I wrote my thoughts down a few days ago and then decided not to post what I was feeling. Then you post feelings that almost mirror mine. I have no answers.....here's what I was feeling
Not psychic or anything, but I usually at least have strong feelings about the defendant. The evidence thus far makes him look quite guilty but I'm not feeling my usual hatred toward him like I have with other murderers in the past. I don't know if reading the tat postings softened my emotions or what. This is a new experience for me and I don't understand my empathy towards him or is it that I'm not feeling his guilt as well? Things are just not adding up. There is much more to this than what I've seen so far. I think big surprises are coming or I'm just out in left field.
I know what both of you mean, and the TapATalk posts he made at such a young age are heart-wrenching. The possibly neurological or neuro-psychiatric clinical features he described sound truly dreadful, and, if they were unabated through all the important and increasingly stressful intervening years up until now, I think that things were just too difficult for him to continue masquerading as ‘normal’.
What do we do with him? Idaho does not have an insanity defence (or it may be thought that he is quite sane and fit to plead).
On Insanity.
Denis Nilsen (ex army and former policeman) strangled a series of vulnerable homeless young men in his 1980’s London flat, then sat with them, enjoying having someone with him of an evening. Sometimes he lay with them, seeing something profound in the picture made.
Thereafter came the boiling of skilfully dismembered body parts and disposing of some down the drains.Dyno-Rod was called as the street drains became badly compromised and the smell was bad. The police were summoned as the numerous lumps of flesh, at first thought to be chicken, were deemed possibly human in origin.
Nilsen cooperated meekly with the police as they took him away.
Brian Masters wrote Nilsen’s story in his prize-winning ‘Killing for Company’, which included the trial. The opposing legal teams instructed their own psychiatrists, who presented diametrically opposed diagnoses. Where, Masters asked, is the highly prized objective psychiatric diagnostic truth? Was Nilsen insane or not?
Nilsen was adjudged not insane and died in prison a guilty man a few years ago.
Masters wrote that anyone who sits eating toast prior to dashing out to work at the unemployment office, while a human head is yet again boiling on the stove, is insane in his soul.
The book is frequently urged to be read by those studying psychiatry, and the backlash from some professionals could be, according to Storr (top psychiatrist), due to resentment at a different academic pointing out some uncomfortable truths.
Psychiatry does not have the answer to everything. Notions of the devil were interestingly explored in the book also. If he exists, he will be adept at presenting evil as attractive, while cleverly convincing many that he is but an imaginative construct, used by the guilty as an excuse for their own wholly human evil behaviour.
This ‘insanity of the soul’ (or whatever it is) I think needs to be expertly studied if it is to be understood.
Maybe more specialised brain scans will demonstrate brain lesions that can, (in a future time), be treated. Obviously, it would be better to prevent another young person progressing down this route.
It seems to be that some young men have difficulties living on their own, while simultaneously experiencing promotion problems at work because of their ‘awkward personalities’, as well as not being able easily to strike up informal rapport leading to romantic relationships.
In these two cases at least it would appear that external work stressors might have caused them to ‘snap’ and embark on murderous rages, the young and innocent being the victims.
Maybe we have to be more gentle when confronting people with perceived faults.
Sometimes, all a person has is their career, and being confronted publicly can rock their foundations.
