Common Folk Can Be Stressed to Kill

How unusual was the brutal killing of Patricia Kastle by her bitter, rejected former husband?

Sadly, not that unusual. According to forensic psychologist Reid Meloy, author of “The Psychopathic Mind,” the seeds of such violence can exist in even “happy marriages.”

“Where you have attachment, a bond, like in a relationship, you have the capacity for very euphoric, pleasant feelings--and at the other end, deep anger and rage. Really, the way we are biologically wired, the closer you are emotionally, the higher the highs and lower the lows.”

The stress of a divorce, combined with guns close at hand, can lead to murder by even “normal” people. But add abnormal factors--intense jealousy, paranoia, delusions--”and the risk of homicide goes way up,” Meloy said.

According to acquaintances, Patricia Kastle’s husband had adored her and grew extremely depressed and vindictive when she filed for divorce. Although Lee Kastle was pleasant to co-workers, some acquaintances said he had a violent streak. Patricia Kastle feared him enough to obtain a restraining order in December to prevent him from coming within 100 yards of her. According to court documents, he made offensive calls, slashed her tires and tried to run Patricia off the road. On Monday he chased his ex-wife down in a Newport Beach mobile home park, shot her in the head and then turned the gun on himself.

Meloy, chief of mental health services for San Diego County and an assistant professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego, has researched cases similar to the Kastles’ and says there is a definite pattern.

“When they first separate, that is the time of highest risk for violence,” said Meloy, who holds a Ph.D. in psychology. “The obvious factor increasing risk is very intense emotion,” he said. “That’s normality. We can expect those things. Any relationship, no matter how healthy it looks, is at risk.”

The other factor, also “normal” in many households, is the presence of a gun close at hand. Most are intended for “family protection” but are used much more frequently for a spur-of-the-moment attack on a family member or acquaintance, Meloy said. In only one-third of all murders is the victim a stranger to the killer.

No weapon is more effective in such an attack, Meloy said. Chances of surviving a knife attack are five to six times greater.

The closer a person is to that lethal weapon, the greater the risk that “a temporary emotion will translate to a final solution,” Meloy said. “These feeling states are transient. No one stays in a rage all the time--our bodies don’t allow that. But if you’re in a state of rage and close to a gun or a lethal weapon, the risk goes way up.”

If a person has a psychological abnormality, that increases the risk even further. Paranoia, for example, “oftentimes is felt initially as jealousy,” Meloy said. “If one of the people is paranoid, his own mental state contributes to pathological jealousy, which increases the risk of violence.

“To the extreme, you get the delusional person and the erotomanic, whose delusion is that somebody is in love with him when there’s no basis in reality to believe that.” Such people can fall in love with an actress encountered only in movies or TV, then experience the joys and rages of an actual relationship. Such delusions have led to murder.

Even less extreme cases--where one or both people have a “borderline personality”--the threat of violence still exists. Usually a very intense attachment is formed, but it could be just one-way. At the same time, the attachment is filled with tumult and intense emotion, Meloy said.

“They’re not psychotic, but they distort their perceptions. What you and I see as an innocuous event, they see as extremely bizarre or unusual, because they personalize it,” he said. “He may see his wife came home from work late, and he may weave in his mind that there is a conspiracy afoot and distort her behaviors in that light.

“Borderline personalities have a terrible time separating,” and when threatened with separation, they experience rage at being abandoned, Meloy said. “It usually goes way back to the relationship with parents. When faced with separation by his current partner, it can trigger very early, primitive feelings of rage for the parent abandoning him. But now he’s an adult and can act out the violence in a significant way.”

Dr. Thomas J. Grayden, chief of forensic psychiatry at UC Irvine’s medical school, spends much of his time examining violent criminals as a court-appointed psychiatrist. These people are not “normal,” but neither are many of them severely mentally ill, he said.

“In most cases, people with fairly normal backgrounds are not going to get into this kind of situation, but drug or alcohol abuse can take away the inhibitions people normally have. The incidence of drugs and alcohol is extremely high in these kinds of cases,” Grayden said. “Cocaine is everywhere around here.”

He said he was not surprised by the allegations that Lee Jerry Kastle was a cocaine user. Such violence “is very consistent with cocaine intoxication or withdrawal. People on cocaine get extremely paranoid and would react with that kind of unnatural behavior.”

He said he means “ true paranoia--to the point of being psychotic and totally losing a sense of reality, with true paranoid delusions. They have a fixed, false belief--that’s what a delusion is--that someone is out to harm them. A lot of people are spurned lovers but don’t murder. But what’s the thing that tips the scale? Potentially, it’s substance abuse.”

But with cocaine, you’re damned if you do and damned if you stop, he said. Unlike drugs such as heroin, which have physical withdrawal symptoms such as nausea and shaking, the main cocaine withdrawal symptom is emotional: severe depression. In that state, an event that causes a normal person a controllable depression--such as loss of a wife or lover--can prompt the cocaine user to commit utterly irrational acts, Grayden said.

Such people are commonly recalled as “nice guys” and not the sort of person to be violent, he said.

“You don’t have to have a true, severe mental illness to do this. You can have just some unusual personality deficits, and if the stresses are high enough, it happens.”