Psychopathy scores differ for Verdon, dangerous-offender hearing told

The dangerous-offender hearing of convicted killer Jeffrey Verdon heard from a second forensic psychiatrist on Monday who scored the 36-year-old repeat violent offender much lower on a psychopathy checklist than the first. Dr. Jeff McMaster testified there is “always a range and always a margin of error” when it comes to assessing psychopathy but scored Verdon just below the threshold of 30/40. Dr. Brad Booth, who testified for the Crown earlier in August, gave Verdon a score of 37/40, which put him in the 99.5 percentile. The checklist includes factors such as a versatile criminal record, lack of empathy, promiscuity, impulsivity, superficial charm and whether an individual leads a parasitic lifestyle. McMaster, who was called by the defence, testified that the best method to reconcile different scores would be for forensic psychiatrists to sit down and discuss how they arrived at the scores in the first place. Verdon has been in and out of jail since he was 18, when he and another teen drunkenly beat an Ottawa Citizen delivery man to death for $55 and a car battery. He was convicted of manslaughter. Verdon has also been convicted of stomping on the head of a bouncer, leading police on a high-speed chase in a stolen truck, and kicking down the door of an ex-girlfriend’s home. He is facing an indeterminate dangerousoffender designation for his most recent violent offence at a different girlfriend’s apartment in 2011. Verdon repeatedly bashed the property manager’s head into a doorway and threatened the crying elderly landlady.