I've just rewatched Sabrina's sentencing and then revisited Jonathan Hearn's where he makes the long emotional speech of repentance and apology.
Now don't get me wrong - I'm not making excuses for him, he's a cold-blooded killer who planned and carried out a murder of an innocent man. No one can excuse that and he deserves his sentence and more.
However, he was 22 years old when he met Sabrina with very little experience with women and he comes from an incredibly religious sheltered background, home schooled and a life that revolved around his family, siblings and church, and I'm just wondering whether this had any bearing on her ability to not only get him to conspire to commit a murder, but to actually carry it out?
By that I suppose I'm asking did it make him more 'vulnerable' to Sabrina's charms, because she was so different, such a contrast to everything he'd known growing up?
I just can't get my head around why this tall, nice looking young man, deeply religious who everyone says is incredibly intelligent, was so besotted by a married woman 11 years older than him - who with the greatest respect (and obviously I've only got what we've seen it court to go on) is odd looking at best, and doesn't seem to have been overly endowed with brain cells? Trooper described her as looking 'dumb as a box of rocks' and that's certainly how she comes across in court - like the lights are on but no-one's home.
Looking at them both separately - it's such a bizarre relationship - you would never put those two together in a million years. The swinging, drinking, party girl and the studious, religious, hyper-intelligent paramedic. Even if their plan had succeeded could you actually imagine those two married?
I'd be interested to hear what others think.
Aha... I have had a lot of thoughts about those two, Martha. For the life of me, the logic behind the attraction would require the entire ruminations of Freud , Jung and Pavlov. .. and then some.
I can see what she thought she saw in him. But, she really didn't see what was in him, obviously. But what he saw in her, I simply cannot even make an attempt to grasp.
I re-watched the sentencing also. I had to. Towards the end, her attorney reads out letters from her children, screams put into words, really horrific, but what does Our Lady of the SnowCone do?.. she simpers!! A big broad proud mum -ish smile that has to be one of the least attractive features she has breaks out across her face, not once, but over and over, it was truly a moment of real insight into her .
She thought, but don't ask me how she got there, she thought her kid's letters to the judge were brilliant, but it never crossed her mind the she was the reason for those childish screaming letters!!. 'please, judge , I need my mother, I need my mother'...
People. We were looking at the face of the very depths of cold calculated cruelty, made plain on the face of Sabrina Limon.
I concluded that Hearn's parents were lunatics, protected from their idiocy by the economics of California .. in any other situation, like say, oh, France, or Switzerland, they both would have been carted off for long term therapy and medication, and their children put into mainstream education.
They had that air of wide eyed crazy.. How on earth they could have sent their son out into the world so ill equipped , so negligently cocooned in the suffocating cotton wool of 'prayer journals' and 'scripture flak jackets' ,.. really.
And what a price they have paid for that neglect. A beloved son doing life in a California prison for murder. And one can only marvel at the 'teaching ' he grew up with. What on earth made him think that 'God ' would 'bless ' them in this endeavor?... how does this even make the slightest sense?
Well. There they are. Baloney sandwiches for dinner for the rest of their lives, and a patch of sky. What a useless , ridiculous , malevolent pair.