I would like to get back to focusing on what I believe caused the murders of the two children. I think to understand the two murders, we have to know: (1) what we are looking at and (2) what we are looking for. As I have indicated previously, I believe that what we are looking at is a jealous rage killing, which is a killing that will have less stab wounds than the more common type of rage killing, a homicidal rage killing. I say that because of all the murders I have read about, this one has about the fewest stab wounds I have ever come across. I think I have also indicated that the overturned vacuum cleaner, the smashed wine glass, and the sock in the alley were all done to try and make the crime look like it had an economic motive (an "interrupted burglary") and is staging, while the real crime had a personal motive, the stabbing of the two boys.
That brings us to what we are looking for. Given the relatively few number of stab wounds and the fact that despite a homicidal maniac allegedly being lose, there are no shots to the heads of either Damon, Devon, or Darlie, I have concluded that the assailant did not specifically intend to kill the murder victims, but was in a great deal of emotional pain and was trying inflict pain upon them. I believe rage is involved here, but a much more transient sort of rage than you find in a homicidal rage, which usually involves a large number of stab wounds. That is one of the most puzzling aspects of this case: if the assailant was so angry, why did that anger dissipate relatively rapidly? My conclusion on that point is that we are looking for a rage trigger (or as the former FBI crime scene analyst John Douglas called it "a stressor") that is not centered around the two children, but is somewhere else. In this regard, I think we need to understand two things about Darlie: she believes in her own mind that she is a world-class manipulator and her greatest fear was returning to that impoverished childhood. I also believe that on the morning of June 6, 1996, having pressed Darin for a week over getting money for the tickets to travel in the upcoming days and weeks, Darlie brought out the atomic bomb in her arsenal of manipulation: "I think we need to separate." Although that almost always worked, this time it backfired on her because Darin, who could not get the money and who had his back to the wall financially told her, "fine and don't come back." I think Darlie did a slow burn thinking about how her best manipulative trick blew up in her face and how she was going to have to go back and live with her mother. I believe that is when the emotional pain overwhelmed her--we have to remember that she has no coping skills since her parents never taught her any and she never developed any on her own outside of manipulating people to get what she wants--and exploded on to the two happy residents of Nintendo House.
Other people have indicated that they believe the motive was money, which I think was a backdrop but not the reason for the murders themselves, that Darlie got tired of raising the children, or I guess what would be the official reason, listed on her death penalty information sheet, that the two children were interfering with her lifestyle. My opinion is that none of those reasons would have caused the explosion of knife thrusts we see here because they are too general and are not reasons that one person would thrust a knife into another person four times and a second person six times (according to the autopsy reports). Instead, I was looking for some unexpected bombshell that fell on a person with no coping mechanism and the only thing I could find was the argument that Darlie and Darin had shortly before the two children were stabbed.
In any event, if people disagree, that's fine, but what I am curious to understand is the contradiction we see here: an obviously angry assailant who nevertheless had that anger dissipate rather rapidly to the point of only stabbing the children only a total of ten times. Don't get me wrong, I would not like to be stabbed like that, but in Illinois they are considering parole for a woman, who, with her lover, stabbed the woman's brother in 1976 a total of 87 times (the Patricia Columbo case). If Darlie meant to kill the two children, why do we see so few stab wounds and none to the head, so that she could have finished them off relatively easily?
