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Her records are full of drawings and writing samples from the murderers she has examined. Lewis sat on the sofa thumbing through case records. On a snowy afternoon last winter in her comfortable Tudor home in New Haven, a boom box flooded the house with Mozart. She is a master at separating the lurid side of her work from her family life. “Violence is probably the single most important public health issue anywhere in the world,” Lewis said. Her husband, Melvin Lewis, M.D., HS ’59, professor emeritus and senior research scientist in the Yale Child Study Center, frequently ribs her, “Dorothy, with two basic drives why did you have to choose violence?” She has no regrets. In concentrating on violence, Lewis chose, to put it mildly, the road less traveled. Pincus, M.D., HS ’64, her longtime collaborator, now chief of neurology at the Veterans Administration Medical Center and a member of the Center for the Brain Basis of Cognition at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. The last person in the world you’d expect to be doing this work,” said Jonathan H. The outsider has become the expert and even something of a butterfly. Her theories, once considered outrageous, influenced Supreme Court rulings on capital punishment in 19. When all three occur simultaneously, Lewis believes, they become primary ingredients in a recipe for violence. Three elements, she has found, occur consistently in the most violent offenders: brain dysfunction, child abuse and psychotic thinking, particularly paranoia. Her findings, based on psychiatric and neurological evaluations coupled with reviews of medical records, have appeared in such publications as the American Journal of Psychiatry and the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. It would even put her at odds with the mainstream of her profession as she challenged conventional theories that attribute violent behavior to socioeconomic deprivation and lax discipline. Lewis’ work would place her on the stand as a defense witness where prosecutors would do their best to discredit her. It would put her in the company of such notorious murderers as Mark David Chapman, who shot John Lennon serial killers Ted Bundy and Arthur Shawcross and in 2005, John Allen Muhammad, the so-called “Beltway Sniper,” who examined her fingers and told her she should drink more water. Her work would take her away from her family as she flew to reform schools and prisons around the country to research cases or testify for the defense. Lewis has spent her career as a psychiatrist studying murderers and searching for scientific explanations for their behavior. … I was convinced, even as a child, that Hitler could not have been born that way. Now I could never know what made him tick. In Lewis ’ memoir, Guilty by Reason of Insanity: A Psychiatrist Explores the Minds of Killers, she recalls stories of the Nazi dictator hanging over her childhood as “a source of fascination and fear.” She was the only student in her elementary school “who did not rejoice upon hearing of Hitler’s suicide. After all, she was horrified when she watched her uncle slaughter a chicken on their farm in New Jersey.
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Her interest began in kindergarten, when a precocious desire to understand how a human being could be so cruel led her to try to figure out Adolf Hitler. She felt like an outsider, and she credits that feeling of isolation with her lifelong interest in society’s pariahs. A serious, often sad, child, Dorothy was urged by her mother to be more social: “shorten your skirts be a butterfly.” But young Dorothy never felt much like a butterfly.
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She was tangled in an ambiguous relationship with her older sister, who liked to hide in dark closets, jump out and scream, “The green witch will get you!” But at other times, she helped Dorothy with her French homework, keeping her a week ahead of her classmates. As children were choosing up sides for a game, she remembers praying, “Please God, let me be picked second to last, not last.” The little girl who was the object of so much teasing at school would once again see her prayers go unanswered.Īt home, things were not always easy. ’63, HS ’70, a clinical professor in the Child Study Center, recalls her childhood in New York City during World War II as painful and awkward.