In high school, there was someone who wrote to the local paper. It might have been in reaction to (the Attica Prison Uprising in 1971) and the conditions in prison. He was in prison and convicted of murder, I think. I wrote to him, and he wrote back. My mother was horrified and certainly not approving.
It was a week before high school graduation, and we put on some Beatles music and danced on the tables in the cafeteria. The nuns were not impressed. It got worse because I refused to (identify) the other kids who danced on the tables. Within about two minutes, they sent me to the principal’s office. The whole senior class marched behind me — 140 students. I look back on it and laugh. What high school principal wouldn’t trade today’s problems for kids dancing on tables?
When I was in college, I read an article in The New York Times. It talked about a new genetic strain of child murderer who kills remorselessly and gleefully. And I thought, ‘Are there really kids like that?’ Because this was so different from anything I had experienced. That sort of set off my career. I wanted to learn more about kids who got in serious trouble.
I was so young when I got my Ph.D. When I came to USF, I was 27, so I wasn’t that much older than the students. They thought I was cool, and they still think I’m cool. Seriously, I would do cool things. We’d sit outside on the grass and have class. I became the field trip guru. If you want to know about kids who break the law, you should meet some. I would take my students to juvenile correctional facilities, Florida state prisons, juvenile courts. When you take students to talk with men on death row, they’ll never forget that. That’s so meaningful to them, as it was to me.
Why are people interested in serial murderers? I don’t think it’s because they want to go out and kill a dozen people. They’re trying to get at — how does somebody do that? Maybe I’m saying there’s a part of human decency that causes us to go, ‘How can that be?’ There’s a famous psychiatrist named Alexander Lowen who said what attracts and repels are often the same thing. It’s that kind of mix that causes this.
I wanted to study juvenile homicide. I wrote to the governor at the time, Gov. Bob Graham, saying this was an important problem. He backed my study. That was really a door opener. I worked with the Department of Corrections to get a sample of juvenile murderers with certain criteria. I found 59 boys. What launched my research were those 59 boys. I did studies of them, trying to understand their motivations, how they got involved in crime, their backgrounds, how much time they were served.
After 35 years, I tracked them down. Of the 49 who were alive at that point, I could locate 44 of them. Half of them agreed to talk to me. Three had never been out of prison. Three more were back in prison, as I recall. Some were back in the community and had been rearrested or recommitted several times. (Of the offenders that were released from prison, 88% were rearrested and 63% were rearrested for violent crimes.) Some had never been in trouble again. That was the coolest thing I ever did in my career, to find out 35 years later where these boys were as men in their 50s. Some of them I remembered very well. What touched me is some of them remembered me.
I’ve published about 150 professional publications, including five books. Because my first book was called Why Kids Kill Parents, people always go, ‘You didn’t like your parents?’ I love my parents. It has nothing to do with that. What happened was there were two kids in my original sample who had killed their parents, and they were very different from typical kids. These kids had been subjected to a lot of abuse. They weren’t criminally sophisticated. I’d gone to see one of them in prison. After, he called me up and said, ‘Dr. Heide, someone has to tell the story about kids like me,’ and he meant kids who had been abused.
I was swimming. I used to be a very avid swimmer for many decades. I was swimming, and all of a sudden, the table of contents of this book I was not going to write, Why Kids Kill Parents, flashes in front of me. I’m so startled I stopped swimming. It was like a movie. I go, ‘I guess I’m supposed to write that book.’ So, I wrote the book. There were 18 presses that wanted it — very unusual in academia — because it filled a void. There was nothing scholarly on this topic, and it was the time when this was front page news. That book created a firestorm.
Back in the ’80s, very soon after I started doing my research, I was featured in Newsweek. That was a launching pad again. Attorneys started to know my work, so I was asked to evaluate kids involved in homicides in Florida. Over the years, I’ve evaluated probably 150 adolescents, and some adults, involved in murder. I’ve worked with lawyers in 20 states and in Canada. It always keeps me learning. What looks like a closed book, you can’t tell until you open the book.
I’m one of the most cited scientists in the world in my area, top 2%. I was made a fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science for my contributions in criminology, particularly related to juvenile homicide and parricide (when kids kill their parents). I think back to when I was a kid in high school and college with an interest. To have reached this level of success … I have to give credit to the people who encouraged me, mentored me, believed in me.
I’d like to see more focus on prevention. This is a solvable problem. If we invested 1% of what we spend on criminal justice on prevention programs, there’s a lot we could do to level the playing field so that all kids have opportunities. The other thing I would really like — and this is going to be probably revolutionary — is moral education brought into schools. I absolutely do not mean religion, but character development. … There are programs, but society has to embrace them. There has to be that want for our children, and our adults, to be ethical, moral people.
I’m a lot of fun. And people who know me and my colleagues will agree. I have good wit. I got that from my mom. I wouldn’t say I do stand-up comedy, but sometimes when I speak at an event, people can’t stop laughing. Those are things that people wouldn’t know that they might enjoy. They might think I’m gloomy. No, I’m not gloomy.