I feel compelled to share some private stuff here that maybe can shed a small amount of light on BSL's mindset. It's some thinking I've been doing about psychopaths/sociopaths.
One train of thought here really shook me and made me do some deep thinking.
I have seen several times people talking about the marks of a sociopath:
1. Late bedwetting
2. Being bullied in school/being a misfit.
3. Pyromania
4. Cruelty to animals
This really shook me because all of this describes me when I was young, and it got me thinking about how I was feeling and whether it was in me to do something so terrible to another person. Let me describe the various components as they applied to me and what my mental/emotional reactions were. Maybe this can help a little bit. I am being vulnerable to share this so please be kind.
1. Late bedwetting: I had this problem until I was probably about 8. My parents tried everything - even fake sugar-pill medicine. I had a few accidents at school, too - usually after running around at recess... I think until 2nd grade. I didn't know why it happened - it's like I just didn't have the physical signal to go until it was too late. It made it so I couldn't spend the night at friends' houses, and I had to have a change of clothing at the school office. It was humiliating. I would have to hide in the bushes until after recess and make my way to the school nurse. Made me feel so ashamed and other kids teased me. It went away on its own probably about 3rd grade, and was such a relief. It made me feel like an outcast.
2. Being bullied in school: I was picked on incessantly in school. I was small, considered "too smart" by my classmates (had the second-highest IQ, etc. testing in the school), and kids would pick on me - boys and girls. I got in a lot of fights due to this, and sometimes I'd have 25 kids chasing me all over the school as a gang. School officials were helpless to stop it, and sometimes my recesses would end with me 10 feet up in a tree and a mob of kids throwing things at me or being up on a chain-link fence with kids pulling at my ankle. Ever since then when people ganged up me I would get very defensive and angry and that makes the people pick on me more. (Has actually happened in a couple adult situations on blogs, believe it or not - but not in real life anymore.) Even in middle school, some bully would incite others to gang up on me. One time in 7th-grade band the school bully got a gang of kids and about 10 of them grabbed me off my chair in the middle of a song and while the teacher was watching carried me struggling out of the band room to the lunch quad and shoved me head-first into a trash can and rolled me down a long ramp - rotten food flying all around me, as the gang stood there and cheered. The last time I was bullied was as a sophomore in high school. A bully stood up and announced to everyone sitting around that he was going to pour his chocolate milk on me, so they should watch. This gang had already been following me from class to class - kicking my book bag - stealing my books and throwing them on the roof, etc. I told him quietly not to do that. He laughed. I told him quietly again not to do that. He laughed - then began pouring the milk on me. He was 6 feet tall and I was 5' 4" and small. I stood up and hit him in his solar plexus as hard as I could - and my arms were strong. He collapsed.... then got up coughing and picked me up, threw me against the lockers, then picked me up and started stuffing me into a trash can. A group of senior cheerleaders ran over and stopped the fight. I was the basketball-team ball boy and they knew me and surrounded him and demanded he leave me alone. This was the last time I was bullied. No one ever picked on me again after they saw me fight back. Chris and I became friends after that. He confided to me that he had been seeing a psychologist for his issues, and apologized for bullying me. This experience growing up made me feel alienated from other people - yet when the cheerleaders stopped the fight and others started respecting me, something healed in me there. But I went on to have few friends.... like BSL.... for a long time, until I moved away from that area and had a fresh start. Once the chain of alienation was broken, it was like I got a fresh start and never again did I truly feel like an outcast. But the scars remain - the feelings in me that groups of humans can band together and become a very ugly force. I trust individual humans, but I do not, and never will, trust groups of humans. Groups of human can band together for evil and target individuals to satisfy a group urge to hurt others, and I have never forgotten this. Slightly related - I had skipped a grade due to my "smarts." This put me back socially because other kids in my new grade liked girls earlier than I did - and I was already young for my grade - and so I fell far behind in learning to interact with women romantically - then was teased due to my late non-interest in them. So my relationships with women came much later than many of my classmates, and through life I am still a bit behind in how to relate to women, due to lack of participating in a lot of teen dating, etc. I still have trouble with understanding what makes women tick, and how to get along with them romantically, due to the late start I got in my teens.
3. Pyromania: I loved starting fires and playing with matches. I almost burned my grandfather's shed down as a kid, burning newspapers for fun. When I was older, I would build plastic models of ships and planes and burn them and then save the half-burned models because it was cool how they would melt. Fire has a hypnotic quality for man - anyone standing around a campfire can attest to this strange power. Maybe it's something about having the control to be able to unleash such a powerful force of nature with a book of matches - I don't know. But I can't remember any string of pyromania incidents I did.... other than the above. Some here may remember that I had a big fire at my place last fall, and my shed and garage burned down. That was truly an accident. My landlord has me burn piles of branches now and again, and finally one of the fires sent a popping ember into some pine needles 30 feet away and it started an unstoppable blaze. But I will say that I enjoyed making these fires big because they looked cool. Had the fire not been so big, the ember likely wouldn't have done what it did. On the other hand, I also like big branch fires because you can get the burning done quicker and throw green branches on and still have them burn. So... the pyromania thing for me....not so much - put it this way - I never started a malicious fire....
4. Cruelty to animals: This is where I'm going with all the preceding personal revelation..... the fact that I seem to have all the components to have become someone like BSL has shaken me into this introspection. I wanted to paint a picture for y'all before adding this last part.
When I was young a friend showed me how to use a magnifying glass to torture ants and snails. He and I would sit in his backyard and burn them. What a powerful feeling. Then I would get a can of Raid and hunt down every last survivor until the can went empty. My poor old cat..... I would do crazy things like put him in the bathtub in a big wooden box just to hear him yowl. One time I took a paper bag, filled it with dry beans, tied it to his tail, and laughed as he ran all over the neighborhood trying to get away from the noise.... up on roofs. jumping from tree to tree..... another time I put him in our old station wagon (he hated cars) and got in and started the car, to watch him freak out. This one backfired, as scared cats seek the highest ground, and he ended up atop my head with all his claws dug in.
Neighborhood boys started torturing lizards - sticking firecrackers in their mouths and lighhting them.... At my grandpa's one summer when I was about 10, I spent a day chasing dragonflies around and swatting every one I could find.... then started using a pellet gun to shoot lizards.
All of this sounds like a recipe for a sociopath. And I was a kid who found a dead baby bird once and built a little box for him and took him and buried him and said a prayer for him and my parents still remember that. Was I going to be OK or not? Remember I was about 11. My brain was still developing. My psychological cement was still wet. I had not become the adult I was going to be.
Then something happened I'll never forget. The bully up the block - who I think had been the one teaching my friends to torture lizards, caught a stray cat. I came upon what happened soon after - did not witness it - but my friends did. This is going to really upset animal lovers, so be ready.
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.
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The bully put a bottle rocket in the cat's rear end and lit it. The cat died. My friends were all laughing about it. I didn't laugh. I thought of that cat... and how I had a cat.... and how though I pestered him... I loved him. I thought of the pain the stray cat had gone through. Something in me changed right there. It really bothered me what the bully had done. I started thinking about the things I had done. I thought of the dead dragonflies and lizards. I thought of those ants and snails, and how they were going about their business and how a white light came down from their sky and fried them and tortured them for no reason other that a cruel god - (me and my friend) had decided to end their lives for no reason other than to exert power over them. I felt so small and mean and ashamed - and thought about - what if some capricious god had decided to to the same thing to me... would that have been fair or right? No. It wouldn't have been. Not at all.
From that day on I never intentionally hurt or killed an animal again that I wasn't going to eat. I don't kill spiders - I take them outside. I only kill ants that are biting me. Even if ants get in my house because I didn't take my trash out soon enough, I don't kill them - I take out the trash and wait for them to go away. Once in awhile when I visit my grandpa's old house - he has passed on and we rent it out - I still can see the dragonflies and lizards I killed. When my old cat died he lived 18 full years I was full grown. I cried my dad cried I built a little box and put in some cat food and things he liked and buried him in a beautiful spot.
What changed in me? What may be the difference between me and BSL? I think I know the answer:
EMPATHY.
My growing brain realized that its very unkind to hurt others . I was able to put myself in the position of the creatures I tortured and realize what a terrible thing it is to abuse other creatures just for the fun of it. I try to put myself - knowing myself - in the position of someone like BSL - and ask whether I could do something like that. I immediately think of the suffering family - the pain such an act would cause - the pain of the community - the act of snuffing out a life that had built for 21 years - parents nurturing a new baby - watching it grow.... the days to day growth and joys and tears of another human being like Mickey.... and realize what a breathtaking, horrible act it is to play God over another like that... and how I could never do something to create such pain because of.... EMPATHY.
My brain learned empathy for others. The bully taught me that lesson with the poor stray cat. Empathy is what controls our ability to hurt others. The lack of empathy unlocks the hidden pain we all have in one degree or another - and lets us unleash it upon others. A person without EMPATHY could do something like kidnap or kill someone, without being himself tortured by the crime he has committed against life.
I think BSL never had a stray-cat moment. His brain never developed the connection to the sanctity of life, and God's mandate that we do unto others as we would have done to ourselves.
I thank God that although BSL and I may have some of the same ingredients in our past, our paths were not the same. I pray for BSL and his family, as well as the Shunicks, and mourn that - if BSL is indeed the perp - his life never led him to a moment of empathy.... that he was never able to sort out whatever bad feelings he has... which has led to this awful moment in the lives of both families.
I know that was long, but I felt I had to type that out.... to share how those "red flags" of a sociopath don't always lead to it... but how it takes a personal realization to kick in, before the mind's wet cement has hardened.
It's like BSL just never saw the light.
