The ones incarcerated are the ones who weren’t as good at it.
I wonder if that explains the discrepency between Qadgap’s 20% (of current cons) and Stranger on a Train’s 80% (of ex-cons). Charm probably never comes in handier, than when you’re facing a parole board.
Like I said in post 26, the reality is much worse than TruCelt let on. The victim was a 14 year old boy and the police pretty much sent him back because they figured it was just a couple of fags fighting, later joking about reuniting the lovers. They didn’t realize he was a serial killer, but the best case interpretation is that they sent a naked beaten 14 year old boy home with the man who had abused him and joked about it. There was a decaying body in Dahmer’s home at the time but the police didn’t investigate.
The boy, Konerak Sinthasomphone, was later murdered and dismembered. The police officers were John Balcerzak and Joseph Gabrish. If there’s a side of the story that paints them in a positive or even neutral light I’ve never heard it but I don’t claim to be an expert.
Otara nailed a lot of it. I was naive and didn’t recognize (at first) that there was a Real Problem at work, never having encountered such a person before. I thought she was “just sensitive”; I thought the blowups were my fault because I wasn’t doing enough to protect her. And, of course, I thought she’d get better.
To answer your main question: It wasn’t her charm or social skills that attracted me to her.
I went out drinking with a couple of the Leon County Deputies the night after his execution, one of the two was telling stories about talking to Bundy while he was in custody. He said it was absolutely terrifying that you could not help but like Bundy after talking with him for a few minutes. Then you’d remember what he’d done. Said it freaked him (the deputy) worse than anything else that he’d ever seen in (then) 25+ years on the job.
I don’t think so. I work with parolees, and my experience is much closer to Qadgap’s. I wonder if Stranger on a Train’s experience is with a more restricted population.
Jeffrey Dahmer? Really? What was charming about him?
And you’re simply providing, in Ted Bundy, an exception; indeed, Bundy’s being a charming, seemingly nice person is one of the things that made him famous because it’s unusual for serial killers to be like that. Most serial killers are more like the BTK Killer; losers.
Having some charm is, after all, a feature of almost everyone in the world. Almost all people can be charming - can turn on the smile, use some flattery, tell a joke. Sociopaths being able to fake emotions from time to time doesn’t make them unusually charming as compared to normal people.
Note that I’m not saying it’s impossible. My evil ex was a no-doubt-about-it psychopath, exhibiting every diagnostic criteria except the violent ones, and would charm your socks off until you clued in to her (which, eventually, everyone did.)
I had a temp job for a bail bond agency, I just worked the front desk area, anyway, one thing that surprised me is how really charming and smooth these criminals can be. I thought it’d be like on TV and they’d be all mean and rude and tough. And you had a few like that but most were very pleasent.
That’s the one thing about “bad” people, they are fine as long as everything is going their way but heaven help you if things turn “bad”
Dahmer may not have been charming but his neighbors found him pleasent even if his apartment stunk.
He was a white guy living in an all black neighborhood. He got along fine with the people in his building and would visit with them and drink beer and watch TV and talk sports.
I read a few books on him and outside of the smell of his apartment, the only “odd” thing about him was being a young white guy in an all black neighborhood.
People thought his killings were racist but they weren’t. Dahmer just picked victims that were convenient and not likely to be missed so soon.
It is.
But…don’t do it. Never, never, never, never.
Ok, if you are both just over the age of consent and both moving to different parts of the country…mmmmkkkkkay.
Disclaimer: Based on anecdotal experience. Very anecdotal.
You will be spoiled.
Haha, and don’t have crazy sex on LSD. You’ll be ruined for life.
Or with those blue pills, and hot tubs, and balconies, and beaches.
And I’m a geek otherwise devoid of such tales.
The felons I knew all worked in kitchens, and numbered maybe a couple dozen all told. I’m not an trained diagnostician and at that time didn’t know more than high school Psych I, but I’d swear that the majority of those I knew demonstrated clear symptoms of character disorders, typically borderline or antisocial personality disorders. I recall one who stayed employed (despite unjustifiably beating the living hell out of the dishwasher) strictly out of fear. He apparently got taken back in on a parole violation for molesting or raping one of his neighbors. Others were your basic issue low level scumbags who lied just for the sake of lying, and would then paint themselves out to be victims, or demonstrate pathological levels of paranoia and anger. It’s not a statistical sampling as Qadgop the Mercotan has access to, but it was the experience that I had.
It is worth noting that serial killers, and murderers in general, are a small percentage of overall sociopaths. Just because serial killers–who really are on the ragged fringe of even the professional criminal population–may not be charming, that doesn’t mean that many more mundane sociopaths are not.
Seriously, you may be more right that you know. The degree of rationalization and blatant lies, told as if it was expected that the public would blithely accept it, is itself nearly pathological. Bill Clinton and his “it depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is” defense is a common example but hardly unique across the political spectrum.
Stranger
I watched a fairly long, televised interview with Jeffrey Dahmer and was surprised at how pleasant he seemed. He wasn’t “charming” in the usual since of smooth and smiling. He was quiet and direct. But he was well-groomed, intelligent, and nicer-looking than I thought he would be. It was very hard to imagine that he could have done what I knew he did.
I also thought that his mother was pretty. As best I remember, his parents were separated. His father didn’t impress me very much, but I don’t know what I was expecting.
Psychopaths are defined by their total lack of empathy or guilt. They are usually very intelligent. I don’t know if this next characteristic is true or not, but long ago I read that psychopaths can’t blush. Anyone know? I’ve also read that in the general population, 1% are psychopaths.
Yeah, there has been a spate of ‘Obama is a narcissist sociopath’ articles recently. And my response to that has been, you have to be to think you are good enough to be President.
I’d stake my fortune on two of my ex boyfriends being psychopaths. Story time!
One was in college. We had a class together, he invited me to coffee, and after one date it was like the whole world melted away and became just me and him. Like we had a special connection that was unique even in the world of love. An otherworldly connection. And he was mind-boggling smart. I was spellbound. I felt like I was part of some grand drama.
After a few months, he started showing more of his true colors. He’d say these grandiose statements about himself. He’d do really bizarre harmful things for kicks. I remember once he erased everyone’s projects off a school computers so that dozens of students would lose their papers, etc. He’d steal things he had no use for off of his close friends. Just weird stuff. He jerked me around a bit, but for a while he could keep smoothing things over by telling me what I wanted to hear. Eventually he mentioned cruelty to animals and fire starting in his youth. Even still, it took me an embarrassing long time to realize that this guy was crazy, not genius. When I did, I got out of there as quickly as humanly possible.
The other one was a co-worker. Same instant connection. Same “us against the world” mentality (which actually was about isolating me from my support groups.) This one was more socially adept. Everyone thinks he is a great guy. He drinks a lot, so when his behavior becomes erratic people just write it off as being drunk. It was weird. Sometimes he’d have these episodes where he’d get all jerky and start saying really inappropriate things- like saying random obscene jokes when nobody else is making them. Whenever this happened, everyone just figured he’d had too much to drink, but I knew him better than that.
Having done the song and dance before, I was suspicious when I noticed he had excuses for everything. Even if he was ten minutes late for something, he couldn’t own up to it. He’d spin these elaborate tales that never quite seemed to add up. He literally could not apologize. He swore up and down he drank a normal amount of alcohol even though he was to the point where he was drinking entire bottles of liquor every single day. Still, he was a lot of fun and it was easy to write this stuff of as the quirks of a fun drunk. And he seemed to understand me so perfectly. It always felt like he could see right through me, right into my soul, which can be incredibly sexy. Then, once again came revelations about childhood fire-starting. I knew what was happening. The relationship ended, and it ended poorly with him exacting revenge in a very cold-hearted manner.
The terrifying thing? I’m sure if either one of these guys came up to me today, I’m sure they could snow me into giving my kidney to them. They are that good at what they do.
Why are they so good at it? One is that when they see people, their vision is not clouded by the feelings and emotions that rule most of our social interactions. We always enter our relationships with people in a very subjective way, and our interactions are very much affected by our emotional states. But psychopaths don’t have these issues. They can see you the way a scientist sees a test rat. In a sense, they really can read your soul in a way normal people can’t.
Having someone read your soul can be very compelling. The victim assumes that this is happening because of some sort of special connection that they share. It’s a really unique and intense experience that the victim assumes is a sign of something good. Also, because they can read you so well, they know what you want to hear. When trouble comes up, they know what to say and how you’ll react to it.
God help me stay away from these people!
Because when she was being charming, it felt absolutely wonderful to be in a relationship with her. Plus, the sex was incredible - and she looked a lot like Lucy Pinder.
Yes and no.
There is what used to be called the “Herd Instinct”. While humans are not a herd species, we do have some innate urge to protect each other and band together. This is not, however, even remotely like altruism. Human group-mindedness is a defensive trait; it is situational and rarely proactive. It mostly dictates that people tend to find a certain “circle” of more or less similar people to group with for protection.
Altruism is something quite different. It has little-to-no survival value, and peopel can and do get by without it. Human groups are formed as much or even more out of desire for power or safety as any “noble” ideal, but altruism comes from sympathy and reason.
But there is a mistake in the sense of “innate” as a purely programmed biological response and something which any right-thinking operson will rationally choose. Sociopaths seem to not choose it. Of course, what’s interesting is that some of them are not particularly awful people. Despite their general problems, they are not mortal fiends. But they do skirt a little closer to the line. It is less obvious to them what they should choose and why.
I believe such people are self-created, just as the rest of us are. While there are likely biological tendencies which dampen or raise emotion in individuals, there do not apear to be any consistent, verifiable biological differences in the brains of these people, which are definitively there from childhood. Some appear to emerge later in life, sometimes eagerly associating with murderers. Karla Homolka, for example, started as a “normal” girl for what it’s worth. But after becoming Paul bernardo’s lover, she actively chose to descend into a spiral of violence, lust, and murder with him. She even became pleased and proud of her self-created worth as a vicious, violent monster.
I also want to make clear that I don’t consider all sociopaths alike. Some are emotionaless manipulators, others spiral out of control, and still others manage to elad relatively normal lives. Many are narccicists.
What probably didn’t help the situation is that the teenager was pretty drugged at the time and probably not coherent. Dahmer claimed the guy was 19, that they were lovers having a quarrel, and that the guy was really drunk and was just trying to cause trouble. I suspect a male-female pairing would have caused more concern with those officers, but one never knows.
My husband is like this, but without the panic attacks level of severity. He grew up in an abusive household and they had to pretend that Everything Is Just Fine; not being talkative was not acceptable there. He admitted to me recently that his seemingly-effortless ability to talk and socialize is forced, that he is actually terrified inside when he starts off talking.
It also makes it harder when the one who “cries wolf” really does run into trouble. I know a woman who has physically attacked male partners, especially while drinking and/or on drugs, and could get very crazy in the process. Usually any physical violence she received back tended to be self-defense on the guy’s part. So when she claimed that a boyfriend come over to her apartment, broken down her door and hit her, we rolled our eyes. Until we saw the busted-out door jamb, that is, and the police report on her kitchen table.
Edit: I’m trying to remember the title or author of this book I’ve been reading, but am drawing a blank. It’s from the 1950s or earlier, and is an absolutely outstanding work on sociopathy, especially among the more “mundane” cases, like people who just mess up their lives by quitting their jobs at the drop of a hat because the boss is “mean” or other subtle things. Complete self-centeredness. Lots of case studies on these people, and their doctors absolutely at their wits’ end trying to figure out what to do with someone who you can’t keep confined or anything, but who show no apparent conscience - unless showing one helps at that time - and many of whom absolutely insist that they see the error of their ways and will live better. Until they get into hot water again.
My comment was made quite seriously. I’ve worked with felons and I’ve worked with politicians…