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

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 violent 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, Clayton Weatherston, a tutor in the Otago economics department, was convicted for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, a recent graduate. She had been stabbed two hundred and sixteen times. Even in Dunedin, however, a psychopathic 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.

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n November of 1999, an internist at a New Zealand hospital faced two mysteries. One had to do with Colin Bouwer’s ailing wife, Annette. A forty-seven-

year-old physiotherapist, she had been in good health until a few weeks earlier, when she began experiencing dizziness, blurred vision, and problems with coördination. She made an appointment with an optician and got a prescription for glasses. Annette’s symptoms did not seem especially alarming, until the morning of November 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 stabilized. Why it had been so low in the first place remained baffling. The other mystery was Colin Bouwer’s behavior. Bouwer, who had moved from South Africa two years earlier, was a stout, self-assured psychiatrist with an Afrikaans accent. “He gave me a warm, hard handshake, and said he was a physician, a psychologist, and a pharmacologist,” Andrew Bowers says. “He said it in an intimidating way, as if to establish that he was the one in charge.” Soon, though, Bouwer’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 internal medicine, yet he seemed unable to discuss the diagnostic tests associated with hypoglycemia. Four days after Annette was discharged 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 Bouan 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. For Andrew Bowers, the most sign of one, and her condition, once tended Annette’s funeral, the following 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 DepartAndrew Bowers is a genial, ment of Psychological dark-haired man in his midMedicine, was at the forties, with the tired eyes and house when Bowers arthe 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 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 insecun most medical schools, rity colored his interactions it is not hard with Colin Bouwer, who, as to identify the stars, the head of the Department of Psycharismatic figures whose chological Medicine, was sevcharm and enthusiasm eral notches higher than Bowdraw in students and resiers in the academic hierarchy. 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 excitecall 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 resiWhen 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 bedBowers 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 psyzure. Yet Bouwer said that he had no- that week, but says that her visit to the chiatrist who trained in Bouwer’s deticed 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 chemBouwer 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 UniverBowers wanted to order a postmortem to the children of the deceased, because sity in 1975, and spent a number of 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 pracunexpectedly, 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

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ANDREA VENTURA

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physical therapist, and they married in 1981. Later, Bouwer specialized in psychiatry at Stellenbosch University, the most illustrious of the country’s Afrikaans-speaking universities. Dr. Sarah Romans, a former head of Otago’s Department of Psychological Medicine, remembers meeting Bouwer at a conference in Spain: “Here I am, an academic head of department, looking for good staff, and here is this unpolished diamond. He seemed like a great catch.” Dan Stein, Bouwer’s research partner at Stellenbosch, now head of the department of psychiatry at the University of Cape Town, sent an enthusiastic letter of recommendation: “On a personal level, I regard Dr. Bouwer as a man of enormous integrity. He has a wonderful sense of humor and ability to communicate with others, so that he is held in warmest esteem by patients from all walks of life.” In early 1997, Bouwer arrived at Dunedin; Annette and the two children soon followed. The town was founded in the nineteenth century by Scottish settlers. Its streets are named for those of Edinburgh, and at its center is a statue of Robert Burns, looking wistfully out toward Otago Harbor. When Mark Twain visited Dunedin, in 1895, he wrote, “The people are Scotch. They stopped here on their way from home to heaven—thinking they had arrived.” It would have been an easy mistake to make. Dunedin sits on

the coast among steep, intensely green hills, which swoop down unexpectedly to reveal sandy white beaches. The effect is a cross between Ireland and Fiji. The Bouwers lived in a cliffside house overlooking St. Clair Beach, known as the best surfing spot on the South Island. Bouwer was hired by the University of Otago, New Zealand’s oldest university, as a senior lecturer in psychiatry, and he swiftly rose to the top administrative post. When I spent a sabbatical at the university’s Bioethics Centre, in early 2000, his office was across the street. Our paths never crossed, but I knew several of his colleagues. They describe him as an ebullient, down-to-earth rugby fan who was always good for a laugh or a story. He had decided to emigrate, he said, because of worries about violent crime. Bouwer had a paunch and a bushy beard, and though his hair was thinning on top, he wore it long and unkempt; it gave him, as one colleague said, “rather an Einstein look.” He came across as deeply caring. “He’s the sort of guy where you’d let your child sit on his lap and open a present,” a former assistant in his department told me. “He’s sort of a cross between Santa Claus and your old uncle.” By all accounts, Bouwer was an excellent psychiatrist. “He has this amazing antenna,” Sarah Romans says. “He can reach out and just size people up and know where their vulnerabilities and their 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 anxiety disorders—social anxiety, panic disorder, 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 Congress in the nineteen-sixties, as a teenager—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 without a trial for six months and tortured him for his political beliefs. He would bring up his torture casually, at conference 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 consisted of standing naked with a brick being hung from his testicles, sleep deprivation, exercised to exhaustion with a hessian bag over his head, then dunked in water until drowning, electric shock administered to the penis and anus, sodomized 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 Annette. 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 devoted 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 simple. He had written prescriptions for glucose-lowering drugs, ground them up with a mortar and pestle, and given them to Annette, most likely in her food. (Although 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 before 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 Bouwer 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? lthough Bouwer was indeed a qualified psychiatrist, much of his autobiography was constructed out of lies and half-truths. He did not have a graduate degree in pharmacology, or any specialized 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, Henriette, who was the child of his first wife, Mariette Kruger, and a biological son, Colin, Jr. Many people tell lies to protect themselves. 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 usually 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

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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 actually been trained as a doctor by the South African military. A press photograph from the time shows him standing alongside his fellow medical graduates with a slight smile on his face and a graduation robe draped across his shoulders, wearing sunglasses and a military uniform. He was commissioned into the South African Defense Force on September 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 patients reportedly claimed to have had sex with Bouwer while under his care. (On being asked to provide more intimate details to the medical counsel, they apparently decided to withdraw their complaints.) Bouwer supposedly told them that he hadn’t had sex in a long time because 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 vulnerabilities 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 operator. Investigators eventually concluded that Bouwer was sexually involved with at least four hospital staff members in InverTHE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 6, 2010 39 

cargill and Dunedin. His most visible relationship was with Anne Walsh, the psychiatrist who was present at Bouwer’s house the morning that Annette’s death was reported. Walsh was intelligent and ambitious—as the director of training and a former acting head of the Department of Psychological Medicine, she carried considerable 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 relationship 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 became involved with Bouwer only after Annette’s death.) If Bouwer had any inkling that he might become a suspect, there is no evidence 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 graduate student that she was in a coma. In late November, after Annette had been hospitalized, he sent an e-mail apology to a colleague for missing a deadline on a paper, explaining that his wife was “terminally ill.” He even gave a tutorial to a group of medical students in which he explained how to commit the perfect murder. 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 realized that suspicion might fall upon him. In January, he began to communicate 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 retrospective 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 depressed; and at the time of Annette’s illness he was planning to take desperate action. “When [Annette] went into a
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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 container, he suggested, and taken the drugs herself. Bouwer flew to South Africa in late January, 2000, purportedly griefstricken 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, certifying that he had received electroshock therapy for severe depression. Finally, he produced a suicide note. Dated January 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 behavior was not that of a dying, grieving man. He continued to play squash regularly, even though he said the cancer had metastasized to his bones. Dr. Richard Mullen, a psychiatric colleague, ran into Bouwer one day in the hospital. “He told me he was off to get his testicles cut off due to cancer,” Mullen says. “He didn’t appear to be upset at all with his impending procedure.” At work, Bouwer missed appointments and broke promises, and he became 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- 

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.

ing,” one faculty member told me. “I would feel nauseated. He would badmouth other people.” Although the police originally thought that Anne Walsh might have been involved in the murder, their surveillance convinced them otherwise. In the conversations recorded by the police, Walsh seems almost desperate to believe that Bouwer was innocent. She constantly 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 almost deaf to Bouwer’s actual concerns about the letter:

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. everal months after Annette’s body was cremated, Bouwer and the children 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.” Bouwer let his daughter run her fingers through the ashes before they were scattered. Later, in a police interview, he admitted 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 professor of psychiatry at the Medical College 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, bigamists, 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 incapacity to feel moral sentiments such as guilt and empathy. Cleckley marvelled at the psychological ease with which psychopaths lied, cheated, and betrayed their friends and families. While the charming, cunning psychopath has become a stock character in Hollywood films, Cleckley’s psychopaths bear little resemblance to Hannibal Lecter. Often, they look more like the bunglers in “Fargo,” whose elaborate criminal plans are derailed by spectacularly 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 consistently 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 emphasize how psychopaths can use moral and
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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 argument 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 lecture about the perfect murder, the bizarre lies, the shaved eyebrows, the emailed toxicology inquiries: these didn’t exactly seem like the product of a cunning mind. When the police arrested 

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, psychopaths present a theoretical problem. On the surface, they seem like the very worst kind of characters: not mere criminals but criminals without remorse. Yet the fact that even clever psychopaths show such poor judgment about their own interests suggests a deeper neurological impairment. “The core bit of psychopathy seems to be the emotional dysfunction—the lack of guilt, the lack of empathy,” says Dr. James Blair, a neuroscientist 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 problems in the way the ventromedial frontal cortex works.” But, if a neurological impairment 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 heritability.”

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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., initially 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 installing and repairing air-conditioners and ice machines. And although he was a wellbuilt, 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 private detective hired by Ria’s mother, Louise van Schalkwyk, to look into the murder. “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 standstill,” 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 belongings. 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 investigation, a move that naturally cast suspicion on him. Seven months later, in March, 2000, Colin, Jr., and his mother staged a phony kidnapping to deflect attention from the murder. 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 vehicle. About a week after the kidnapping, 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 attacked 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 culpable homicide.

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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 uncommon 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-examination to be a bit narcissistic, although they are far too polite to say so. The iconic New Zealander is Sir Edmund 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 Zealanders 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 department. “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 manipulate, finding—or inventing—a common interest. For Sarah Romans, it was shared academic ambition; for another colleague, it was family devotion. Bouwer sent raunchy e-mails to some people in the depart- 

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 attitude 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.

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 escaped 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 conversation 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 intensive-care unit who she feared would not survive:

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station there is a framed photograph of Bouwer, along with his remark about the New Zealand police being unable to catch a murderer. Bouwer is serving his sentence in a new prison about an hour south of Dunedin, near Milton, known locally as the Milton Hilton, for its luxurious facilities. He was given a life sentence in November, 2001, with a minimum of thirteen years to be served before he would become eligible for parole. He appealed the decision, but so did the Crown, and his sentence was increased to a minimum of fifteen years. Last year, I wrote to him in Milton, asking if he would be willing to meet with me. He declined, referring to the shame and remorse he felt about his past, and to a wish to avoid causing his children any further pain or embarrassment. He seemed skeptical, too, that his explanations would be heard with any sympathy. He wrote, “I have learnt that the pain of people like me with personality disorders is intense, and not easily verbalised. I do not believe the medical profession, nor the general public will

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ever understand the pain that ‘psychopaths’ endure.” He also told me that, in order to make amends for his wrongdoing, he had become a Messianic Jew—a Jew who believes that Jesus is the resurrected Jewish Messiah. Later, he sent me some thoughts on religion, some of which took the form of meditations. They were dated and signed with his name. One meditation, titled “Suffering and Divine Worth,” begins with the sentence “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of suffering.” Another read, “I often feel that everyone else has advanced so far into holiness that I am isolated and alone in my sin.” I was struck by the style in which these meditations were written, which seemed quite different from the rest of his correspondence. A little research revealed that the first passage is often attributed to Dostoyevsky, and that the second is by the Quaker theologian Richard Foster. Several other passages turned out to be from still other writers. It soon became apparent that Bouwer’s personal meditations about confession, suffering, and sin had been plagiarized. 
THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 6, 2010 43

Later in the same conversation:
ColIN: Just go to his funeral, that means so much to the family. KAte: Mm. ColIN: And you can say, shit, I feel so bad for all of you. KAte: Mm. ColIN: And you can cry and then you can leave. You don’t have to be there longer than ten minutes.

A few months before Bouwer began to poison Annette, he told her sister that it would be easy to get away with murder in New Zealand, because the police there were not equipped to handle complex criminal cases. Here Bouwer misunderstood his adopted country. Kiwis may not be accustomed to violent crime, but they have a knack for improvising solutions. The Dunedin police put together a case against Bouwer so airtight that it took a jury only three hours to convict him. In the months leading up to Bouwer’s arrest, the police interviewed staff members of the Dunedin Hospital, and, remarkably, no one let it slip out that Bouwer was being investigated. A detective who worked on the case told me that in the Dunedin police