. They were usu-
ally self-serving, in that they aimed at
generating admiration or sympathy. And
they were often so fantastic that, at least
from the outside, it is hard to imagine
anyone believing them. Yet people did.
“He was just so plausible,” Dr. Robin
Emsley, the chairman of the Department
of Psychiatry at Stellenbosch, says. “He
had a way of convincing you that he was
telling the truth, even when he was
backed into a corner.”
Here is Bouwer explaining a late paper
to a colleague in America by e-mail: “I am
terribly sorry about the delay in getting
the final draft to you. I have been in East
Timor doing volunteer work for Doctors
Without Frontiers during their riots and
elections.” When he was at Stellenbosch,
Bouwer reportedly told his colleagues that
his first wife had committed suicide after
killing their two children. Later, he told
them that Annette was being treated for
breast cancer at the University of Cape
Town and, as a result of metastases to her
brain, had become psychotic. None of this
was true, of course.
Despite all the stories of having been a
brave political dissident, Bouwer had ac-
tually been trained as a doctor by the
South African military. A press photo-
graph from the time shows him standing
alongside his fellow medical graduates
with a slight smile on his face and a grad-
uation robe draped across his shoulders,
wearing sunglasses and a military uni-
form. He was commissioned into the
South African Defense Force on Septem-
ber 22, 1975. Records show that he served
in the military for only two months before
he married his first wife and resigned his
commission.
In 1982, the South African Medical
Council suspended Bouwer’s license to
practice medicine and put him on its list
of “impaired” doctors, because, it seems,
he had a weakness for Demerol. It was
more than ten years before his license was
fully restored. In 1996, two former pa-
tients reportedly claimed to have had sex
with Bouwer while under his care. (On
being asked to provide more intimate de-
tails to the medical counsel, they appar-
ently decided to withdraw their com-
plaints.) Bouwer supposedly told them
that he hadn’t had sex in a long time be-
cause his wife was dying of cancer.
Bouwer had an aura that many women
found attractive. He also had a knack for
spotting women with psychological vul-
nerabilities that he could exploit. Soon
after he arrived in New Zealand, in 1997,
he was given an apartment at Southland
Hospital, in Invercargill, where he did
part-time clinical work, so that he could
stay overnight. Before long, rumors began
to circulate about the number of women
who visited his apartment, and about the
number of telephone calls he got, since all
phone calls came through the hospital op-
erator. Investigators eventually concluded
that Bouwer was sexually involved with at
least four hospital staff members in Inver-
THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 6, 2010 39
 cargill and Dunedin. His most visible re-
lationship was with Anne Walsh, the psy-
chiatrist who was present at Bouwer’s
house the morning that Annette’s death
was reported.
Walsh was intelligent and ambi-
tious—as the director of training and a
former acting head of the Department of
Psychological Medicine, she carried con-
siderable influence in the department—
but was also widely seen as needy and
emotionally brittle. She was married to
the head of the Department of Pathology,
with whom she had a teen-age daughter,
but it was no secret that their marriage
was breaking up. According to evidence
introduced at the trial, her sexual relation-
ship with Bouwer began on a trip to a
pharmaceutical-company-sponsored
conference in Copenhagen in October,
1999, a month before Annette went into
her first coma. (Walsh says that she be-
came involved with Bouwer only after
Annette’s death.)
If Bouwer had any inkling that he
might become a suspect, there is no evi-
dence of it in his behavior prior to the
murder. He was stunningly reckless. Two
months before he first sent Annette to the
hospital unconscious, at a time when she
was still in good health, he told a gradu-
ate student that she was in a coma. In late
November, after Annette had been hos-
pitalized, he sent an e-mail apology to a
colleague for missing a deadline on a
paper, explaining that his wife was “termi-
nally ill.” He even gave a tutorial to a
group of medical students in which he ex-
plained how to commit the perfect mur-
der. If you injected insulin between the
toes, he told the students, the murder
would never be detected.
In the weeks following Annette’s
death, however, Bouwer apparently re-
alized that suspicion might fall upon
him. In January, he began to communi-
cate with experts in toxicology all over
the world, asking about the likelihood
that glucose-lowering drugs could be
detected in a postmortem exam or a ret-
rospective blood test. He must have also
come to realize that the police could
track the prescriptions he had written.
By early February, he had decided to
fabricate a more complex story: he had
prostate cancer; he was severely de-
pressed; and at the time of Annette’s ill-
ness he was planning to take desperate
action. “When [Annette] went into a
40 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 6, 2010
coma, I saw it could be quite an easy
way to die,” he told the police. “I was
going to kill myself.” He said that he
had stockpiled the glucose-lowering
drugs in a plastic container in his closet.
Annette must have found the con-
tainer, he suggested, and taken the
drugs herself.
Bouwer flew to South Africa in late
January, 2000, purportedly grief-
stricken over Annette’s death, saying
that he needed to set their affairs in
order. His children moved in with Anne
Walsh. When Bouwer returned, just
over a month later, his appearance had
changed so drastically that many people
did not recognize him. He was bald and
beardless, and his eyebrows had been
shaved off. The reason, he said, was that
he had undergone chemotherapy. Later,
he produced a forged letter, supposedly
from a Pretoria urologist, saying that he
had been treated for prostate cancer,
and another forged letter, supposedly
from a psychiatrist in Cape Town, cer-
tifying that he had received electroshock
therapy for severe depression. Finally,
he produced a suicide note. Dated Jan-
uary 4th, the day before Annette’s
death, it was addressed to Annette: “I’m
sorry for being a weakling. I know [your
specialist] will be back tomorrow and
you’ll be safe in the medical ward. Please
forgive my cowardice. I’m ending my
life knowing you will be safe and in
good medical care.”
In the months after Bouwer returned
from South Africa, some people who
had initially found his stories plausible
began to have second thoughts. His be-
havior was not that of a dying, grieving
man. He continued to play squash reg-
ularly, even though he said the cancer
had metastasized to his bones. Dr. Rich-
ard Mullen, a psychiatric colleague, ran
into Bouwer one day in the hospital.
“He told me he was off to get his testi-
cles cut off due to cancer,” Mullen says.
“He didn’t appear to be upset at all with
his impending procedure.”
At work, Bouwer missed appoint-
ments and broke promises, and he be-
came convinced that rumors were
being spread about him, especially
about his affair with Anne Walsh. He
began to summon faculty members
into his office for meetings, at which he
pumped them for information. “I
would start shaking before the meet-
ing,” one faculty member told me. “I
would feel nauseated. He would bad-
mouth other people.”
Although the police originally
thought that Anne Walsh might have
been involved in the murder, their sur-
veillance convinced them otherwise. In
the conversations recorded by the police,
Walsh seems almost desperate to believe
that Bouwer was innocent. She con-
stantly reassured him, trying to dispel his
worries that he was going to be arrested,
and she urged him simply to tell the
truth. Shortly before Bouwer was taken
into custody, he gave Walsh the suicide
letter that he had supposedly written to
Annette, explaining how and why he
planned to kill himself. In a conversation
recorded by the police, Walsh seemed al-
most deaf to Bouwer’s actual concerns
about the letter:
A.W.: I cried over your suicide letter.
C.B.: Why?
A.W.: It’s the sweetest, most very sad, but
it just says it all, really.
C.B.: It’s not put on, is it?
A.W.: No, Colin, no, it’s not, but it shows
how much you loved your wife and family.
C.B.: My handwriting is not too good.
A.W.: It’s fine, it’s fine.
C.B.: I didn’t love her, Anne.
A.W.: I think you were very fond of her.
C.B.: We had an understanding.
When Bouwer went on trial for the
murder of his wife, the prosecution
argued that his motive was twofold:
he wanted the money from Annette’s
life-insurance policy, and he wanted to
marry Anne Walsh. Yet that argu-
ment never really made much sense. An
insurance policy for two hundred and
sixty thousand New Zealand dollars was
unlikely to tempt a doctor whose salary
exceeded a hundred thousand dollars a
year. Nor would Bouwer need to kill
Annette in order to marry Anne Walsh.
He had divorced twice already; he could
do so a third time. It’s not even clear that
Bouwer ever planned to marry Walsh,
given all the other women with whom
he was involved.
Just as puzzling as Bouwer’s lack of
motive was his poor judgment; he was
weirdly careless about covering his tracks.
The faked prescriptions, the references
to Annette’s impending death, the lec-
ture about the perfect murder, the bi-
zarre lies, the shaved eyebrows, the e-
mailed toxicology inquiries: these didn’t
exactly seem like the product of a cun-
ning mind. When the police arrested
Bouwer and searched his house, they
found the mortar and pestle he had used
to grind up the glucose-lowering drugs,
hidden in the pantry behind a box of
Weetabix. Nine months had passed
since the murder, and Bouwer hadn’t
bothered to dispose of it.
S everal months after Annette’s body
was cremated, Bouwer and the chil-
dren went to one of her favorite spots to
scatter her ashes. “We just threw the ashes
to the wind, and they seemed to get like a
glow,” Bouwer told Annette’s mother in
South Africa, on the telephone. “It was
like a light with the ashes going up.” Bou-
wer let his daughter run her fingers
through the ashes before they were scat-
tered. Later, in a police interview, he ad-
mitted that the ashes were not actually
Annette’s. He had taken them from the
fireplace in his house.
What personality type does this kind
of thing? In 1941, Hervey Cleckley, a pro-
fessor of psychiatry at the Medical Col-
lege of Georgia, published a book about
psychopaths called “The Mask of Sanity.”
Drawing from patients in his clinical
practice, Cleckley told stories of men and
women—successful businessmen and
professionals as well as con men, biga-
mists, and petty thieves—who were
friendly, charismatic, and often brilliant at
manipulating other people. Yet alongside
the glib charm of these psychopaths was a
kind of moral blindness, an apparent in-
capacity to feel moral sentiments such as
guilt and empathy. Cleckley marvelled at
the psychological ease with which psy-
chopaths lied, cheated, and betrayed their
friends and families.
While the charming, cunning psy-
chopath has become a stock character in
Hollywood films, Cleckley’s psycho-
paths bear little resemblance to Hanni-
bal Lecter. Often, they look more like
the bunglers in “Fargo,” whose elaborate
criminal plans are derailed by spectacu-
larly boneheaded decisions. Cleckley’s
psychopaths are not simply blind to the
interests of others; in some ways, they
are also blind to their own. They consis-
tently underestimate the intelligence of
other people, lying needlessly, even in
circumstances where they are certain to
be caught. In “The Mask of Sanity,”
Cleckley keeps returning to words like
“mimicry” and “simulation” to empha-
size how psychopaths can use moral and
THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 6, 2010 41
emotional language skillfully without
really feeling its depth and resonance.
And yet, like a pianist with a tin ear, the
psychopath can perform for only so long
before his deficiencies become apparent.
In moral philosophy and the law, psy-
chopaths present a theoretical problem.
On the surface, they seem like the very
worst kind of characters: not mere crim-
inals but criminals without remorse. Yet
the fact that even clever psychopaths
show such poor judgment about their
own interests suggests a deeper neuro-
logical impairment. “The core bit of psy-
chopathy seems to be the emotional dys-
function—the lack of guilt, the lack of
empathy,” says Dr. James Blair, a neuro-
scientist at the National Institutes of
Mental Health, who has spent fifteen
years studying the moral judgment of
psychopaths. “And at the brain level we
can relate those problems to problems in
the way the amygdala works, and prob-
lems in the way the ventromedial frontal
cortex works.” But, if a neurological im-
pairment prevents psychopaths from
fully understanding the wrongness of
their actions, are they fully to blame for
their wrongdoing?
Complicating the issue of blame still
further is the fact that at least some aspects
of psychopathy appear to be genetically
related—not in their criminality, which
appears more closely linked to classic
causes, such as trauma and abuse, but in
their emotional poverty. “The heritability
of the basic emotional problem does seem
to be pretty high,” Blair says,
noting that, on a scale from
zero to one, it’s .7. “Which is
a pretty respectable heritabil-
ity.”
I n May of 2000, four
months before
Colin Bouwer was arrested
in New Zealand, his son
Colin Bouwer, Jr., then
twenty-five years old, was
arrested in South Africa and charged
with murdering his wife, Ria. She had
been found dead in the guest bathroom
of their home, in Kempton Park. Her
panties were slashed, and toiletries were
scattered around the bathroom, as if a
break-in had occurred. Colin, Jr., ini-
tially told the police that he had been
out of the house for several hours with
their seven-month-old daughter, Me-
lissa, and had returned home to find Ria
dead.
Colin, Jr., was, at first glance, unlike
his father. He made his living by install-
ing and repairing air-conditioners and ice
machines. And although he was a well-
built, good-looking young man, he does
not seem to have inherited his father’s
charm. He was a more intimidating
figure, according to Abram van Zyl, a pri-
vate detective hired by Ria’s mother, Lou-
ise van Schalkwyk, to look into the mur-
der. “There was a stage when we were still
investigating the case when he had been
to see some hit men in Johannesburg to
persuade them to knock me off, so that
the investigation would come to a stand-
still,” van Zyl told me. He says that Colin,
Jr., was a jealous, domineering husband
and, on several occasions, had thrown Ria
out of the house, together with her be-
longings. The couple had fought on the
day of the murder, and Colin had stormed
out. When he returned, Ria was on her
bed, writing a letter. Colin strangled her
in the bedroom.
After the murder, however, the actions
of Colin, Jr., proved to be just as bizarre
and self-defeating as those of his father.
His first move was to call his mother,
Mariette Kruger, who drove thirty miles
from Johannesburg to Kempton Park,
and helped him move Ria’s body to the
bathroom, arrange the crime scene, and
devise a story to tell the police. (She was
later found guilty of being an accessory
after the fact.) That story was suspicious
from the very start, according
to van Zyl. No items of value
had been taken from the
house, and although Ria’s
panties had been slit, she had
not been raped. Colin, Jr.,
began pressuring Ria’s
mother to call off the investi-
gation, a move that naturally
cast suspicion on him.
Seven months later, in
March, 2000, Colin, Jr.,
and his mother staged a phony kidnap-
ping to deflect attention from the mur-
der. They told the police that while
Mariette was driving her granddaughter
to day care, two armed men hijacked her
pickup truck and disappeared with the
infant. A few hours later, Melissa was
found unharmed in the abandoned ve-
hicle. About a week after the kidnap-
ping, Louise van Schalkwyk found a
voodoo doll in her mailbox, with pins
stuck in its body and a condom pulled
over its head. Attached to the doll’s neck
was a Christmas decoration, one that
van Schalkwyk had placed on her
daughter’s grave. Four more voodoo
dolls arrived, this time with genitalia
molded out of a pliable material. In
April, 2000, van Schalkwyk was at-
tacked and beaten as she left her house,
and her leg was broken. Van Zyl says,
“That was also something that Bouwer
had orchestrated, there’s no doubt in my
mind, but we were never able to prove
it.” Colin, Jr., eventually confessed to
the murder and was convicted of culpa-
ble homicide.
P erhaps because New Zealand is
such a small place, the South Island
especially, people are far more trusting
of one another, and even of strangers,
than they are in the United States or
Europe or, indeed, South Africa. In
downtown Dunedin, it is not uncom-
mon to see bicycles standing unlocked
on the street. The Otago Daily Times is
sold in the Dunedin Hospital lobby:
payment is deposited in an honesty box.
As a rule, New Zealanders are not
known for being introspective. They are
modest, outward-looking people who
live in big landscapes, and most of them
probably find American-style self-ex-
amination to be a bit narcissistic, al-
though they are far too polite to say so.
The iconic New Zealander is Sir Ed-
mund Hillary, the self-effacing climber
of Mt. Everest, who always insisted on
sharing the credit with his Sherpa
climbing partner, Tenzing Norgay.
This climate of trust and humility is one
reason that visitors fall in love with the
country, but it may also make New Zea-
landers vulnerable to hustlers and con
artists who do not play by the rules.
“Kiwis are easily conned,” said Jubilee
Rajiah, who got her medical degree in
India before training in Bouwer’s de-
partment. “In India, he’d be caught out
in no time.”
But Bouwer also took pains to make
himself likable, by molding his persona to
fit the individual he wanted to manipu-
late, finding—or inventing—a common
interest. For Sarah Romans, it was shared
academic ambition; for another colleague,
it was family devotion. Bouwer sent raun-
chy e-mails to some people in the depart-
ment, while to others he emphasized his
religious faith. A secretary in the hospital
told me that when Bouwer found out she
was a Christian he brought in a Bible the
next day and pointed out his favorite
chapter.
When Bouwer’s mask did slip, it was
in situations whose moral significance es-
caped him—his substitution of fireplace
ashes for those of Annette, his odd habit
of bringing up stories of detention and
torture over a beer. In early August of
2000, the police taped a telephone con-
versation between Bouwer and one of his
lovers, a physician whom I will call Kate.
At one point, she began to tell Colin
about a young crash victim in the inten-
sive-care unit who she feared would not
survive:
Colin: People are allowed to die.
Kate: This guy’s time is up too soon.
Colin: People welcome death sometimes.
Kate: This guy’s time is up too soon.
Colin: Are you listening to what I’m
saying?
Kate: Mm.
Colin: The problem is the physician’s at-
titude towards death.
Kate: Mm.
Colin: Because it’s an enemy to our
training.
Kate: He’s only twenty-two.
Colin: I couldn’t care a stuff. Death is
• •
our friend, it’s not an enemy.
Later in the same conversation: station there is a framed photograph of ever understand the pain that ‘psycho-
Bouwer, along with his remark about paths’ endure.”
Colin: Just go to his funeral, that means
so much to the family. the New Zealand police being unable to He also told me that, in order to make
Kate: Mm. catch a murderer. amends for his wrongdoing, he had be-
Colin: And you can say, shit, I feel so bad Bouwer is serving his sentence in a come a Messianic Jew—a Jew who be-
for all of you.
Kate: Mm. new prison about an hour south of lieves that Jesus is the resurrected Jewish
Colin: And you can cry and then you can Dunedin, near Milton, known locally as Messiah. Later, he sent me some
leave. You don’t have to be there longer than the Milton Hilton, for its luxurious fa- thoughts on religion, some of which took
ten minutes.
cilities. He was given a life sentence in the form of meditations. They were dated
A few months before Bouwer began November, 2001, with a minimum of and signed with his name. One medita-
to poison Annette, he told her sister that thirteen years to be served before he tion, titled “Suffering and Divine Worth,”
it would be easy to get away with mur- would become eligible for parole. He begins with the sentence “There is only
der in New Zealand, because the police appealed the decision, but so did the one thing that I dread: not to be worthy
there were not equipped to handle com- Crown, and his sentence was increased of suffering.” Another read, “I often feel
plex criminal cases. Here Bouwer mis- to a minimum of fifteen years. Last year, that everyone else has advanced so far into
understood his adopted country. Kiwis I wrote to him in Milton, asking if he holiness that I am isolated and alone in
may not be accustomed to violent crime, would be willing to meet with me. He my sin.” I was struck by the style in which
but they have a knack for improvising declined, referring to the shame and re- these meditations were written, which
solutions. The Dunedin police put to- morse he felt about his past, and to a seemed quite different from the rest of his
gether a case against Bouwer so airtight wish to avoid causing his children any correspondence. A little research revealed
that it took a jury only three hours to further pain or embarrassment. He that the first passage is often attributed to
convict him. In the months leading up seemed skeptical, too, that his explana- Dostoyevsky, and that the second is by
to Bouwer’s arrest, the police inter- tions would be heard with any sympa- the Quaker theologian Richard Foster.
viewed staff members of the Dunedin thy. He wrote, “I have learnt that the Several other passages turned out to be
Hospital, and, remarkably, no one let it pain of people like me with personality from still other writers. It soon became
slip out that Bouwer was being investi- disorders is intense, and not easily ver- apparent that Bouwer’s personal medita-
gated. A detective who worked on the balised. I do not believe the medical tions about confession, suffering, and sin
case told me that in the Dunedin police profession, nor the general public will had been plagiarized. 
THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 6, 2010 43