I hope this doesn’t sound odd, but really thank you for your work with those that many deem hopeless or irredeemable.
That's very kind of you.
I don't know how helpful my work has been to them, directly. My work has always had the focus of helping treatment teams better understand what's going on (it's odd how patients speak differently to outsiders/non-staff - I was kind of like a visitor from the patient point of view - they often told me things about staff or other patients and I could keep them anonymous when I met with the staff). I would sit in the TV room, for example, and just chill with the patients. Or I'd just talk to random prisoners in various stages of their inmate experience. Sometimes, the goal was more patient-oriented (toward a particular patient). The psychiatric nurses were my teachers. The psychiatrists were formidable, I never ran into a single one who wasn't doing their best for patients, but it is a very difficult job and almost no one lasts for decades or even a decade, in that context. As a result, in many institutions (whether prison psych wards or state hospitals), care/supervision is provided by people with less than a bachelor's and sometimes with just a GED (often called ward techs or orderlies). The state psych hospital required everyone to do training though.
But I did get "taken in" by various people. I'd become convinced someone wasn't mentally ill enough to be locked up indefinitely (someone who was wanting out). My conviction would usually only last a couple of hours and the psychiatrists taught me a lot about how not to get taken in. They also found some of my efforts quite humorous. It's still amazing to me how powerful the transference can be when one is in the presence of certain mental illnesses.
The rubric for care at most of the places I worked was that there could be only one severely disordered (psychopath; sociopath; severe PD people) per unit, as a baseline. This was considered a step in their treatment (the severely disordered people were still given hope - it's very important that they occasionally try to re-integrate into an environment that isn't just all severely disordered people). However, due to economic constraints, there would often be 4-5 such people in a ward.
Then, there were wards for the severely disabled longterm people (schizophrenic wards turned out to be more predictable and manageable for me, personally). It was very interesting getting to see so many psychotic people come into the intake units at each of these places (I did quite a bit of ER observation as well). One psychiatrist said, "All psychosis looks pretty much alike, at least in the first hours of admitting them: schizophrenics; bipolars; major depresson; drug addicts; schizoaffectives, some Personality Disorders." At the time I did most of my work, there were very few ways of easily telling how to manage treatment in those first hours.
Bottom line is: people can be quite dangerous but appear perfectly normal. The longterm mentally ill are usually incapable of organizing a crime (but can be very impulsive - I actually stopped working in the jails some time ago, due to this issue, it was just too scary sometimes, especially at the intake jail). Working at the jail, btw, was every single person's least desired job within the public agency where they all worked - they all worked diligently to put in enough time and receive good employee reviews, so that they could get the heck out of there. Many of them found jobs elsewhere as well. At the employee entrance to the State Hospital, there was a little museum of weapons taken from patients (often improvised from a gift brought in by a family member - such as a pen or pencil). Sobering. There was a ward for pedophile rapists and another for "regular" serial rapists. Serial killers get sent to the special Medical (Psych) Ward at Vacaville, in CA. I was there only once (but studied under the man who studied Kemperer there). That was not for me.
At any rate, Letecia seems to have been functioning at a moderately high level right before she killed Gannon. She seems to have evaded psychiatric care altogether. That has brought me around to several other theories about this case that are pure speculation (and most of that speculation initially came from members here). Such as: Was Letecia sexually active outside her marriage? Why is there discussion of a threesome? (She acts as if Al would have had knowledge of this - which I doubt - but it's still a peculiar thing to say). Why did she take $8000+ from Al? What did she do with it? Was that the only time money went missing? Did she use street drugs? Why does her mind so rapidly go to Bad Actors/criminals (how often has she told Al that her car was followed?) Does she really have an Ed.D.? Will we ever know? Did she really go to law school (Al seems to doubt it). Was Al about to leave her? Did she get weird every time he left town? Why does she pressure Grusing for "protection" for her mother and siblings? Al seems pretty onto her (that yawn and the other "advertiser censored" behaviors he uses on her really got to her. That part is just regular narcissism. But a spiraling, malignant narcissism is something else to watch. I wonder what her real triggers were that weekend.
I am keeping in mind that almost all of this, if any of it is relevant, had to have happened outside of HH's knowledge. Neither HH nor AS seem to treat LS as if she's insane, which I find notable. AS speaks to her as he always has, apparently, as if she's perfectly sane or at least capable of understanding exactly what she says. He acts as if they both know she's lying, she tries to bribe him to say otherwise. She's used to turning her intimate relationships into this kind of...messed up attempt to manipulate. Probably applies to every relationship in her world and everyone has enabled her in some way (out of fear, most likely).
Sorry for the long Sunday post. I'm just catching up.
SPECULATION and opinion above.
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