The Science of Revenge

The Science of Revenge

Chapter 1

The Deadliest Addiction

On July 10, 1973, Olga Hepnarova, at the age of twenty-two, rented a Praga RN freight truck and drove it at a speed of nearly forty miles per hour into a crowd of mostly elderly people gathered on a Prague sidewalk waiting for a tram. She had carefully planned her journey to inflict maximum carnage, circling the tram stop for the crowd to build and launching her murderous run from the top of a slope to gain velocity. She left eight dead and twelve seriously injured. She did all this because she wanted revenge.

We know Olga’s motive because she went to great lengths to explain it to the world. In the days leading up to the killings, she wrote a letter describing what she intended to do and why. She mailed copies to the editors of two Prague newspapers just prior to setting out to become a mass murderer.

“Please accept this letter as a statement,” Olga wrote. “It was written in defense against possible disparagement and ridicule of my act; also I do not want you to doubt about my sanity. . . .

“Today I will steal a [truck] and drive full speed into a crowd of people. It will happen somewhere in Prague 7. I intend to kill people. I know I will be judged and punished. And this is my confession. . . .

“For thirteen years I have been growing up in the clutches of a so-called good family. I am beaten and abused—a toy for adults and a victim of schoolchildren (and forever an outsider among my peers) . . . publicly smeared, slandered, mocked, humiliated.

“I am a destroyed woman,” Olga continued. “A woman destroyed by people. So I have a choice: kill myself or kill others. I choose—TO REVENGE MY PERSECUTORS. This is my verdict: I, Olga Hepnarova, the victim of your bestiality, sentence you to the death penalty by running over and declare that in my lifetime x people are not enough. Actions not words.”

Olga waited for the police to arrive after her rampage. She confessed to the crimes and the planning and explained that she acted in retaliation against society for the way she had been treated.

Olga Hepnarova regarded herself as bisexual, and this seems to have been a source of some of the rejection and humiliation she experienced. She had a history of treatment for depression and had attempted suicide as a young teenager. However, during her trial in the Municipal Court of Prague, against the advice of her legal counsel, she insisted upon her sanity. She accepted full responsibility for her actions and expressed no regrets. Multiple psychiatrists and psychologists examined her and confirmed that she was, in fact, of sound mind. In a statement to investigators, she explained her rationale:

“If the society destroys individuals, individuals can destroy the society. . . . I wanted to take my revenge on society, including my family, because they are my enemy. . . . Knowing that I managed to do it, I felt a kind of release and satisfaction.”

When given an opportunity to speak to the court, Olga explained that she understood justice as an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. In conformance with this logic, she asked the court that the death penalty be imposed upon her for her crime. The court obliged, finding her guilty of the eight murders and sentencing her to execution by hanging.

Olga’s mother filed an appeal. The verdict and sentence were upheld by the Supreme Court of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Pleas for mercy from Olga’s mother were rejected by Prime Minister Lubomír Strougal.

On March 12, 1975, Olga Hepnarova was hanged in Pankrac Prison. This earned her the distinction of being the last woman executed in communist Czechoslovakia. Her tragic life and death, and that of those she brutally maimed and murdered, remained largely unknown outside eastern Europe until more than forty years later, when a film about her, I, Olga Hepnarova, was released. This film was based in part upon the 2001 book Opratka za osm mrtvých (Noose for eight dead) by Roman Cílek.

The Courtroom of the Mind

There are many things that might interest us about the shocking case of Olga Hepnarova: the alleged child abuse at the hands of her father and possibly her mother’s complicity or failure to protect her; the bullying by her classmates and possibly her teachers’ complicity or failure to stop them; the venomous bigotry and persecution surrounding nontraditional sexualities; the role of depression and the trauma of a prior suicide attempt; her acute sensitivity to injustices normally borne by others without resorting to mass murder; the fact that she chose to kill people whom she did not know and who had done nothing to her; her apparent narcissism and desire for notoriety; her insistence upon her sanity and desire for people to understand her; and the failure of mental health professionals, law enforcement agencies, and even the death penalty to prevent or deter the crime—if anything, the prospect of her own execution seemed to motivate her to kill.

But there are two items not on this list, often overlooked, that provide a deeper understanding of not only Olga Hepnarova but revenge itself. The first is Olga’s thought process. Prior to the crime, Olga placed the people who wronged her, and society itself, on trial inside a courtroom of her mind. During this trial, she played all the roles. As prosecutor, she identified the crimes she believed had been committed and the perpetrators. As victim, she provided eyewitness testimony. As the defendants (her family and society), she denied and confessed culpability. As judge and jury, she weighed the evidence, reached a verdict, and handed down a sentence. As warden, she carried it out.

Consider the momentousness of this process. An entire criminal proceeding was conducted by the perpetrator of the crime against the future victims before the crime had even been committed. This proceeding was identical in all material respects to the criminal proceeding to which Olga knew she herself would be subjected afterward. Whether her future victims had committed the crimes of which Olga felt aggrieved, and whether those crimes were serious enough to the rest of us to warrant the death penalty, were irrelevant. In the courtroom of Olga Hepnarova’s mind, she alone had authority to make these determinations. All that mattered is that Olga saw herself as a victim of unfair and malicious treatment. Having reached this conclusion, she naturally and quite rationally sought justice using the judicial process humans have used for thousands of years. The desire for revenge not only motivated Olga Hepnarova to murder human beings with a rented truck; it motivated other human beings to murder Olga Hepnarova with a hangman’s noose.

The significance of this process cannot be overstated. It reveals a hidden, archetypal framework for understanding human revenge, rage, and violence. In this book, we’re going to discover that most of us—good, normal people, not just the Olga Hepnarovas of the world—are routinely putting the people who offend and mistreat us on trial inside the busy courtrooms of our minds. We’re also going to learn that humans experience a never-ending supply of real and imagined grievances, great and small, nearly infinite in number, that drive us to want revenge against others virtually every day of our lives. We’re almost constantly thinking about our grievances and ways of avenging them, fantasizing about revenge, trying to suppress our desire for it, and sometimes indulging it. We also spend a great deal of time recovering from the negative effects of getting revenge, and from the negative feelings and harm directed back against us by those who see our acts of revenge as unjust and now seek revenge against us.

It’s this always-burning, always-cycling desire for revenge that motivates our rage and violence against others and that motivates their rage and violence against us. Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, put it this way in his Reflections on War and Death: “In our unconscious we daily and hourly do away with all those who stand in our way, all those who have insulted or harmed us.”

Although the trials of our enemies take place entirely inside our minds, they have real life-and-death consequences. At their conclusion, we will choose, as did Olga, whether to carry out our sentences in the real world. This makes the trials of our enemies the most important trials of our lives. For the outcomes of these trials will determine for us, for the people who harm us, for our families and theirs, and often for people whom we have never met whether tragedy strikes or is avoided, and peace and happiness are lost or found. If we hope to secure personal and communal peace, harmony, and prosperity—and reduce rage, violence, and aggression in all forms—we must learn how to win the trials taking place inside our minds. Because despite the significant progress made by humanity in reducing violence over millennia, we’re still losing these trials at a horrific rate and cost in terms of lives, peace, prosperity, and security.