Since this will appear under Jeana's name because I am not allowed to post directly, I think I should reintroduce myself as the person who wrote the "General Overview," which was Section One, Section Two (History of the Intruder), Section Three (Mixed Motive Crimes), and Section Four (What the Wounds Tell Us). I am writing what
I think will be my final installment and in this section I will focus solely on motive. I know I mentioned what I believe to be the motive in passing, but I will try and focus on it as the sole topic here.
Before I discuss motive, I think it is necessary to discuss how to determine the motive. One mistake I think a lot of people are making in this case is that they are trying to figure out logically why Darlie would have stabbed the boys. As a result, most people say that this crime is a killing for money. Some people say that the killing involves her getting rid of the two children because they were interfering with her lifestyle. We also know that the defense says there was an intruder. However, I don't think it was any of these things. The problem with using logic is that if you tell Darlie that the evidence is "X," she will say no, the evidence is "Y." If you tell her there was no intruder, she will say there was an intruder. If you tell her that she just stood there doing nothing after the boys were stabbed, she will tell you that she was a whirlwind of activity, wetting paper towels and hauling them over to the boys. In short, it is too easy to manipulate logic. We have to use some other approach and I suggest that approach should involve "memory."
In my native state of Illinois, four people were shot to death and a fifth, a husband was shot through the left wrist and in the thigh, and, thus, was wounded. This case is known as the Christopher Vaughn case and is not an "intruder" case but is helpful to consider. The husband said that the family was taking a short day trip, he stopped to check the luggage rack on their vehicle, and when he got back in the car, his wife pulled out a gun and started shooting him and the three kids in the back seat. The Chicago Sun Times contacted two experts who wrote the book on parent killers back in 2001. One of them said, "I've seen thousands of these case. After you have seen several they all start to look alike. The husband's story does not match what I have seen. I know by the third sentence of a report I hear on these types of crimes what category these kinds of crimes fall into (mother did it, father did it, neither did it), and the mother here is not likely to be the killer, as the father has indicated." Although the case is in the preliminary stages, the State's test on the mother's hands showed very little gunshot residue, and, especially, not consistent with someone who has shot five people. The husband has been charged with four counts of murder. In a similar vein is a passage I read in a book by John Douglas, the former FBI profiler. He was called to the scene of what looked to be a hate crime. The alleged victim sobbed about how his parents had raised him not to be hateful and how someone came into his house and drew a swastika on the wall as well as other indications of a hate crime. John Douglas looked the scene over for 30 minutes and had the guy arrested. Although the guy protested at first, he later admitted he had staged a hate crime scene. He then asked John Douglas how he knew, and Douglas responded, "When you have seen 3,000 crime scenes like I have, you know what a real hate crime scene looks like and this does not look like that."
In Darlie's case, I think most people don't know what happened so they review all the evidence and try to make an educated guess using logic. However, what I noticed first were the stab wounds inflicted on the boys. To me, the multiple thrusts of the knife into both boys indicates rage. Someone was pretty angry with them. We see this type of rage in the Jeffrey MacDonald case and the other case being discussed, the Julie Harper case. I am not sure exactly who the assailant is by this point, but one other thing I know from a lot of these cases is that a knife is "personal." As a result, I believe the assailant is very angry at them and has a personal reason for stabbing them. I then look at whether the attack is sustained or not. In both the MacDonald and Harper cases, I think the stabbing is sustained and, thus, is a homicidal rage in each case. Here, the boys were stabbed only a total of 10 times and neither victim had more than six stab wounds. What we appear to be looking at here is a rage that is more transient than sustained--in other words, the rage wore off. The only other type of rage that I know of is a "jealous" rage and that is what I believe this is. The rage trigger would not be around them and as a result, I believe that the rage had to have come from the argument that Darlie and Darin had that evening/early morning. This crime is not a killing for money because those crimes tend to be more "matter of fact" and far less violent than what we see here. Examples of killings for money include the Charles Stuart case in 1989 (wife shot once in the head), the George Revelle case in 1994 (wife shot in the head), and the Frances Newton case (husband shot in the head and their two children were also shot to death). In killings for money, the assailant appears only to want to move the victim aside to get something and, thus, there is a low level of violence.
However, what people say when I mention the jealous rage theory is, okay, I can see plunging the knife into them as rage, but why would she jealous of them? You have to remember that she came from an impoverished background and was only able to leave it once Darin came flying by. Even then, for the first few years after they were married in 1988, she and Darin weren't living large, as it would later be termed. It wasn't until 1992, when Darin's business took off, that they started living well. Eventually, Darlie fixed up the house so that it was "Nintendo House," the happening place for the kids to be. My understanding is that Darlie came from the bottom of the socioeconmic ladder growing up. After she was with Darin for a time, they had pretty much climbed to near the top of the socioeconmic ladder, assuming Darin's alleged statement is true that near the time of the murders, he and Darlie had made it into the top two percent of wage earners for their age group. I think Darlie had a considerable fear of ever going back to that impoverished background, as evidenced by her statement in her "suicidal thoughts" letter one month before the murders, "I have been fighting my whole life and feel like I just can't fight anymore." What has she been fighting her whole life? I think this is the most important statement in the whole case. I think the "just can't fight anymore" is a nod to the fact that they are running out of money, but what is this "whole life" thing? In any event, I believe that she had been pestering Darin for at least of week for money and continued to do so. Darin could not come across with the money because he did not have it. Finally, that evening or early the next morning, Darlie used the atomic bomb in her arsenal of manipulation, the statement that always did the trick, "I think we need to separate." This statement is what I like to refer to as "the gasoline" because Darin saw his way out of his no money predicament by telling her "good, and don't come back" to get her off his back for awhile. Darin's response is what I like to refer to as "the match" because I think he acted quite serious in his response and I think Darlie took him seriously. I then believe Darlie was very stressed because she had no problem-solving skills and the only place she could turn to would be back with her mother and that impoverished childhood once again. I think she then became angry at the two children not for anything they did, but for having permanent residence at "Nintendo House," while she was being forced back to the poverty of her childhood. I believe that the thought of the long fall down that socioeconomic ladder, which the two boys did not have to endure," was too painful for her and resulted in the crime that occurred in June of 1996. There is your jealousy. Too, I think once the rage dissipated and Darlie saw what she had done, she and Darin quickly came up with a plan to cover it up, and that they are working their plan even 11 years later, their plan being to walk away from what happened. All of the above is what I think memory tells us--it was not money, but the one ugly consequence of running out of money and the pain it brought Darlie, that resulted in what happened that night/early morning.