To be sure, there was violence among the peoples of the new world, but it is unlikely that it resembled the crime and justice evidenced in the streets of London and Paris.  Our current preoccupation with violence is something that we can go back many years and find afficiandos in the dark ages.  The printing press brought the gift of the written word to people who had to rely on rather skilled orators with long, long memories of rather bland  ballads, putrid  poems, and odious odes.  Prior to Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg and his marvelous movable mechanical print ushering in the age of the printed word, there was a dearth of avenues for the human mind to seek distraction.  No wonder the extracurricular activities our ancestors pursued are hideous when examined in the cold light of enlightened day.

That said, we are bloodthirsty by nature and our proclivity to seek voyeuristic venues to satiate our desires has meant that it would not take long for someone to realize that we would love to read about executions, murders, thefts, robberies and so on.  Along came the tabloids of the day — the broadsides.

As Newgate was London’s busiest processing point for those who had transgressed the law of the era, we still have copies of broadsides (or broadsheets) that allow many to feel intense feelings of sympathy and outrage for the persecuted criminals. In fact, it is shocking to the more modern liberal sensitivities to realize the sheer number of people executed under the “Bloody Code” where theft of a loaf of bread meant death — regardless of sex or age.

In the harsh climate of the day, it seemed that the violence perpetuated against innocent citizens also had a rather shocking component.  And while there were occasionally depraved individuals littering Europe’s criminal history, the truly debauched killers of history were usually aristocracy, for who among the peasantry could afford to kill on a large scale and escape punishment for long?  And so we see the likes of Giles de Rais and Countess Elizabeth Bathory, each murdering hundreds of males and females for what is generally thought to be a twentieth century reason — sexual satisfaction through bloodshed and murder.  It isn’t that there weren’t violent psychopaths roaming in the lower classes; it is simply that they were likely apprehended and terminated quicker as the ruling classes did not suffer such actions from the serfs.

Since the new world was controlled at a distance by the power brokers of Europe, it should not be surprising that the truly demented killers of the new world would be of the “common” class.  The debate is only curious for the fact that there is a disagreement as to who among our blood drenched ancestors should be crowned as the “first” serial killer(s).  Modern writers have focused on Belle Gunness, H.H. Holmes, the Benders – a Kansas family of murderers, and several others, but the two men who definitely fit the bill for the title of America’s first serial killers are often overlooked or disqualified for some unfathomable reason.

Perhaps it is due to the fact that the research has been clouded by varying accounts.  There are conflicting records on even the familial relationship that existed between the two men.

However, these historical discrepancies agree on the important points:  the two men murdered many people without discretion, without discrimination and with great ferocity.  They enjoyed killing their fellow humans.  Age, gender and relationship mattered not one whit to them.  And so it is based on their psychological nature that I believe they are the first serial killers we can identify in our history of murderous mayhem belongs to the Harpe men.

Many accounts have the two men as cousins while still others list them as brothers.  The facts agree that Big Harpe was older than Little Harpe.  It is conceivable that the men were cousins as their fathers would have been brothers and living close to one another.  The nicknames were not based on age; Big Harpe was a huge man and must have engendered fear merely at his presence.  How unfortunate that his inner nature was dark and depraved.  This was no gentle giant. Like modern day killer Edmund Kemper, still living out his days in California’s penal system, the giant truly is a murdering monster.

Or maybe the reluctance to recognize the men is due to the fact that they acted in tandem. If that is the reason, then there should at least be an acknowledgement that they are the first team serial killers to grace our new world shores. Sort of an early version of California killer cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, the Hillside Stranglers. Of course, America also suffered from killer cousins on its east coast as well, though cousins David Gore and Fred Waterfield are less well known for their Florida murders as a tag team of death.

Whether the men were in fact cousins or brothers, it is irrelevant to the history they have left behind. There was obviously a familial streak of violence that cannot be denied.  It remains a rather disconcerting fact that they had wives and had off-spring.  Their descendants walk among us today.

And so it goes — the battle to see which stain among our patchwork quilt of crime will win the coveted honour of being considered number one, the first among evils to be selected as our premiere excursion into darkness.

So, you see, when canvassing the depths of depravity, there is a scuffle, a fight if you will, to be considered the first among many.

I’ve heard that expression since childhood, and it seemed to me, for the longest while, that I would probably not live long enough to see the completion of some retribution cycles.  I would encounter some slight, some injustice, some irritating set of circumstances, and I would have to take solace in the belief that what goes around (basically some foul entity using duplitious means to gain at my expense) would come around (that the person would reap hideous events for his or her actions).

I have, however, noticed that as I get older, there are more and more occasions where these type of people get their comeuppance.  It is certainly heartening to see.

For every action taken, there is an energy associated with it and with the consequences created by each action.   Should you do negative/evil actions, then you will receive negative/evil energy threefold.

All sorts of events occur where you must have faith alone that the person(s) who did you wrong will get the requisite retribution in the end, even if you are no longer around to witness the result.

But as time goes by, faster every day it seems, the delay between the nasty action and the retribution meted out by the universe is getting shorter and shorter.  Maybe it just seems that way to be because when I was a child I had to wait years to see those who shit on me to get theirs; or maybe it is because we are getting closer to the ultimate implosion of our world and society.

Whatever.  It is just good to see.

And so, I have to tell those who despair of ever seeing those ass-hats — those who profit on the backs of others — getting their “reward” thrice-fold via the universe and the system of inter-connectivity, to those I say, wait.  Revenge *is* a dish best served cold.  And you will see the circle of life close in on them.

I have lived with a jaundiced view of the world since I can remember.  Being a precocious child is a hideous sentence for anyone; it isn’t fun.  All it means is that a child happens to have adult sensibilities.  They think in adult ways and perceive the world as an adult would.  That said, imagine being trapped in a child’s body and subject to the injustices children are hit with every single day.  You cannot get an adult to tell you the truth.  If another adult is abusing you, then you will not be believed and the adult you confide in will rat you out to his/her fellow adult.  The abuse will then go up a notch in violence and intensity.

People you have a low opinion of will be in charge of making decisions about your life:  where you go to school, what medical and dental procedures you will have, what clothes you will wear and on and on.

You will watch as people are given deference over you merely because they have reached a magical age and are considered adults and are somehow more intelligent, more mature and more knowledgeable than you.

It sucks — hard.  Trust me.

Once I was reunited with my mother, I breathed a sigh of relief.  She has always been the one adult that I could count on to tell the truth and to believe me, no matter what.  Even so, I was not an easy child to govern.  Though I would do whatever was easiest on her, eventually, I had firm and strong views on just about everything.  Part of the process of building a psyche that can withstand the shit-storm that is our society involves working things out mentally before engaging reality.  Born without the capacity to understand the way the human mind works for normal people, my mother’s wisdom and quietly repeated words of logic helped me understand how narcissists and psychopaths find so many victims.

And it also prevented me from garnering victims of my own.

As I stated, it isn’t that the opportunities were not there for me and it isn’t as though I did not feel the temptation to do so.  I did not allow my desires to become reality as I realized that to pursue my inner nature would have upset my mother greatly.

In the grand scheme of things, it is perhaps better that I resisted,  whatever the reason, as I have seen for others the result of the collection of negative energy and the retaliation of the universe.  As I so often have observed, the universe is not a judging entity — it merely is what it is.  It is neither good nor evil, but positive and negative.  The energy which binds all things to one another reverberates on a positive or negative level.  Individuals emit and attract said energies.  And this is why I know that the principle of  “what goes around comes around” actually works.

There are those among us who delight in causing misery and grief for others.  They do not fully fit the criteria given in the Diagnostic Manual governing the psychological field of personality disorders, so they end up being labeled as “difficult” people.  Millions of dollars are made from authors who try to give tips to those who are brainwashed from birth to “play by the rules” and to “act fair” and never, ever to “stoop” to the level of behaviour that these ass-hats do.

And while it seems that these people will profit indefinitely ad infinitum, I have to disagree.  What goes around, does come around.  For those who spread misery and angst to others, and then promptly feed upon this malevolent energy they have created, like vampires in our midst feeding from our souls; for these creatures, we know that the universe has a retributional force that must eventually be felt.

The dysfunctional will never understand why their lives end up in a shit-storm.  It is this portion of payback that the psychopath in me delights.  The plaintive cries of “Why me?” are always accompanied by self-serving, self-justifying statements.

“I have no regrets at all in anything I have ever done or said.”

“I have always done the most for you.”

“I am always bailing you out of trouble, and all I get in return from you is hurt and betrayal.”

Yes, these denizens of doubtful duty are quick to lay their troubles at your feet.  But do not accept their wails of persecution as your action.  Realize that they have brought upon whatever catastrophe is currently visiting them, by their very actions, thoughts, words, deeds.  The universe is not a judgemental force.  It merely returns what you have emitted.  Like for like.  Too simplistic for most people, I know, but I’ve seen it in action myself and I can vouch for it.  And, it seems, as we speed towards the end times, the payback cycle is getting quicker.

It almost seems as though there is a bit more bite when the payback is dealt — as though the rule of three, so often mentioned throughout mystical literature and practices, applies to the return of energy.

Whatever ass-hat is currently making your life miserable in this time and place, do not lose heart.  Remember that they will get their comeuppance via the universe; but make a little song of it in your head and repeat it whenever you can:

What goes around comes around, and you’ll get yours buddy.

And so it will be.

Perhaps it is a little like splitting hairs, but I am a firm believer that the two are different.

I imagine that you are already familiar with one or both of these reflections of man’s mutating mind.  Who in your life fits the criteria for these aberrant types?   We will have to forgo the $250 an hour uptight and costly analysis. 

In a classic showdown, who do you think would win:  the psychopath or the narcissist?

Let’s examine the narcissist first.

The diagnostic criteria from the psychology/psychiatry bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, also known as the DSM-IV, states that someone who qualifies as suffering from the Narcissistic Personality Disorder has at least five of the following traits:

— enormous sense of entitlement

— need for admiration, praise, attention

— lacks empathy

— arrogant and obtuse

— jealous of others and believes others are jealous of them

— uses others as disposable objects

— lives in an unreal fantasy world

To these items, I would add: lies as a matter of course, perverts events in memory to fit image of self, argues in defiance of evidence, and secular and insular to a maddening degree.

Now think carefully.  Are you the unlucky victim of a narcissist?  Does someone in your life fit the criteria?

To see a narcissist in action is to marvel at the illness so pathological that the “medical experts” can only give you the following advice:

LEAVE!!

That’s right.  The 21st century mind doctors can only offer victims the advice of run, hide, cut the narcissist out of your life.  If you are involved with a narcissist, then the only option you have is to escape their presence, cut them off and pray they think that it was always their idea.

Fascinating, isn’t it?

Well, not really, because what the hell are you supposed to do if the narcissist in your life is a sibling?  Worse case — what if the narcissist is a parent?

Speaking as one who has literally been surrounded by narcissists, I discovered rather late in life that I have survived only due to my own personality disorder.  Regular people are collateral damage to the narcissists I have observed.  I am developing an understanding for these victims; not empathy, but an understanding, which is almost as good given the fact that I am not quite capable of empathy.

Lord knows I understand the concepts involved, but no, I really cannot empathize.  It has been frustrating to see the victims being eaten alive by these self-involved parasites, but I now understand the “why” behind their lemming-like devotion to the narcissist victimizing them.

Life without empathy isn’t as much of a detriment as one would think.  I have not been a victim of the narcissists and have discovered that narcissists will be more careful of a psychopath than they would for a human being who is structured in a regular and,  dare I say, NORMAL way.  The only foe the narcissist will fear is the psychopath.

For a long time, I puzzled over what it is about the psychopath that the narcissist fears and I believe I have the answer.

The narcissist is driven by a pathological need for others.  Indeed, they are as close as one can come to the human embodiment of the vampire.  Other people are used up and discarded when they have provided all that the narcissist can use.  Others do not exist as individuals with feelings, emotions, and rights to decent treatment, freedom of thought, etc.  It is as though you do not exist until you are seen by the narcissist.  Once he/she has left the room, you are frozen in space and time until they deign to glance at you again.

The narcissist needs people.  This is the end result of all of their machinations and maneuvers.  The desire for praise, attention, and adulation is ceaseless.  All of your efforts, your achievements, your actions — it will never be enough for the narcissist.  This is part of what makes the narcissist so exhausting for regular folks.  There will never be a moment in your dealings with them where they will tell you, “That’s just exactly what I needed done.  Thank you.”

Nope.  Never going to happen.

What you will hear is, “Oh, wow.  Well, thanks, but what I *really* wanted done was……”  and insert anything that seems over the top and quite impossible.

You are never to feel as though you have reached their satisfaction in any effort or attempt you have made.

And the narcissist has the marvelous ability to act like the perfect man/woman for fresh victims.  To the uninitiated, they can be bubbly, lively, charming, seductive, everything to everyone.  Whatever it is that someone is looking for, the narcissist can become.  The ability to morph into the perfect man or woman is central to their lethal pursuit of new meat.  It is only once you are totally dependent upon them and under their spell that the mask falls away and you are left with the nasty bit of goods residing behind the disguise.

But by then, it is too late.  You went in for a penny and you’re now in for a pound.  Your life will be so miserable and you will come to believe that it is all your fault.  The mind games began at “Hello” and you are no longer master of your own domain/mind.  The histrionics, the drama, the never-ending cycle of abuse will wear on your nerves.  Your misery clouds your judgement and you will wonder if you were ever really happy.  What happened to your own ego?  Your own value and self-worth?  The center of your soul seems to have shifted and you feel like you are just on the edge of a major collapse.  This is the end result of the narcissist’s ploy.  You are to be kept off-balance  all.the.time.

The narcissist thrives on your uncertainty.  The vast nothingness that resides in the narcissist’s soul is the poison with which they must live with and the goal is to make it your poison.  You must partake of the vile miasma that percolates in their being — it is necessary for their survival.  As it is not yours, it will eventually destroy you.

Part of the process of deconstructing you is that you will not be allowed to think well of yourself.  That simply wouldn’t do, lest you look around and realize that your life was a hell of a lot better without the narcissist.

So how does a psychopath compare with the tepid portrait of a narcissist?

The psychopath is sort of the child no one wants, at least in terms of the psychological/psychiatric realm.  The “bible” (DSM IV) doesn’t really address the psychopath.  It is seen as a bit of this and a bit of that, but it isn’t given a clear diagnostic tree as others are.

Psychopaths are also without empathy and have a tendency to view others as objects for their use.  Much like the narcissist, lying is like breathing:  they do it with ease and talent.  The logic for lying in some instances beggars logic, but lie they will.  The psychopath also has an enormous belief in his/her superiority to others.

And yet, they are not consumed with jealousy of others as the narcissist will be.

Perhaps it is the little things that indicate a difference.

Psychopaths are driven to get as much as they can for themselves and they thoroughly believe that it is something innate, something akin to being born to greatness and the rest of the world be damned.  Others are to be used and disposed of.   Rules are for others; not them.   And while the narcissist clings to this all-entitled notion, psychopaths are more focused on the end result.

Narcissists seem to be distracted by their over-weaning need to be admired, praised, showered with attention and affection, regardless of source.  In fact, they will break down should they find themselves without a source and supply of adoration.

Again, they need others in a way that psychopaths do not.

And so, should a narcissist come up against a psychopath, the narcissist will defer, at least temporarily, to the wishes of the psychopath and try to appease him/her.   If it were to come down to a battle, then the psychopath would walk away leaving the narcissist in tatters.  It is the narcissist’s need for others that runs to the core of the afflicted person’s psychological being.   If a psychopath and a narcissist were each stranded on separate desert islands, then the psychopath would still be alive and waiting for rescue in five years time whereas the narcissist would have perished years ago.

A fate worse than death?  Yes.  For a narcissist, he/she cannot fathom a life without others dancing in attendance and providing the “mirror” for the ego’s sustenance.

And though narcissism is supposedly more prevalent in men than in women, my life has been littered with female narcissists.  I have seen them in every role possible:  parent, sibling, aunt, friend, enemy.  The consistency of their traits is rather remarkable given the difference in backgrounds, educations, social status, financial standing, and so on.  Yet each and every one had the drive to seek out others to feed upon.  The sense of entitlement just as strong in each one.  And it was not surprising.

Irritating?  Hell, yes.  But surprising?  No.

And although the two are close in characteristics, the narcissist and the psychopath are not evenly matched for battle.  The psychopath is far more ruthless and far more independent of others to be wounded or cut to the quick as the narcissist would be.  The narcissist lives in constant fear of exposure:  some one may see beyond the mask and reveal their inadequacies for all and sundry to gawk upon.  This means that they must expend mental energy to keep others off-balance and unaware of the true nature of things.

The psychopath is not driven to connect and feed upon others as the narcissist is.

I will return to the discussion of narcissists and psychopaths throughout this blog.  I believe that these two personality “disorders” are far more common than we are led to believe.  Unfortunately, there is little in the way of practical methods people can use to avoid becoming victims of one or the other (or, God forbid, both) of these types.

I hope to elucidate a few techniques that have proven effective, at least from my perspective. 

That isn’t a typographical error.  The possessive apostrophe letter “s” is correctly indicated as I intended.  It is the criminal’s justice system, not the victim’s.

And, as time goes on, I find myself more and more fed up with a system my tax dollars are paying for, a system I did not choose, a system I disagree with, and a system that is paving the way straight to hell for all of us.

There does not seem to be any limit to how far the creatures in the higher echelons of power will go in an effort to “liberalize” already lax laws; the Young Offensive Act, or whatever its supposed to be called, has been a blot, a stain on our collective soul since its inception.  Youth no longer care about retribution for their actions because they know that there is no such thing.  They can rob, rape, mutilate, destroy and yes, even murder, with the full knowledge that they will escape any true punishment.

As one of those “precocious” children, I was saddled with an adult’s sensibilities, mind-set, brain, but trapped by time and circumstance in a child’s body.  It was extraordinarily frustrating and frequently infuriating to endure abuse and to know I would not be listened to merely because of my age.  I learned quickly that adults were no better than those my age:  lies were easier told to children as it was often assumed that children do not remember who made what promise.  Furthermore, adults believed other adults rather than a child.  The propensity to dismiss the notion that an adult would abuse a child is thoroughly entrenched in our society to the eternal detriment of young children everywhere.  I vowed that there would come a day when I would be old enough to voice my opinion and I vowed that I would never be silenced again.

Did I mention precocious with a strong streak of psychopathic tendencies?

So imagine if I had been living at a time when the Young Offenders Act would have covered my activities.   With this legislation to cloak the true nature of my actions, I guarantee that my future would truly have been very, very different.  Murder would not have held the horrors of life in prison.  Even as an adult, life in prison in Canada is, at the very most, a mere twenty-five years.  Very few felons serve this entire sentence.  Far fewer every day, it seems.

And if the murderer is a “youth”?  Well, then they are held in a juvenile facility until they reach the age of 18.

At the magic age, the gates fly open and they are set free.  The world is left to wonder as to their name, for our system will protect their identity.  The fact that they have taken another human life (or even lives) will be kept from everyone that the killer comes in contact with.

While incarcerated, we, the Canadian taxpayers, will pay to feed these butchers, clothe them, provide room and shelter, entertainment, and university education should they want it.  When released, if they have trouble obtaining a decent and high-paying position, then the system is designed to step in and ensure that they are gainfully employed, again at the Canadian taxpayers’ dime.

And what about the victim?  Well, they are dead and gone.  They do not vote and they do not pay taxes.  No one cares about them.  Well, no one in the system cares.  The loved ones of the victim, the ones left behind, they care, but they are on their own.  If the victim was a mother or a father that left children behind, then do these children get government assistance in obtaining food, shelter, clothing, education?

Hmmm?  Well?  Do not approach this from a logical or a moral standpoint or you will go astray.   Given what we provide for the criminal, do you think the victim’s surviving family will have assistance?

Nah!  You would be dreaming if you think anyone would pop a nickel for a victim’s survivors.

Nope, not a chance.  They get nothing, nada, zero, zip.

Killer kid or murderous man, child or adult, the criminal rules the world.

See, it appears is that somehow the victim brought death upon themselves.  You’ve heard the defense attorneys:  the victim was asking for it….. whatever “it” was:  gunshot, stabbed, drowned, bludgeoned, poisoned, whatever.  The murderer defendant was a poor man/woman who had an abused childhood; they have a personality disorder; they didn’t get hugs from their mommy and their daddy on a regular basis; they never had a real baseball glove; they had a bad drug habit; they were going through a rough patch; whatever, who lo and behold, the victim barged into the defendant’s life and totally ruined his/her life by……. again whatever will fill in the blanks and there you have it.  The victim brought the violence upon themselves.

Welcome to Canada, land of the stupid and the poor.

And how about the serial killers we have here.  Aren’t we just so special?  We have a lot of them, but shhhhh.  Don’t tell the police.  They don’t like to hear that.  In fact, they will hold press conferences just to deny such a thing.

Still, those murderous men pop up, just as regular as clockwork, pesky little varmints.  When the defense cretins get their hands on these “men”, then you know that the criminal didn’t want to rape and strangle her; she asked for it; or it was consensual sex and her death was an accident; or she liked it rough and we just got carried away; or hey!  We wuz drinking and ya know… or doing smack, or whatever.  And even though you know better, that’s the way it will be told.

And you may have noticed that the predator is a man and the victim is a woman.  Now why do you suppose I default to those genders for those roles?  Call it a lucky guess, but in the majority of cases, the predator is always male and the victim is always female.

If the victim was a sex trade worker, then you can kiss goodbye any semblance of decency when those in the system refer to her.  She may have been your friend, your daughter, your mother, your sister, but to the system, she was a slut, a prostitute, a denizen of sex, a nympho, a whore, or a wasted druggie who was less than toilet tissue in terms of value.  Yes, you can have your memories obliterated by the way the system will take her up, chew her remains into a thousand pieces, and spit to the earth an unrecognizable mess.

But you must have been prepared for this, right?  When she went missing and you tried to tell those in the system that something is wrong, that she always called in, that she would not make her family worry, and they gave you that look, the look that popped on their face the minute they ran her name in the system and her record came back on the computer screen?  You did know, didn’t you, that any chance you had of getting some aid and action just vanished?  You are now being looked at with disdain, as if you are wasting their precious and valuable time.  Because you are.  Study this look carefully for you will see it on all the faces you will encounter in the system.  The people will be different, different names, different jobs, but they will all share this look.  It is hard to describe, but, boy!  Once you’ve seen it, you’ll know just what I mean.

The ones in the system that have been reprimanded in the past will know better, but there will be those who haven’t had the “sensitivity” training.  These champions may actually verbalize what is apparent in their expression:  you don’t really expect me to go waste my resources on a hooker, do ya?

The speech is always the same:  she’ll turn up.  Wait a week or two and then check back in.  She’s probably gone to fresh turf where she isn’t known.  She’s probably on a bender.  Whatever.  They will ultimately blow you off.

And the thing is, she will turn up:  she’ll turn up dead.  But, hey, they don’t care.  As noted above, the dead don’t vote and they don’t pay taxes.  The system doesn’t care.  You’ve paid into the system all of your life, but don’t expect it to work for you.  It’s not your system.  It’s the criminal’s justice system.

Therefore, when she’s found and you’ve identified your sister/daughter/mother/loved one, consider yourself lucky to hear, “sorry for your loss,” but don’t expect much more than that.  It will not be a high priority to solve her death, and it will only require solving if they cannot ascribe it to something nice and easy that requires no work, like drug overdose, suicide, exposure or accident.  It is wretched to say, but if she has been shot or stabbed or mutilated, then you stand a chance of having someone be held accountable for her death and pay.

Well, not really pay.  But he’ll be arrested and charged, oh, yes, and then in about a year or two, he will eventually go to trial.   He might have to have his day in court hundreds of miles away though, you know, change of venue so that the poor little dear gets a fair and unbiased trial, ya know?  So, if you want to attend the trial and get some sort of closure there, then you’ll have to hitch your own way to the new location.  No free rides for the victim’s loved ones.  Nothing for you.  Well, after all, this whole thing is because of your loved one, isn’t it?  Look at how much it’s going to cost just to prosecute this defendant.  Really, I don’t know how much more one could expect from the criminal’s system.

The defendant?  Oh, he’ll be fed and clothed and taken care of until the trial, don’t you worry none!  He might even look totally different come opening day of the trial.  If he looks healthier and stress-free, then it’s because he is.  Nothing is too good for criminals in the system.  The whole thing is geared to his ultimate comfort.  His rights are paramount to all and sundry.  No one can know the lengths to which the system will bend for the criminal until you see it for yourself.  Being awestruck and stupefied can look deceptively alike.

See, it is like this:  that perverted blob of flesh and skin, masquerading as a human male, who took her life, he’s going to have the best that we taxpayers can shell out for in terms of legal expertise.  We will pay to have your memories destroyed, your heart broken a thousand more times, your future totally ruined, and we will ultimately pay for his “punishment” if there is any.  We will pay to house him, to clothe him, to feed him, to educate him, anything.  And if he has a substance abuse problem,, then we will only be too happy to help him kick whatever habit he has.  We wouldn’t pay for your loved one’s home, food, clothing, shelter, or recovery program, but we will pay for the piece of snot that took her life.

And therein lies the rub against a soul-skin so raw from life:  it is the criminal’s justice system.

How did this happen?  Did I miss a special vote?  I don’t remember this in civics class, but maybe it’s something new being taught.  I thought we were all about equality, freedom, and the right to live our lives without fear of becoming someone’s punching bag.

The way the world works, well, it jars you.  It keeps you awake at night, your mind spinning over the maddening way things are done.  Deep down in the core of your heart and soul, you know that it is wrong.  It is so un-just that your mind reels.  There will be no justice for you, for your loved one, for society.  She’s gone forever and whatever she may have done, whatever she may have achieved, it is all just so much dreaming, and dreams do not translate into votes or cash, so the system has no use for you, for the victim, for the survivors.

Because ultimately, nothing is anyone’s fault anymore.  The system says so.

And the criminal is the only one with rights and the only one the system is concerned with.

Every day, in every court room across the country, there are men and women who have transgressed the most basic of social laws:  do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  This is the one law that all human beings should adhere to.  I do not believe for one minute that anyone would beat/mutilate/stab/poison/kill anyone if they knew it was going to be done unto them, now would they?

The world has gone to hell already.  It isn’t safe to do anything anymore anywhere.   What do you get for playing by the rules?  A cookie before dying?  A great write-up for your obituary?

The chance to become a victim?

The world is insane.  No one is normal anymore.  Thus it would appear that the secret to survival lies in how crazy you decide that you can be should the need arise.  The future does not belong to the meek, or even to “nice guys.”  The earth will be inherited by the sociopaths, the narcissists, and the psychopaths that are riding roughshod over civilized society.

So I say, trust in your own inner psychopath.  Find it, develop it, cherish it.   Decide here and now just how far you will go to live your life on your own terms without someone taking everything from you.  Think of it as a mental exercise, but you have to do it.  Most people are shoved into a frozen state of panic whenever they are faced with a violent confrontation:  decide how you would react and prepare yourself.  Things are not getting any better; our society fails the victim regularly.  The victim is dead and gone; those who loved the victim are left behind to grieve and cope without that person’s presence.  And every occasion the survivors encounter the system, they will be victimized again and again.

Choose to push back; choose to fight if necessary; choose to destroy those who would destroy you.

We are all ultimately responsible for every action we take.  We alone choose to act and we alone should pay for the repercussions generated from our actions.

Accountability is currently held at a universal level:  what goes around, comes around.  In lieu of a justice system of our own, it is all we are left with.

Written by Avianlvr.

The defense called to the stand Jesse’s mother, who portrayed her poor boy as doomed from his birth.  His many illnesses had left him unable to deal with the real world, suffering as he did from grand dreams that made his reality unpleasant.

Neighbours recounted his tendency to bully and attack other children smaller and weaker than himself.  They also told of his penchant for torturing and killing small animals.

Teachers described a student who disrupted classes with temper tantrums.  When he was disciplined, he would go off on tirades that he wasn’t to blame, he was being unfairly persecuted, he couldn’t help it (sound familiar?), he would tell his mother and she would make them pay.

To anyone acquainted with psychopathic behaviour, none of the preceding strikes one as lunatic in nature.  Granted, it isn’t nice behaviour, but it doesn’t indicate insanity.  To the men and women of the day, though, this seemingly inexplicable personality before them was crazy.  What else could explain it?

The alienists stated that Jesse could not control his urges, Jesse was a victim, Jesse needed to be locked up in an insane asylum, not put to death.  How could they punish him for what was beyond his control?

The lawyers continued to present “evidence” through experts, neighbours, his mother, and so on.  It seemed like there was nothing that they would not attempt to make their case.  Thus, in an effort to show how demented poor Jesse was, they called to the stand the victims of Jesse’s earlier bout of attacks in 1872.  Victim after victim recounted their attacks and the trauma involved in physically healing.  For Harry Austin, the attempt to castrate him meant very painful surgery to attach the half-severed penis back in place.  For Robert Gould, his testimony was made visceral as his face was still grotesquely disfigured from Jesse’s blade.  The logic in making the victims re-live the events in public and on the stand is something that defense attorneys do even today, despite the fact that it normally backfires.  Only the very spiritually stunted would feel sympathy for Jesse Pomeroy when faced with the young, innocent victims who were scarred for life by his actions, both physically and psychologically.

The star for the defense was the alienist Dr. John Tyler who made the lame assertions regarding Jesse’s sanity.  The testimony made for compelling reasoning, until the prosecutor shredded the logic by having the good doctor admit that Jesse knew right from wrong, and that the insanity he suffered from was a “moral” insanity.  Evil men do what good men dream of; good men make the choice to not do what they dream of.  And no one was disputing that Jesse was amoral.

The prosecution’s alienist was Dr. George T. Choate and he stated that Jesse was intelligent, mentally sound, and extremely manipulative.  Since Dr. Tyler had to admit that Jesse did not suffer from delusions, fits, or delirium, Dr. Choate’s testimony painted the picture of today’s psychopath:  knows right from wrong but chooses to do whatever he pleases, cares for no one except his own pleasures and feelings, has no remorse, believes in his inalienable right to whatever he wants, has no concept of consequences and refuses to be held accountable for the effects his actions may have on others.

Yep, that’s Jesse all right!

Well, it took the twelve good men five hours, but they came back with a verdict of guilty of first-degree premeditated capital murder — there was a recommendation for mercy on account of his age — just 14 years!  Imagine.  Poor little tyke.

But the judge did not have the power to change the sentence and pronounced the punishment to be death; hanged at the neck until he is dead.  For Jesse Pomeroy, it looked as though he was, as of December 11, 1874, a dead man walking.

Things don’t always turn out the way you want them to though, and this was just such an instance.

Naturally, the governor did not want to make history as being the politician at the helm of the state when it executed a 14-year-old monster I mean teenager.  Governor William Gaston established a committee to study the case and make a recommendation.  They came back with their answer:  execute him.  The committee was sent back to “study” it again and make another recommendation.  Again, they returned with their answer:  execute him.

Guess what?  They were told to go back a third time and really study the case and come up with another recommendation.  By now, even the most thick-headed among the members must have realized that the governor was not going to accept the decision that they made based on the legality of the case.  There was no excuse other than he feared for his political legacy and future.

He should have carried the sentence out.  As a result of his pig-headed opposition to capital punishment, he lost the election in 1876 to Alexander Rice, who coasted to victory on a promise to hang Jesse, and then had to watch as Rice quietly commuted Jesse’s sentence to life in prison without parole.

Of course, Rice wanted to make it more than just life without parole, so he directed the sentence to be served in solitary confinement.

And so it was for over forty years.

Jesse was busy though.  He raged against the system and insisted that he hadn’t been given a fair trial.  He lodged complaints, appeals, and, most notably, several escape attempts.  He wasn’t alone in his persecution claims; his mother continued to be a pestilence on society’s backside with her claims of Jesse being wrongly convicted just to satisfy the rich society folks who had lost their children through no fault of hers or Jesse’s.

She sent Jesse items through the mail for the longest while, but after his third escape attempt using tools she had smuggled in to him, she was banned from sending anything else to him.

Ruth spent the rest of her life fighting for Jesse’s release.  She made the trip, once a month, for his one allowed visit.  When she died of diptheria on January 10, 1915, at the relatively young age of 52, he lost the solitary human being on the planet who cared about him.  It did not affect him.  Given his psychopathic nature, it should not come as any great surprise.

Jesse used the time well (when he wasn’t injuring himself in escape attempts) by learning to write in several different languages and reading everything he could get his hands on.  He lived for forty-one years in solitary confinement until he was released, for humane reasons, into the general population, in 1917.  Ever the psychopath, he loved the fear he generated in those prisoners who knew of Jesse Pomeroy, the boy fiend, and all of his exploits.  He was on borrowed time with regards to his fame, and there came a time when he was just another old man in the system.  To be unknown was a fate worse than death for Jesse, but somehow a fitting punishment for one so secular and self-involved.

Now and then, newspapers would do an article on Jesse and dredge everything up again.  At the time of his trial, there was an attempt to blame the lurid dime novels of the day as the reason for Jesse’s warped mind.  The problem with that was that Jesse hadn’t read these novels at all.  Remarkably, in 1915, a newspaper writer actually stated that the people of 1874 had no grasp of how to handle degenerates and that was why Jesse had been released as being reformed.  This statement was ended with the claims that now (in 1915) society had a much better handle on how these type of criminals should be treated and cured.

Astonishing, isn’t it?

At one point Jesse sued a writer for a woman’s magazine when the author stated that Jesse had murdered a kitten while in prison.  True enough, he murdered plenty of animals when he was a free individual, but this story was, in fact, not true.  I guess he was worried about his good name being sullied.

Eventually, Jesse was taken to Bridgewater Farm in 1929 as his health was failing.  He died of heart disease on September 29, 1932, at the age of 71.  He was a classic psychopath who happened to finish his time on this planet inside the walls of a prison.  His development fit the stereotypical criteria providing us with an intense and early example of the psychopath — origins and genesis — it is all there in the story of Jesse Harding Pomeroy.

In our current and modern world, we see echoes of Jesse Pomeroy every day in the news.   And still there is the confusion regarding how society should act.  To this day, we still fail to grasp the implications when we see a “child” act in the way he did.  We still fail to protect the vulnerable, the innocent.  We still sacrifice lives needlessly in the name of the predator’s rights.

Jesse Pomeroy flashed into America’s society and foreshadowed events we are unsuccessfully grappling with today.  Psychopaths, serial killers, children who kill.  He was all of these things.  Experts that do not have anything to offer us but theories.  Advocates who release predators back into our world.  Protecting the rights of the criminal by not disclosing their names or their location, thereby endangering all who are in the criminal’s vicinity.  Here was an episode filled with lessons that no one ever took the time to study.

Have we learned nothing?

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Further Reading:

Excellent article by Mark Gribben at TruTV Crime Library under Serial Killers/Killers From History.

Harold Schechter authoritative book is entitled Fiend:  The True Story of America’s Youngest Serial Killer, and you can read an excerpt from this tome at his site.

And naturally, there is the Autobiography of Jesse Pomeroy, which must be read with the knowledge that it is a typical book written by a self-serving psychopath. 

Written by Avianlvr

As if he was operating in a protected bubble of anonymity, Jesse tried to lure young victims with his tried and true promises of candy, money, the circus — whatever he could think of.  Fortunately, most of the children had been warned and refused his offers.  Using a new ruse, only two weeks after slaughtering Katie Curran, Jesse asked 5-year-old Harry Field if he knew where a certain street was located and if he would like five cents to take him there.  The child walked with Jesse to the location and once there, asked for his nickel.  Jesse threatened him and began to seek a deserted area to complete his plan.  As he was dragging his victim along, Jesse ran into another teenager who knew what Jesse was up to.  The youth began a loud verbal altercation with Jesse, during which Harry wrenched himself away from Jesse’s grasp and ran home.

The time lapse between fantasy and action was shortening.  Jesse’s urges were building to a fever pitch, blinding him to the danger he was placing himself in.  His presence was known in the area.  Parents were starting to learn of the predator in their midst and were becoming more vigilant in their supervision.  Sadly, for one child, there would be no knowledge to enable the parents to protect their baby.

In the month of April, the Millen family moved to the area.  It was their lack of knowledge of the neighbourhood that enabled tragedy to alter their lives forever.

On April 22, 1874, 4-year-old Horace Millen was to become Jesse Pomeroy’s next and mercifully, last victim.

Horace had a sweet tooth, so he was on his way to the store to get some cake when he met up with Jesse.  Asked where he was headed, Jesse said he was going there too.  Once at the bakery, Horace bought a small cake and shared it with Jesse.

His new friend asked Horace if he’d like to go to the waterfront.  Pleased that an older boy was keen to spend time with him, he happily agreed.

Jesse had decided to kill Horace the minute he saw him.  He encountered several witnesses on his way to his ultimate enjoyment, but it did not deter Jesse in the slightest.  In fact, he was anxious that no one interfere this time; he was not to be thwarted a second time.

The two continued to the marshes near Dorchester Bay, Jesse settling on Savin Hill Beach as the locale for his next little foray into the darkness of his mind.

Alone and far away from witnesses, Jesse pounced upon the little boy.  He failed to  kill Horace with the first swipe of his blade and a life-and-death struggle ensued.  The pathologist stated that the little child had fought fiercely for his life, defensive wounds up and down his arms and all over his hands.  The tiny mits were clenched so tightly that the coroner would later have trouble uncurling them.  The deep gouges his feet had left in the marsh sand indicated Horace did not die immediately, that he had tried to stave off the attack, and that he had died an extremely painful death.  Jesse was livid when Horace fought back and proceeded to stab the smaller boy again and again.  The lust was all that possessed Jesse Pomeroy.  Horace’s mutilated body had sustained over 18 wounds to the body alone.  Indeed, the coroner counted over thirty stab wounds all over Horace.  The two deep lacerations on the throat were cited as the cause of death, but the genitals had been severely mutilated as Jesse once more sought to castrate his victim.  There was a lethal post-mortem stab to the right eye, disfigurement of the face, and stab wounds over the entire body, with particular attention to the victim’s genitals.

The estimate is that Horace Millen lost his life around 1:00 p.m.  His body was discovered at approximately 4:00 p.m.  His father went to the police station to report his boy missing at 5:30 p.m.  Neither the police nor his father knew that his body had already been transported to the coroner for autopsy and for evidence.  The medical examiner made his observations and conclusions in front of the coroner’s jury:  Horace Millen had died as the result of an attack by a madman.  It was after 9:00 p.m. when the South Boston station sent an officer to the home of Horace Millen to deliver the news.

Based on the evidence the body revealed with respect to the type of wounds inflicted, the case was a copy of Jesse’s earlier attacks.  He was, however, thought by many to still be in reform school.  When the truth was revealed, he was quickly picked up and brought in for questioning.  Jesse Pomeroy, however, was a truth psychopath and never worried for a minute that there was any chance of him being held accountable for his actions.  Smirking, he told them that they could not prove him anything.  The captain forced Jesse to go view the body in the funeral home, at which point Jesse confessed, only asking that they not tell his mother.

After Jesse was arrested for the first-degree murder of Horace H. Millen and held for trial,  Ruth and Charles were, eventually, forced to close down the store and remain in their home.  Their co-tenant in the building then took over the old Pomeroy store space to expand his business.  Then his workmen made a terrible discovery.  Roughly a month after finding the body of  Horace Millen, the remains of Katie Curran were discovered.  Again, Jesse was unfazed with this turn of events.  Claiming he had no knowledge regarding the body of Katie or how it came to be in  the cellar, the police pointed out that there were really three suspects for Katie:  his mother, his brother, and Jesse himself.  Realizing that his actions could land his mother and brother in the dock with him, he confessed to the murder of Katie.  He explained how he had savaged her corpse which was rather evident as her genital area was torn to pieces.  Jesse was very calm and unmoved when recounting the story of how he had murdered these two children in an effort to gain sexual gratification.  It was revolting for the men of law enforcement to deal with him.  Try as they may, his behaviour defied all explanations.

The papers of the day pointed out Jesse’s “evil looks” as being evidence for the evil inside his soul.  Jesse had lost sight in his eye either from the brain fever he had suffered as an infant, or, as his mother stated, an adverse reaction to the smallpox vaccine he received.  The eye was white and malevolent in appearance, having an unnerving affect on those who saw it.  He had a harelip and a cleft palate.  These features supposedly combined to explain why Jesse did the things he did.  The prevailing theory of the time was driven by Cesare Lombroso who coined the phrase “stigmata of degeneration” and it was his theory, based on Darwin’s atavistic characteristics which appear in living organisms, that criminal behaviour should be expected from individuals who look a particular way and have certain degenerate features, like, say, a harelip, a large head, a cleft palate, and an evil white eye?

Well, it should come as no surprise to anyone that Ruth Pomeroy refused to believe Jesse was guilty, despite the fact that the police had, in the case of Horace Millen, several reliable eye witnesses, blood from Jesse’s knife, the fact that the knife was the type of weapon which made the wounds on the body, mud peculiar to the area found on Jesse’s boots and knife, scratch marks from Horace on Jesse’s face, and more importantly, his boots were the only ones (given a wear defect on one boot) that could have made the impressions at the crime scene.  This last piece was very important as the police had made a plaster cast of the impressions to back their case up.

Defense attorneys for Jesse had him examined by the alienists of the day.  Alienists are what we call psychiatrists and psychologists today.  The field of examining the human mind was still in its infancy but Jesse Pomeroy was made for analysis.  Jesse was examined by no fewer than three specialists (two for the defense and one for the prosecution).  The lawyers knew that Jesse was guilty and their only hope was to spare him from the ultimate punishment for the charge of first-degree murder:  death by hanging.

Initially, Jesse was only too pleased to talk about his crimes and his feelings.  This scenario is every psychopath’s dream.  They have important people interested in them.  It is only as it should be, as far as the psychopath is concerned.  They are special people and are only worthy of being interacted with by other special and important people.  Harold Schechter’s work on his book on Pomeroy, Fiend, states that Jesse confessed readily to the murders, giving gruesome details and answering questions on the reasons behind his actions.  He claimed he had pain in his head and that it was a signal to him to torture these victims.  He said that the pain brought on a feeling that he had to attack these children and that he was helpless before this inner direction; thus, he “couldn’t help it,” and he had to commit these atrocities.  It is fascinating to see that even with this early example of a psychopath, the wheedling confession still includes an attempt by the predator to extricate himself from any responsibility and to negate the efforts of society to hold him accountable for his actions.  It’s not my fault, I couldn’t help it, my mind told me to do it and I couldn’t fight it.  You get the picture.

The alienist who spent the longest time with Jesse came away very disturbed by what he discovered.  Jesse had no feelings of remorse for his victims; none whatsoever.  Furthermore, he knew the difference between right and wrong.  Finally, he stated that Jesse would always be a threat to society and he would have to be incarcerated forever to protect others from his actions.

Now, with a report like this, what do you think his ultimate decision was of Jesse’s sanity?  Just like today’s so-called experts, the doctor concluded that Jesse Pomeroy was insane.

The report was for the defense team, so perhaps the result should not be too surprising.  However, based on what the legal system states, if an individual knows the difference between right and wrong, then that person is not insane.

Not that Jesse was concerned.  After divulging his inner thoughts and confessing to intimate details about the two murders, Jesse received a note from his mother telling him not to confess.  He promptly recanted everything and denied everything he ever said.  He felt, ‘so what?’ if they convicted him; he figured he would get out when he was eighteen and then join the navy.  Really.  He really believed this.  His legal team was working to save him from swinging at the end of the rope, but Jesse felt they could do no more to him than send him to reform school until he was 18.  This type of magical thinking is also typical psychopathic behaviour.  One need look no further than the case of Ted Bundy and how he had ruined his chances to live his life out to old age in a Florida prison by deciding that he alone could win the case and prove his innocence.  Ted also shared Jesse’s inner self-belief that if he denied his guilt that he could somehow WILL it into reality, despite the eye witnesses, despite the forensics, despite the plethora of evidence (i.e., past crimes indicating patterns).  So Ted took the reigns of his legal future into his own hands and fumbled.  He was fried in 1989.

Back to the psychopath that is Jesse Pomeroy.  He was unconcerned and even bored during the trial.  No one missed his attitude.

As the alienists were placed on the stand, the case was made for Jesse to be declared insane.  The prosecutor, however, forced the experts to admit that Jesse had no intellectual impairments, that he knew right from wrong, that he did not suffer from delusions.  The testimony was that he was morally insane by virtue of being a moral defective, a moral degenerate, a …. well, you get the gist of the idea:  Jesse Pomeroy was morally bankrupt.

But then so are all psychopaths.  They know the rules of society; they just choose not to abide by them.  Rules are made for other less important people, not them.   For the psychopath, whatever they want, they take.  Whatever they want to do, they do.  Whatever they want to say, they say.  There is no confusion in this regard.  The only confusion the psychopath ever experiences is when society holds them accountable for their actions — that’s confusing as the rules aren’t supposed to apply to them.

Jesse was matched in his stubborn assertion that he was innocent by his mother.  She claimed that the grieving family, the Millens and the Currans, had made her boy the scapegoat, her Jesse, and railroaded him into court.  This nauseating type of behaviour is, of course, also prevalent in today’s world.  Again, Ted Bundy’s mother is a classic example of the modern-day Ruth Ann Pomeroy.  Until the night of his execution, she claimed he was innocent.  And then Ted called his mother one last time and told her the truth.  Wherever she is, whatever she is now doing, Eleanor Louise Cowell Bundy must live with the knowledge that her boy slaughtered dozens of bright, young women in a foul, disgusting manner, and any word, thought or deed she pursued in an attempt to protect and to shield Ted from the ultimate debt he was charged with owing, any bit of negativity is hers to own with all her heart and soul.

Ruth Pomeroy put pen to paper in later years to describe to a friend how her little Jesse had confessed originally only to spare his family.  What he was sparing them from is a puzzle, for if she and Charles were innocent of any wrong-doing, then she should not have had anything to worry about, nor should Jesse.  But then logic and facts were not a strong suit for Ruth.  She had to know Jesse was responsible for the crimes.  The problem is that Ruth felt it was Jesse’s right to do whatever he wanted to, and if that meant torturing and killing others, well, then, that was fine by her.  If the alienists had had a chance to chat with Ruth, then I’m sure that this would have been her ultimate reasoning.  To my mind, Ruth Ann Pomeroy has the blood of Katie and Horace on her soul as she was the reason that Jesse was released early and she worked to keep his presence a secret from wider knowledge within the community.

It was the contention of the defense lawyers that the statue regarding insanity should be put on trial, not Jesse Pomeroy.

Quite the trick if they could pull it off.

Continued in Part 6

Written by Avianlvr

With Jesse Pomeroy incarcerated until he reached the age of 18, the community slowly drifted back into familiar patterns.  The actions wrought upon the neighbourhood were alien to all involved.  There was no movement to gain a better understanding of what had happened, why it had happened, or what they were supposed to do when Jesse was released when he turned 18.  Other than hearing from Jesse himself that he “couldn’t help it,” they had nothing in terms of knowledge regarding the crimes.  The newspapers of the time reported that it was generally agreed he was “morally deficient”, a lovely little catch-all phrase that was meant to state, with some sense of authority, that because Jesse wasn’t “right” in the head, this was explanation enough.  Simple, comforting, and totally wrong.

Unfortunately, today’s world doesn’t offer much more in terms of an explanation, and so-called experts cannot even reach an agreement among themselves.  Sociopath, psychopath, narcissist:  which category would Jesse fall into?  One, two or all three?  There have been new categories added that have only served to confuse matters:  conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, antisocial personality disorder.  Which of these would apply?  Any or all?

When you examine the crimes of Jesse Pomeroy, it becomes clear that he was on a pre-set path.  He began early life with solitary episodes where he fantasized “day-dreams” about power and influence.  He was “affected” by these “dreams” — his mother admitted this much.  He was a bully to other children, seeking out those younger and smaller than himself.  This continued as he grew up.

Somehow, when he was disciplined by his father, he associated the whole scene with sexual arousal and sexual release.  It is clear that there is a component of the punishment scenario repeated in his attacks.  His father first would strip him naked first in an effort to make Jesse as vulnerable as possible.  Once exposed, Charles Sr. would then whip the boy with a switch or his belt, and the beating would continue until blood was flowing.  It was during these sessions that Jesse made the connection that would replay in his future attacks.  One wonders if there was a session in which Jesse experienced an erection while being thrashed, and, if he did, was it noticed by his father?  If  it was noticed, then the most likely response would have been confusion, revulsion and disgust on the father’s part.  Charles Sr. would have then beat Jesse more and with greater force to punish the boy for his response.  This would have completed a circuit in Jesse’s brain:  pain, arousal, pain, arousal, and so on.  Punishment sessions may have resulted if he had been caught masturbating.   All adolescents masturbate, but it wasn’t until the late twentieth century that such behaviour was viewed as natural and normal.  In Jesse’s day, it was sinful and a ticket to eternal damnation and hell.  When all things are considered, it is easy to see how the whole thing became one tangled mess.

The unfortunate factor in this development was Jesse had the biological precepts required for becoming a psychopath.  His early behaviour indicated that he was neurologically different from his brother.  His mother’s doting affection nurtured this difference and brought it to the forefront of Jesse’s personality.  Instead of learning to hide his psychopathic leanings, he was given the freedom to indulge his fantasies and to eventually put them into reality.

Jesse began with murdering the pets in his household.  Birds with broken necks, cats eviscerated, dogs mutilated and stabbed to death.  The Pomeroys came to know that Jesse could not be trusted with pets.  At the age of 5, he was caught torturing the neighbour’s cat; after this, the family ceased to keep any animals as pets.  The animals figure prominently in the development of psychopaths.  An animal is another living thing.  It has a life force.  It has a birth and a death.  It can be hurt and it can experience pain.  These are key and important facts regarding animals.  It is for these reasons that we find young psychopaths involved in torturing and killing animals.

Imagine if you will, that you are consumed with your own thoughts, actions and deeds.  No one outside of you matters.  You spend your days imagining a world in which you are sole arbitrator of life and death.  Your word is law.

How would you attempt to bring a little of this fantasy into reality?

You could take a dog (or any animal) and become the god of this canine’s universe.  You can feel the life force inside its body when you put your hand on it.  Typically, these kind of children work their way up to dogs with bugs, lizards and frogs falling victim first, but the idea is the same.  These animals are tortured, cut, burned, stabbed, stoned, whatever, until, finally, the psychopath gives the final coup de grace and ends the life force.  The torture may be prolonged with each successive foray into this experiment, but each session will ensure that the next episode, the next victim, will have to give more to give the same level of satisfaction the last one did.

Pretty soon the animals are getting larger and more aware.  This is what drives the development.  After a period of time, the level of awareness, the knowledge that the victim possesses becomes important.  And this requires a sentient victim, a human victim.  The human victim has a life force, can experience pain, can experience suffering; but unlike animal victims, the human has an awareness that animals do not have.  The victim is human, like the perpetrator,  except one is in control and has power and one is under control and is powerless.

This is the ultimate ingredient needed to create the fantasy in real-time. The human victim. Once the predator has graduated to human victims, it is a different escalation that we then see.

Jesse Pomeroy followed this pattern almost as though he was pre-wired at birth.  From small animals, he worked his way forward up the chain until non-human prey no longer sufficed.   As he entered puberty, his urges grew in strength and in frequency.  At that point, a little four-year-old boy became his target.  The boy was younger than Jesse, but he was human and aware.  Jesse spent a good deal of time with Billy Paine and the experience satiated his urges well enough that it was close to two months before he was driven to satisfy himself once more.

The next victim had to be more aware, more developed than a four-year-old.  Jesse needed to have the victim interact in order to achieve sexual orgasm.  The prey still had to be smaller and younger than Jesse, but had to be capable of understanding the power Jesse was wielding.  And so it went.

As each attack played itself out, Jesse kept increasing the level of violence.  More blood was necessary each time, more mutilation, more agony from the victim.  The change in location did not stop Jesse and it may, in fact, have added to the thrill of these events for him.  He lost his cabin so he ran a very real risk of discovery by conducting these sessions in the open.  He was too close to civilization in two occasions to complete what he wanted (in one case, castration).

With the last victim prior to his capture, he had planned to murder Robert Gould but was interrupted before he could do so.  Jesse had reached the final stage in development and was about to embark on murdering his victims.

Had the good people of South Boston thought to examine the situation a little more closely, then they would have realized that Jesse was well on his way to becoming a serial killer; nothing had been done in terms of identifying his behaviour as a future risk to society, so it was not surprising that he was not going to be given any sort of treatment at the reform school.  Given the state of mental health medicine in the 1880s, it is probably just as well.   Our twenty-first century can do no more than identify high risk offenders; there is no agreed upon course of “treatment” as these people are never going to change.  According to Dr. Robert Hare, expert on psychopathy, we can, however, learn to identify psychopaths and take steps to prevent ourselves from becoming their prey.

The community settled back to a routine and children were allowed to play without direct parental supervision.  The angst and terror had gone away and everything was as it should be.

Meanwhile, Jesse was adjusting to the strict routine of the school and he quickly learned to obey the rules, earning himself a reputation as a well-behaved boy who took direction and avoided getting in to trouble.  To all concerned adults, he appeared to no longer be a risk.  It was all just a facade though.  Jesse learned quickly that if he wanted to get out of reform school, then he had to impress certain key adults.  Jesse still bullied those younger and weaker than himself; he had not changed at all.

His mother was busy writing to anyone and everyone she could about how she was suffering without her boy at her side, how he was railroaded into confessing, how he was loved and missed and how she needed his help at the family store, and so on.  She swore that she would have him under constant supervision either by her or her son, Charles, and that Jesse would be busy at her store.  The governor’s office sent an inspector first to the Pomeroy home to assess Mrs. Pomeroy and her humble abode.  He was struck with her dedication and love for Jesse.  He thought Jesse would be definitely under a watchful eye in her care.  Jesse’s performance, however, was what swayed the man’s decision.  The inspector met the Jesse persona designed for society:  obedient, polite, respectful, hard-working, and feigning remorse for his actions.  Impressed, he submitted his report and upon his recommendation, Jesse was released early into his mother’s “care” and strict supervision.

A mere seventeen months had passed since Jesse’s reign of terror had been halted by his arrest and conviction.  Everyone thought they had sixty-three months before they had to worry about his release.  In essence, his sentence had been reduced by over 70% — he served just a little over one quarter of his term.  Apparently, giving the criminal time off for good behaviour and reducing the sentence is not a unique liberal quirk of our current society.

Without so much as a note to the local police, Jesse was assessed as no longer being a threat.  There was nothing to base this conclusion upon as the inspector had a short chat with Jesse and spoke with the instructors at the school who were able to say that Jesse did his chores, took instruction well, and was obedient.

On February 6, 1874, Jesse Harding Pomeroy, budding psychopath, was released back into society.  No one, other than the Pomeroys, were aware of the fact that the boy fiend was once more in their midst.

As such, when little Katie Curran went shopping for a notebook for school and disappeared, it was March 18, 1874, and only forty days since Jesse had been freed to strike again.  Katie, a 10-year-old girl, was excited about purchasing a notebook to use with her new teacher at class that day.  Within the hour, Katie’s absence caused her mother to panic and go search for her.  Turned away from the regular store as the owner did not have any notebooks, he told Mary Curran that he had sent Katie to Mrs. Pomeroy’s store to check their supplies.

The Pomeroy store?  You can almost see the woman with her heart in her throat; she would, of course, think, well, at least Jesse’s still locked up.  Imagine her emotional state when she found out from the police that Jesse Pomeroy was back, but not to worry as he was completely reformed, dont-cha-know? Oh, and then there was the wonderful reasoning that since Jesse only attacked little boys, he would never be a threat to a little girl.  Despite Rudolph Kohr’s statement to Mary that he had been in the store with Jesse when Katie came in and that Jesse had sent him on an errand, leaving Katie alone with Jesse, the police stuck with their belief that the reform school released him because he had been rehabilitated.  As if.

Circumstances conspired against Jesse from being discovered.  Katie’s father was Catholic and her mother was Protestant, so the rumour was her father had shipped her off to a convent.  Another rumour/reason-to-ignore-the-obvious was a witness who stated he saw Katie being forcibly taken by men in a wagon.  Following up on Rudolph’s statement, the police encountered Ruth Pomeroy who let them search the store, but also let the police know that she felt her boy was being unfairly targeted yet again, as she thoroughly believed Jesse innocent of the crimes for which he was sent away.

What had happened to little Katie?  The last anyone had seen of her was Rudolph as he left the store and she was talking to Jesse about purchasing a notebook.  After Rudolph left on the errand Jesse invented, Katie was alone with him and he saw an opportunity to release all of the pent up desires he had had to suppress at reform school.

Jesse lured Katie to the cellar with the lie that he had some notebooks down there and that they could go and check them out.  She agreed and went down the stairs ahead of Jesse.  Once down in the cellar, with the door to the store closed, she did not stand a chance.  As Jesse confessed later, he moved quickly.  Grabbing Katie and putting his hand over her mouth, he sliced open her throat and proceeded to stab her again and again in a frenzy.  Fulfilling all of his fantasies on her body, Jesse was covered in sweat and blood.  Panting, he looked at what was left of Katie Curran.  He had savaged her body.  She no longer resembled a human being but was a mass of red flesh.  He had succeeded in decapitating her and held her head by her hair and bounced it around the slag heap of coal in the back of the cellar.  He smiled as the sweat dripped into his mouth, mixing with the blood spatter on his face.  He had experienced several orgasms during the murder and he felt very satisfied.

Slowly returning to the “other” world, the unpleasantness of society’s reality, Jesse realized he would soon be missed and had to clean things up.  He buried Katie’s remains deep within the pile of coal, stripping his outer clothes off and burning them in the furnace.  He then went to a trunk and put on some of his father’s old clothes, no doubt feeling lucky to be larger than the average 13-year-old.

While Mary Curran was trying to get the police to check out the Pomeroy store because she had been sent there to buy a notebook, Jesse was busy satisfying his lust urges.  When a man was sent to check the store out, it was too late and the search was too limited.   Preferring to take the easy explanation, the police believed Katie Curran was alive, but just not in South Boston — either kidnapped by ruffians or in a convent by her father’s directions.

But she was in South Boston — albeit a dismembered and rotting corpse, but she was there.

Forty days after being released as “completely rehabilitated” and no longer a threat, Jesse Pomeroy had merely picked up from where he left off in September, 1872.  Incarcerating him had done absolutely nothing to change Jesse.  In fact, it had not even taught him to be careful or less reckless with regards to discovery.  Once the cat was back among the pigeons, Jesse graduated to the next step.  He was evolving to murder with the last victim in September, 1872; he had meant to slice open Robert Gould’s throat but he was interrupted by workers.  To paraphrase the words of John Douglas, you can’t changes these guys.  When put them in jail, you’re just putting them on ice.  Another way to think of it is suspended animation.  When they are in prison, they cannot pursue their all-consuming desire:  murder.  When they are released, they have nothing to prevent them from achieving their goals, and so they are back in the activity which drives their very beings.  They live and breath death.  For these individuals, there is nothing else.

And so, while Jesse had a fortunate set of circumstances concealing his monstrous activities, Katie would not be the only child to die at the hands of the boy fiend.

Continued in Part 5

Written by Avianlvr.

Well, that was the whole thing in a nutshell.  Boston was rapidly evolving into the capital of snob-central.  These actions, these outrages had such an unseemly quality that the people were left in a haze, groping for something familiar to latch on to.  Nothing in their collective experience prepared them for this.  Where did such a monster spring from?

Back in September, 1857, Ruth Ann married Charles Pomeroy, and within a year, they welcomed little Charles Jr. into the household.  On November 29, 1859, Ruth gave birth to Jesse Harding Pomeroy.  Sickly from birth, Ruth doted on Jesse.  He suffered a “brain fever” that left him in a coma for days.  When he awoke, he had tics and tremors, along with some odd bouts of head shaking.  He suffered, she later testified, from dreams of unbridled ambition and grandiosity that would haunt his waking hours.  Aside from the fact she relayed these facts in a court of law in an effort to excuse Jesse’s actions, his delusions of grandeur are typical of psychopathic thinking.  The world owes them a living; the world exists solely for their pleasure; the world has no right to hold them to any standard of behaviour or to be accountable for their actions.  So entrenched was her thinking that her Jesse could do no wrong, it is thus understandable that he was possessed with a mania in his remaining years that he had never been given a fair trial.

The Pomeroys were an insular and isolated family.  Thomas worked in an abattoir and Ruth was employed as a dressmaker.  The oldest son, Charles, quickly made himself useful and helped his parents whenever and however he could.  Young Jesse was sullen and kept to himself when he wasn’t bullying other children.  A year alone separated the two boys, but Jesse was clearly his mother’s favourite and allowed to amuse himself however he wanted.  Thomas was a heavy drinker and quickly lost his temper.  Whenever the children misbehaved, he took them behind the outhouse where he would stripe them naked and proceed to whip them until the blood flowed freely from their wounds.  It is this experience in Jesse’s background that the alienists of the day (and some of today) point to as providing the groundwork for his later psychotic actions.

The truth is that if the explanation was that obvious or that easy, then Charles Pomeroy should have acted out first and in the exact same manner as Jesse.  The fact is that he did not.

Jesse had the same environment, but his genetic makeup was such that Ruth’s actions, and those of his father, helped to develop the serial killer lurking just under the surface.  He was allowed far too much leeway in growing up, his mother coddled him on one hand and his father brutalized him on the other.

Ah, well.  So the attacks were becoming more and more frequent in the Pomeroys neck of the woods, and Ruth decided to move herself and the two boys to South Boston, leaving Thomas behind.  If she thought the new location would put the brakes on Jesse’s depravity, then she would be sorely mistaken.

Victim number five was lured away with the thought of earning 25 cents in exchange for performing an errand.  On August 17, 1872, while walking along the shoreline of South Boston, George Pratt, a child of rather delicate constitution, was the next to find himself facing Jesse’s depraved lust, bound by rope, naked and bleeding.  Jesse verbally taunted him over and over before launching into a bout of whippings from his leather belt.  The beatings were savage enough, but this time more was needed.

Attempting to blind the boy with a long and dangerous needle, he also tried to inflict lethal damage by plunging the weapon further and further into the body.  Unsatisfied with this course of destruction, Jesse resorted to clawing into the skin with his nails and tearing at George’s buttocks with his teeth.  George Pratt would be left alive, but not before Jesse had claimed two pieces of  his flesh.  If the police had any qualms about the sexual angle prior to Pratt, an examination of the latest victim to fall prey to Jesse Pomeroy removed all doubt.

Shall we recap?

Location                  Date                                      Victim (age)

Chelsea                  December 26, 1871             Billy Paine (4 years old)

Chelsea                   February 22, 1872             Tracy Hayden (7 years old)

Chelsea                   May 20, 1872                     Robert Maier (8 years old)

Chelsea                   July 22, 1872                      Johnny Balch  (7 years old)

South Boston         August 17, 1872                   George Pratt  (7 years old)

What may have been unclear to Ruth Pomeroy was crystal clear to the police.  The fiend had moved territory, the attacks were increasing in frequency, and the children of South Boston were now in peril.

Jesse had lost the use of his little shack on Powder Horn Hill, but he was quick to improvise.   Like George Pratt before him, little Harry Austin, only 6 years old, was set upon by Jesse on September 5th, and once he had the boy alone in a field, stripped him naked, bound his wrists and feet, and proceeded to torture him.  The beatings from his belt, fists and feet were no longer enough for Jesse, nor would the dagger-like needle do.  For Harry, Jesse graduated to actually stabbing with his knife, no longer content with merely making slices into the flesh.  To achieve satisfaction, he now had to plunge the steel into the body of the boy:  his arms, his back, his shoulders.  Prone before him, Jesse tried to severe Harry’s penis but was interrupted before he could complete his desired action.

The escalation in violence was breathtaking.  Jesse’s urges quickly erupted again and he was prowling just days after Harry was violated:  on September 11th, another boy fell into Jesse’s trap.  Joseph Kennedy, seven years old, was attacked once taken to the marshes surrounding South Boston.  He was tied to a fence post, stripped, bound hand and foot, and lashed, punched, kicked, stabbed, and whipped with sticks and Jesse’s leather belt, till the boy was a mass of open and bleeding wounds.  Jesse released him from the fence post to force Joseph into a kneeling position.

“Say it!”  Jesse shrieked.

“No, I can’t,” Joseph cried.

Jesse kicked him in the head.  As he rolled over, hands and legs still bound, Jesse moved quickly forward to send his boot into Joseph’s ribs, the little boy coughing out blood as the air forcibly left his body.  Jesse was determined to make the boy repeat his version of the Lord’s Prayer, filled with obscenities and curse words, a component of Jesse’s necessary items for achieving his ecstasy.  Joseph, however, feared for his soul’s eternal damnation.

“Say it, damn you,” he commanded.

“I .. I won’t,” Joseph wheezed.

The steel blade lashed out like lightning and sliced a wound across the child’s face.

And still Joseph refused.

Furious, Jesse grabbed the little boy’s bound arms and dragged him to a salt-water creek nearby.  Once by the water, he soaked Joseph’s open wounds.  The child’s screams reached higher and higher until the pain overcame him and he mercifully passed out.

Frustrated in his quest, Jesse kicked the boy in a frenzy before finally deciding he had been there too long and that it was time to flee the scene.  Joseph was found hours later, still unconscious, by searchers alerted to his absence.

Jesse’s needs were growing out of control.  In South Boston, it looked like the race was on:

Date                                                 Victim (age)

August 17, 1872                             George Pratt (7 years old)

September 5, 1872                        Harry Austin (8 years old)

September 11, 1872                       Joseph Kennedy (7 years old)

With the change in location came the change in population density, the change in available sites to do the “dark deeds”, the change in risk factors to discovery.

But Jesse didn’t care because all that mattered was satisfying his urges.

Not only were there more chances he would be seen by one of his victims in the neighbourhood, but there was the fact that he had almost been discovered with one of his victims.  He was attacking too close to inhabited areas.  He was unwilling or unable to put more distance between South Boston and his attack zone.  He was meeting with resistance from some of his victims and had resorted to kidnapping a couple.  Several factors were conspiring to lead to his discovery.

But Jesse didn’t care.

And so, he made the attack that would lead to his downfall.

Again, mere days after the attack on Joseph Kennedy, Jesse was driven to find another victim.  Despite the fact that the townspeople were in a frenzy to find the mystery monster.  Despite the fact that vigilante gangs were increasing in strength and frequency patrolling the streets of South Boston.  Despite the fact that the school year had begun and children would be watched more closely.

Despite all of these factors and more, Jesse had to have his satisfaction, regardless of the cost.

And so it was that five-year-old Robert J. Gould became the final victim of Jesse Pomeroy’s escalating perversions.

But Robert was to prove to be more trouble than Jesse had bargained for.  No, he didn’t want 25 cents to run an errand.  No, he didn’t want to see the circus.  No, he didn’t want to go across the field to see something fun.

Thwarted at each turn, Jesse resorted to threatening the boy with violence and coerced him away from the neighbourhood.  Jesse took him to the railway tracks and tied him to a telegraph pole located there.  Once trussed up as usual, he began his protocol of torture:  lashings, stabs, fists, feet, threats, taunts, and the obligatory repetition of obscenities.   This time, however, Jesse needed more.

Standing in front of the bleeding and sobbing boy, Jesse brought his knife up to the child’s throat.  He positioned the blade to make his fatal wound when he heard approaching railway workers.  He spun around and saw men approaching in the distance.  With no time to lose, he fled, leaving Robert bound and bleeding for the workers to find and free.

As Jesse had not been given his usual quotient of time with torturing his prey, this victim would be able to describe his attacker more completely to the police.  Indeed, the cops now knew to look for a large adolescent, brown hair, and with a scary white eye.

BINGO!

Jesse Pomeroy had corneal scars on his eye, although the papers of the era attributed it to “albinism” as some sort of identifying marker of Jesse’s genetic disposition to be perverted and sadistic (He must be touched in the head.  Look at his eye!!).

The police were now able to arrest the “boy fiend” and stop the assaults.

His mother, of course, begged and pleaded to see her boy.  They were wrong.  He was a good boy.  He never gave her any trouble.  He was always at home.  He always did as he was told.

She continued in this vein even on the witness stand, despite the fact that all of the victims were able to identify Jesse as their attacker.  She claimed the children had been coached by parents and by the police.  Her boy wouldn’t do such things.

Jesse himself initially refused to admit any guilt, in spite of blood found on his clothes the day he was picked up for questioning.  The local cops kept him away from his mother and let him stew overnight.  When they returned in the morning, they told him that he would go to prison for one hundred years if he didn’t confess his crimes.  Believing he would not be punished at all if he told the truth, he admitted, in detail, what he had done, even confessing to the initial crime committed on four-year-old Billy Paine, still too young to remember accurately the vile things Jesse had done to him.

Pleased with the details finally on record, the police were disgusted with the boy, feeling he must be morally deficient in some regard.  Once they had his confession, they brought him to juvenile court to face Judge Forsaith.  Victims recited their memories, Jesse admitted his crimes, but his mother, Ruth, was to establish the role she would spend her life performing:  mother of an innocent child, convicted by high society and corrupt officials.  We see her ghost at every trial  with every family member swearing their loved one’s innocence in stark opposition to the evidence presented.

She begged and pleaded with the judge to let her boy go, she would look after him.  The court was wrong, the cops were wrong, the victims were wrong.  Jesse only confessed because he wanted to spare his family any trouble.  Jesse was a good boy.  Jesse was her boy.  She knew him better than anyone else in the world and she never saw any sign of the kind of behaviour they said Jesse was capable of.  It couldn’t be — it was all lies.

For those familiar with current day tragedies, this type of behaviour is not something new.  What is remarkable is that the urge to defend the absolutely heinous actions of loved ones is a time-honoured tradition.

Despite Ruth’s sobbing and wailing to the contrary, the judge sentenced Jesse, referred to as a mere lad of 12 years and 10 months of age, to a reform school.  For the first time in his life, Jesse was to be separated from his mother.  Both wept openly profusely at the realization, and both believed that they had been betrayed by the system.

On September 21, 1872, Jesse Pomeroy was found guilty of the assaults on all of the boys,  and the judge sentenced him to the state reform school, the Lyman School for Boys located in Westborough, Massachusetts, until he reached the age of 18.

The system worked.  The monster exposed, he would no longer terrorize the good people of South Boston.  Jesse Pomeroy was being sent away and there was a collective sigh of relief.  The demon had been identified, corralled and prosecuted.  The children would be safe until some time after November 29, 1877.

But somehow justice would not work in the way the good people believed it would.  Somehow, in some alien notion of justice, the idea of protecting and serving the people was usurped by what was deemed to be the best for Jesse.

And you know that meant bloodshed and heartache for innocent prey.

Continued in Part 4

Written by Avianlvr.

And for the members of law enforcement who were possibly hoping for an easy year, they were destined to be deeply disappointed.

In the bleakest of winter months, February 22, 1872, was to be witness to a most unusual and brutal event.  It was on this date  that a young lad of 7 was lured by a stranger to Powder Horn Hill, the scene of Billy’s grotesque induction to a sadist’s pleasuredome.  Once out of sight and earshot of civilization, Tracy Hayden was attacked by the fiend in much the same manner as Billy Paine had been.

Tracy P. Hayden, who had been quite agreeable to the fun adventure the unknown older boy had suggested, was quickly stripped of his clothing, his wrists bound, and the rope strung him up on the central beam of the little shack.  While hanging there, naked and helpless, the psychopath began to whip his body with a switch, harder and harder, each blow raising angry red weals upon his flesh.  The tempo and force increased until the switch split the skin, raising blood from the boy’s body.  Blows rained upon him from fists, feet and sticks.   In the most bizarre aspect of Tracy’s ordeal, he was forced to repeat curse words as the demon beat him.

“Say it!  Say it!” it shrieked at him.  Tracy’s eyes were swelling shut, his body becoming one solid entity of pain, but he tried to repeat the words.  Over and over.  The command.  His response.  More lashings.  Then punches.  Over and over.

Tracy’s body began to go into shock.  The pain was overwhelming, and when he felt that it could be no worse, the fiend upped the ante and began to stick pins into his flesh.  Tracy screamed.

“Louder!  Higher!”  he commanded.  Tracy cried harder, his mind was racing.  Who is this boy?  Why is he doing this?  Tracy didn’t know him.  Until today, he had never seen him before.  Wouldn’t someone hear him?  Was he going to die?

Suddenly Tracy saw the knife.  The wretch brought it close to Tracy’s groin, gently touching the blade to his flesh.

“I outta cut it off.  I outta, right?  Then what would ya be?”

Tracy realized in horror what he meant.

“No, please don’t,” Tracy pleaded.

The offender laughed and began to dance around Tracy’s dangling body, all the while cackling in some obscene parody of mirth.

Tracy was sobbing now.  As the malefactor began to hammer fists into the head and chest, Tracy began to lose consciousness.  He felt his nose break and the pain was excruciating.   Panic seized his soul and he began to cry out for his mother.  This had the most deleterious affect on the villain, literally infuriating him to new heights of torture and depravity.

Cursing at him, he smashed Tracy so hard in the mouth that the little boy choked on the blood that filled his mouth.

Coughing and gasping for air, Tracy last remembered spitting out teeth as he mercifully sank into oblivion.

………………

Some time later, when the Hayden family noticed young Tracy was missing, they employed some neighbours and began to search for him.  Fortunately, it was not the mother who found him, but his father, who was ultimately relieved that his son was merely unconscious, not dead.  Still, the man could be forgiven for thinking the worst as the sight he laid his eyes upon was truly horrific.

Tracy’s naked body was left dangling in the cold night air, not a spot left without blood or bruises.  The winter weather had slowed the rate of bleeding, but it also had the effect of dangerously lowering the boy’s core temperature.  Mr. Hayden and the men with him worked furiously to quickly free Tracy from the rope, wrapping the boy in blankets.  Tracy was taken to the hospital while someone notified the police.

The local cops had a sense of deja vu when they examined the tiny cabin where, less than two months ago, Billy Paine had been discovered.  The set-up was the same.  The wounds inflicted, while more severe on Tracy, were the same in nature.

With this attack, they realized that their hope for an aberration was not to be.

When Tracy had recovered enough to answer questions, he told the police about the older boy, a stranger who asked him if he wanted to have some fun and go see the soldiers.  All he could remember was that the boy was larger than he was and that he had brown hair.

Not exactly enough for even a general description:  male, caucasian, older than seven years of age, with brown hair.

The cops were left with no options other than to warn the citizens of the Chelsea area that an unknown male was out committing these atrocious acts.   The people became fearful and angry.  An original bounty of $500 was increased to $1,000  for any information which would lead to the arrest and capture of this diabolical miscreant.  The reward money created vigilante gangs who prowled the evening streets looking for the pervert.  Parents began to warn their children to beware of this demon, this fiend, who was obviously so twisted and demented that he must be a hulking monster with a hunchback, green skin and gleaming red eyes.

Such a description would not lead investigators to the guilty party because unfortunately, Jesse Pomeroy looked just like everyone else.

Well, not quite like everyone else, but that will come into play later.

The Boy Fiend

For Jesse Pomeroy was indeed the fiend they sought.  At 12 years of age, he was quickly developing into a full-fledged psychopathic serial offender.

Next to fall victim to Jesse’s escalating cyclical need to relieve his building energy was Robert E. Maier, another young boy, this time eight-years-old, who, on May 20, 1872, was lured away with the promise of a chance to see the circus.  Once again, the boy was set upon by Jesse inside the small cabin in Powder Horn Hill, stripped naked, wrists bound, and a rope used to hoist his body to the central beam in the shack.

And again, the boy was beaten, whipped, stabbed, cut, punched and kicked.  Again, the boy was made to repeat curse words throughout.  Robert endured a phenomenal beating and he was able to note that the older boy gratified himself while inflicting the torture.  Indeed, he was such a good victim that Jesse had an orgasm at the height of Robert’s agony.

Perhaps that is what saved Robert Maier from a more prolonged attack.  Once Jesse was satisfied, he cut Robert down and let him go, but not without first threatening to seek him out and kill him should Robert ever tell anyone.  With that, Jesse escaped.

Of course Robert told his family, who, in turn, took him to the police station after he was checked out and patched up at the local hospital.  Again, the description was less than useful:  male boy, about 14 years of age, brown hair, and now bigger than an eight-year-old boy.

By now the local people were upset, afraid and angry.   The police were forced into action.  As a result, literally hundreds of brown-haired adolescent boys were questioned in the area of South Boston, but no one was identified as being the perpetrator.  The warnings to children became convoluted and the young and budding sadist morphed from a brown-haired teenager to a man with red hair and a red beard.  The religious connotations affecting the image are hard to ignore.

Somehow Jesse Pomeroy was missed in the massive police effort to question every boy that fit the general, and admittedly vague, description.  As a result, Jesse’s lust would build again, and this time the victim would be lured away with the promise of money in exchange for running an errand.

On July 22, 1872, seven-year-old Johnny Balch would find himself stripped naked, bound and suspended on a rope tied to the central beam of the tiny cabin in Powder Horn Hill.  Little Johnny was taunted by Jesse throughout the beating, forced to repeat curse words, kicked, punched, stabbed, cut, whipped and, of course, threatened with castration.  Once Jesse had his orgasm, he cut Johnny down and threatened to kill him if he left the building.  Again, Jesse fled the scene.

It became apparent to the police that there was a strong sexual component to these attacks.  More worrisome was the fact that the attacks were becoming more frequent and more savage.  The last two victims were purposely mutilated, their faces maimed so that they would forever be marked by the attack.  Truly the local law was facing an unknown phenomenon.

Just when the angst of the community seemed to reach its fever pitch, the attacks stopped in the Chelsea area and moved to South Boston.  Now it was the parents of South Boston who had to fear the unknown fiend.

What happened?  How could this foul degenerate move amongst the good people of Boston unnoticed?  Such things did not happen in polite society.  The facts belied the irreconcilable quandary people found themselves in.  And the victims spoke of a mere boy who had perpetrated these deeds.  How could it be true?

Indeed, what had happened?  Well, although Jesse’s mother, Ruth Ann Pomeroy, never publicly acknowledged what a demon she had produced, in August of 1872, she moved the family to South Boston.  Harold Schechter’s definitive tome on the Pomeroy case, Fiend:  The Shocking True Story of America’s Youngest Serial Killer, leaves the reader with little doubt that the move in location was not done for economic reasons, but rather for the removal of Jesse from the area of his victims.

But Ruth’s actions would not — indeed, could not — stop Jesse now that he had a taste for it.

And he was growing more violent.  For the good people of Boston, time was running out.

continued in Part 3

Written by Avianlvr.

On February 6, 1788, Massachusetts formally became part of the new union of United States, but its place in the birth of a new nation had long since been inculcated.  Once free of the burden of providing for a mother country, Boston became an international shipping location, and its economy and population grew exponentially.  Unfortunately, after the War of Independence, America found itself warring within its borders over various economic issues, which primarily centered on the use of slavery by southern states.    When the ugliness of the Civil War was finally over, Boston was soon returning to “business as usual.”

The pivotal and important role the city and the state played in the country’s birth seemed to lead the community headlong into what most people consider twentieth century phenomena:  serial killers and children who kill.

1871.  South Boston.  Young America had yet to celebrate her first centennial of independence, and Massachusetts, one of the original thirteen states,  was quickly becoming the unofficial capital of upper-class New England society.   The lines dividing the wealthy from the working poor were already well established and, for one mother, would serve as an explanation for tragedy.

The year had not been particularly fortuitous, with the last months of 1871 providing tragedy and mystery.  On August 26, an Easter Railroad express train collided with a local passenger train.  The express, travelling at 35 m.p.h., rounded a corner and slammed into the end of the passenger train.  Too late to brake or reverse, the collision resulted in the steam boiler exploding, scalding and maiming passengers trapped in the now-burning wreckage.  Some died horribly in the coach, others survived but were mangled and mutilated from the fire and/or the boiling water spraying over everything.  Thirty people died with survivors left with physical and emotional scars from the event.

The great fire of Chicago, rumoured to have been the result of an irate heifer, was also in the news.  The weather was beastly, but typical for northeastern states settling in to winter.  Thanksgiving was celebrated with usual holiday cheer, though the local papers noted that not many were willing to brave the weather to celebrate in church.  In what seemed to be a foreshadowing of Boston’s own great fire of November 9, 1872, where the commercial district of the city was destroyed, the papers were also filled daily with stories of fires throughout the city from gas explosions, arson, accidents, and so on.  Overall, 1871 was not a banner year.

The Christmas holidays were soon upon the people.  As the year was winding down, it felt good to put the close on 1871.

But the men and women of Boston were lulled into a false sense of security.

The worst was yet to come.

Around Christmas Day, two men were busy in the woods at Powder Horn Hill, near Chelsea Creek in South Boston.  It was around a deserted cabin that they heard a noise.  As they drew closer, the cry was identified as human.  They picked up their pace and entered the building.

There they discovered a sight that would undoubtedly haunt them for the rest of their days.  It was 1871 and these two men had stumbled on to a victim of a budding psychopath.

Hanging from a rope tied to the center beam of the tiny shack and wrapped tightly around his little wrists, hung the body of four-year-old Billy Paine.  He was drifting in and out of consciousness, the sounds coming from his split and bleeding lips when his level of awareness rose, the pain seeping from his throat in a tortured cry before subsiding back into a black void of unfeeling darkness.  He was half-stripped, barely breathing, covered in raw swatches of flesh made bloodied and bruised by some unknown mechanism.

The men, momentarily stunned, quickly worked to get the child cut down and bundled up to protect him from the brutal cold weather while they transported him to the local hospital.  There the police were forced to accept the fact that Billy Paine was in no shape to give the details of his attacker, nor would it be likely that the four-year-old would be able to accurately remember useful information.  So, then as now, the local cops decided that it was likely just an aberration, a one-off weird type of attack that would never happen again.

With  law enforcement resigned to a policy of  “ignore it and it will go away”, the people of Boston were left to cluck about how strange the world can be, and isn’t that shocking?  But things like that never happen to you and me, do they?

And so the year of 1871 passed into 1872.  New year celebrations hold out the hope that this year, this time, things will be so much better.  The disappointments of the previous year are soon forgotten and some folks even make resolutions to do things this year that they never had the strength of character to do last year.

A new year, a new promise, right?  That’s how we look at things.  So, can we really judge the Boston police too harshly for thinking little Billy Paine was just lucky to be alive and for not believing that perhaps he wouldn’t be the last?  After all, we seek comfort in what we know.  Change is new and scary.  There is no point in thinking outside the box.  Weird things happen once and a while, but they hardly ever amount to anything.  Why chase trouble?

But sometimes change comes along anyway, and no matter how much we want to go back to life in the “before” time, once change disrupts our world, we are forever altered.

And the people of South Boston were about to be altered.

continued in Part 2

Doing research on violence in the world has some deleterious benefits.  One can feel quite superior and above the common herd when reading the latest news out there.  It is not as though any of us even know someone like the people we read about on the crime pages.

I’m not exaggerating here.  How many of us actually know someone who has raped a two year old child? Can you even imagine?  Someone like that would be easy to spot, you’d think.  Perhaps a third eye in the middle of their forehead, or some hump on their back.   But these deviants are not so easily identifiable.

They commit their crimes, fully aware that they are breaking society’s rules and, in some cases, deeply ingrained cultural taboos, but they do whatever they want to do regardless.  Such is the mark of true sociopaths that we see, again and again, their dismissive attitude towards what society wants whenever it interferes with what they want.  And they are usually puzzled that they are held up to scorn and persecution for their actions.  In keeping with their insular mind-set, they have no problem explaining away any of the nasty connotations their particular crime may attract.

So the pervert who rapes a two year old child, does he hold his head up when faced with the cretin who rapes a 10-month-old baby?

What about the asshat that rapes a 9-month-old baby?

Think that’s the ultimate?  Nope.  At what age would you think, “Dear God, no one would rape an infant at that age!”

6-month-old?

5-month-old?

3-month-old?

These lines have all been crossed.  Frequently.

Do you think we have plumbed the depths of depravity yet?  Would there be, could there be anyone or anything so evil that an infant even younger would do as a vessel to satiate the dark desires of perversion?

Unfortunately, a resounding YES is, of course, the answer.

All of the above perverts can claim to be less evil, in terms of the age of the victim, when it comes to comparing themselves to the man, I mean, MEN who raped his THEIR own baby girls, at the ripe old age of EIGHT DAYS OLD.

Would you believe that there were TWO men charged with this offense?  Two men, and in different states (one in Arkansas and one in Michigan).  Both of these fellas must be regular Einsteins, eh?  Quite the catches for the women involved who used these men as sperm donors, because they certainly did not act like fathers usually do.

Yes, two newly enshrined fathers were charged with the (what used to be called unusual) crime of raping their own 8-day-old infants.

What psychological combination of factors can amalgamate in a human brain to equal the output of “Hey, this is a great idea!” ?

For any man to rape an eight-day-old infant, there must be factors at work that have yet to be discerned.

Why would a father look at his creation, still very much an infant at eight-days old, and think, “Hmmmm, my baby girl do look fine.  I guess I’ll have to rape her.”?

I can hear some people thinking, “WTF?”, but there are still others, a breed of human I will never understand, who will rush to the perpetrator’s aid and try to spin these actions as somehow being understandable.

In one case, the man had already impregnated a girl and had gained the role of father at the age of seventeen, so it is not as though he was new to the idea of fatherhood.  I also truly doubt that he witnessed his own father doing anything like what he did to his daughter, his own flesh and blood.

There is no set of circumstances that I know of that would —  in any way, shape, or form — explain these actions.  Apparently, the victims were also beaten quite severely; one died after the attack while the other infant survived.  The beating doesn’t make much sense as one knows that an infant this young would not be resisting or trying to fend off her attacker.  It does make sense, however, when you realize that rape is an act of violence.  It has nothing to do with sex, sexuality, arousal, or love.

Rape does have a lot to do with hate.  Oh, yes, and power.  The rapist is exerting his power over the victim, essentially robbing the victim of all identity and any right to feel defined as a person.  It is about robbing someone of the boundaries that they have established around their psyche and their mental picture of themselves as an individual with rights:  the right to live life unfettered by invasions on their boundaries.  It is this theft that can never be restored, and, for this reason, victims quite often never heal.  No victim is ever whole again.

As a society, we all experienced something similar when 9-11 occurred.  On 9-10, we all had a mental image of our world, our place in the world, and we lived with whatever image we had of ourselves at that time and place.  On 9-11, this was stolen from us, all of us.  We can never go back to 9-10.  The agony is that we know how we felt on 9-10, we know how our lives were so much better then and we must live with the angst of  knowing that we can never get back to that place, no matter what we try or how hard we work.  That person is gone forever as is that society and world.

Viewed as such, we can just begin to know the agony of a rape victim.

But what of these infants?  The ones  “lucky” enough to survive the assault?

Talking heads have theorized that these victims are too young to remember anything, so the individual should grow up without any damage.

Really?  How do they know what will or will not be left as an impression/memory for these infants?  It isn’t as though these experts have a solid database of prior victims to draw upon in order to make these assertions.  This type of crime is, unfortunately, something of a 20th century phenomenon.  There have been no pontifications as to the reasons behind such actions as there has been in South Africa.  In that country, sort of a modern-day hell and where one South African is raped every twenty-six seconds, the epidemic of infant-raping is ascribed to the mistaken belief that sex with virgins will cure all types of sexually transmitted diseases, especially HIV and AIDS.

So what is the deal with so-called first-world nations experiencing such cases?  Where are the psychologist/psychiatrists on this issue?  Why haven’t the talking heads and pundits leaped all over this issue?  Why hasn’t the media leaped on this heinous crime and developed it as only the media can when they spin tragedies into marketable stories?  Is it because of some misplaced sense of propriety or of decorum?  That has never stopped the media sharks from feasting before.

Or is the lack of media attention due to the age-old reasons:  children are disposable entities as they don’t vote and don’t spend money, and most victims are women and women don’t count, period!

Hmmmm.  Must be.

But back to the rape of an 8-day old female infant.  As hideous and as loathsome these souls must be, even these degenerates can claim to be better than the father who raped his 1-day-old infant. In most of these cases, the kicker is that the mothers know of the abuse and usually do what they can to cover it up.  In this instance, the poor little baby girl was still in the hospital when her father, Jonathan Wayne Goodrum, aged 19, raped her with an “unknown object” and her mother, Kristina Louise Sawyer, aged 18, played some role in the whole dirty deed, either by failing to report it and/or covering up the incident.  It is likely that they saved the infant from a life of daily sexual abuse from her father, who, when presented with his daughter,  must have thought, “Cool.  I made my own vagina to play with!”

I am not trivializing this incident:  it is a foul crime of which we have no touchstone to guide us in fathoming the new depths of depravity we find man swimming in.  The facts are disturbing to the point of distraction.  How can one possibly wrap the mind around a concept so foreign to most individuals?  How can we hope to gain an understanding of such human failures?

Of course, why would anyone want to gain an understanding of such pathetic excuses claiming to be human?

The answer is simple:  we need to be able to understand the enemy in order to identify future disasters before they occur.  In knowledge, we have the hope of preventing another occurrence of these nightmares.

The justice system does not provide any sort of satisfactory correction to such human aberrations.  We need to develop a different system that will deal with the filth and slime that oozes into our society and cloaks itself in human form until it drops the disguise long enough to destroy some innocence in fulfilling its desires for power, pleasure or pain.  Our anguish feeds these entities.  No one crime is entirely one victim and one perpetrator.  Unfortunately, the pain and suffering is like the ripples a rock thrown in a pond creates.  The first ripples widens and flows outward, followed by a second and so on.  Eventually, that one thrown rock has covered (and affected) the entire pond.  One stone, one action:  but everything is touched.

Where do we draw the line?  If an infant, one day old, a mere twenty-four hours from the safety of the womb, if this human is not safe from evil, then how can any of us delude ourselves into thinking we stand a chance to make it through our lives unscathed?

And is that any way to live life?

Hello, I must be going?

Currently, the province of Nova Scotia is seeing an unprecedented attempt by the premier to make the politicians, at the provincial level anyway, accountable for just a few of the freebie perks they have hitherto unto now enjoyed without censure via the public.

You would think that the man had asked them to sacrifice their first born child.  The howls are at a fever pitch and are starting to blend into a solid whine.

It is unseemly and very telling.  Premier Dexter walked into a shit-storm in terms of the provincial debt, and he, of course, was casting about for reasons as to why the province is so deep in debt.  It did not take long to discover that the provincial coffers had a long-standing tradition of being raided by the people elected to public office.  Realizing the cost of  the more obvious — and galling — perks, he has cut off the parting-of-the-ways freebie allowances (each member who leaves the government used to get a $45,000 parting gift/cash-out).

He moved on to ask the Auditor General to please look into some of the spending habits/patterns that these politicians have done in the last three years, when supposedly there had been measures already put in place to stop awkward purchases of a dubious nature (translation:  purchases for the politician’s personal use).

Is anyone surprised that the AG discovered some rather blatant abuses of the cookie jar?

Worse was still to come.  After the AG’s revelations, the more porky of the political dippers tried to gloss over their transgressions:  It was purchased for the community, It was necessary for my job, It was essential to fulfill the mandate …………..  yada, yada, yada.

The fact of the matter is that Nova Scotia is one of the poorest provinces in the nation of Canada.  It is notable that a national study indicated that Nova Scotians can NOT afford to eat healthy due to the low average earnings and the high cost of food in this locale.  Our health IQ was reported as being above-average.  Essentially, we know what we should be eating, but we simply cannot afford to eat healthy and still provide the other basic necessities of life:  shelter, clothing, transportation, and so on.  And really, what’s the point of living longer if you cannot afford a roof over your head?

So, in order to haul our collective hiney out of debt, the government of the day is considering hiking the sales tax.  It is a quick and easy solution, especially if you are hauling in the type of salary the average political member of the legislature is.  Unfortunately for the common folk, this will add to the already enormous burden the average Nova Scotian is dealing with.  Everywhere you turn, there is a hike in this service, that utility, or whatever.  The hand is always out, reaching for your wallet, with no end in sight.  And these politicans have lost sight of the big picture.

Whining that your toys are being curtailed is not striking a good chord with Nova Scotians.  The two old-time political parties were rousted out of favour in a massive electoral turnout that booted the Tories out of power and ranked the Liberals at second-rate, second-place contender status.

Well, at least the Liberal Party got to be the official opposition, right?  They’re happy, right?  Nawh!  These folks are squealing too that their perks are being taken away.

The humour in this situation, so evident to the taxpayers, is that the Tories and the Liberals behave as though they had nothing to do with the pork-fest rules and regulations that created the current fiscal mess the province is facing.  Furthermore, they balk and fuss and carry on like children at every effort Premier Dexter makes to clean things up.

The message should have been plain as the writing on the wall:  the gravy train has ceased for these public servants — the kick in the politician’s caboose is hard enough that they should be shocked into some sense of decorum and decency.  For years, politicians have been “talking-the-talk”.  We’ve all heard the BS:  prudent spending and use of the public purse, no shady transactions, all of our work for you, the taxpayer.  But when a politician actually tries to “walk-the-walk” as Premier Dexter is attempting to, he is being assailed on all sides for his audacity of trying to keep his election promises.

It is as though these self-serving sycophants truly believe that the voters will develop amnesia and allow them to return the toys and presents, front and center, for their hog-style pillaging.  The voters spoke with one voice in June, 2009, and said ENOUGH.  Were they all wearing ear plugs?

The typical politician is not in the system for the common people:  he/she is in it for grabbing as much stuff as they can before they retire.  It has been this way for quite some time, so much so that the percentage of voter turnout has dropped year after year, as so many just give up on believing that their vote counts for anything anymore.  And thus, it should have shocked the elected members in Nova Scotia into at least a pretense of behaving appropriately — yet, it has not.  Was the voter reaction a mere aberration?  Will they be able to return to their hog-swilling antics at the public teat?

All of this fuss and fury at the thought of being held to some standard of honest behaviour and action.   And, when did such a request become unusual?

So again, I ask:  what happened to accountability?  And why is it seen as something extraordinary to require of these men and women living off the hard earned dollars of the electing public?  Dexter’s actions are truly seen as revolutionary, but why must this be so?  When did we abdicate the right to call these people into account for their spending of our money?

If they are truly in the political game for the public good, then the request to show everyone what they use our money for should not be a problem.  It shouldn’t even be up for debate.  If I work for you, then you want to know you are getting your money’s worth.  Why do politicians think they are above scrutiny?  Indeed, why do they behave as though they are entitled to be above scrutiny?

And when can we have our democracy back?

Threatening a prone patient in death throes to get the related loved one (me) to “shut up” and “stop complaining” lest the patient never be seen by the doctor on call (I guess they would “forget” to tell the ER doctor that the patient existed) is not something that had been made known to me at the time.  Apparently, the troll in a nurse’s outfit did not see fit to broach the subject with me.  Odd, but there you have it.

As it was, I was gone from Kansas in terms of recognizing any rules of protocol for this society.  Had my loved one passed on, it would not have mattered in the slightest if the nurses had actually done their jobs or not.  Their continued existence, their life, well, it wouldn’t be seemly for them to live if my loved one died.

And, no, I am not being dramatic nor am I spouting off.  As it was, they treated my loved one abominably and had I not been there, yes, the patient would have died.

Stabilized, I was able to return the patient to the home front.  Now under my care, I am in total control of the environment.  This is infinitely a much more tolerable state of affairs.  Calling 911 and temporarily acquiescing control and authority over someone I love more than life itself  was the hardest thing I have had to do in a long time.  Yet, it was what the person wanted, and, being one of the few human beings I actually care about, I did what they wanted.

Nurses in Canada, and nurses in Nova Scotia in particular, are over-paid harpies that need to be fired, en masse, just like Reagan did with the air traffic controllers.

Why would I say this?

Because the head is rotten and it is destroying the body.

In other words, the medical establishment here is corrupt, lazy, decaying  —  essentially worse than useless.  People are dying and it is due to the entire corporate culture that is ingrained in the medical community.  Money trumps health care.  Doctors and nurses who think outside the box and go the extra mile for patients are singled out for harassment of one form or another.  They are made miserable in a very distinct and thorough fashion in order to serve as an example to others that you will follow the rules (and people will die) because the rule-makers need to substantiate their positions.  If you prove the rules to be unnecessary obstructions, then you have threatened them on a very dear and personal level.  You will be made to pay.

Assholes hire fellow assholes and there is no cure other than removing the entire population and starting fresh.  It would be easy to re-hire the half dozen or so good nurses that exist — they are obvious stand-outs due to their work ethic.  One obvious clue is that they HAVE a work ethic.

And so it was with my recent experience with the local emergency room.  One nurse stood out from the rest.  She was, of course, exhausted, but she was there for the patients of other nurses — the woman was pleasant looking and she was the only one that wasn’t as fat as a heifer.  This was undoubtedly due to the fact that she was always on the go and didn’t sit on her fat ass like the others.

The nurse assigned was corpulent, abrasive, and so hateful that I was initially puzzled:  did I know her?  Does she know the patient?  Her negativity was palpable.  She oozed hate from every cell in her body.  I soon came to the conclusion that I did not know her but that she had an instant dislike for the patient and that she was, therefore, dangerous.  The patient is the kind of person everyone likes at first meeting.  Bubbly and positive, the patient is not prone to this kind of reaction from strangers.  Since I often encounter this behaviour,  I instantly recognize when it occurs.  Thus, I was quick to peg the nurse as an adversary who would live to regret any inaction/action she may make with regards to the emergency and its resolution/outcome.

To say that I almost came to blows with my loved one’s assigned nurse is to be polite.  If I had had a weapon, then it would have been used.  She was worse than useless in that, yes, she would have murdered my loved one.  Since my loved one was in such a dire health situation, the death would have been chalked up to the pre-existing poor health and the emergency.  I would be the only one to know it was her malicious actions that would have murdered the patient; and now, that wouldn’t do, would it?

And so we return to my starting point:  do they know when they have crossed a more vindictive and virulent psychopath?  Or does this moment of realization only occur prior to their death?

I would almost be willing to delay her inevitable shuffle off this mortal coil in order to see the realization cross her consciousness — almost.

If time was of the essence, then this delightful pleasure would have to be sacrificed for the greater good (of mine).

The conclusion I reach is that most sociopaths do not realize when they have crossed one who is truly beyond their scope, which is just fine with me.

What they don’t know will certainly hurt them.

Cos cheum nach gabh tildeah!

And really.  Does anyone believe that marriage vows count for anything anymore?  I really think that it is an antiquated process/ritual and has long out-lived its usefulness.  Are children still being taunted on the playground if their parents aren’t legally married?  Do they hear painful cries of “You’re a bastard!!” from their delightful little companions?  I doubt it.  Children are extremely cruel, but I’m sure that they are still shallow little christers that scream “You’re fat” or “You’re ugly” or some such wonderful pick-me-up.  The legality of their parents union is undoubtedly tres passe.  There is so much more that they can be hurtful about.

So the question is:  why the media infatuation with celebrities?  Well, the easy and most obvious answer is that we are all paying the media to do our whoring for us.  We, the consumers, eat this sort of fodder up as part and parcel of our daily escapism from our deadly dull lives.  How else can one explain the ridiculous amounts of money these celebrities make?  Oh, and to read that it is such hard work to work in the bubble that is Hollywood (see: http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20353114,00.html ) you can almost work up a tear or two for these delicate creatures of our own creation.

There is, however, a more sinister cabal at work here.  The whole notion of Hollywood is based on creating a world of make-believe for you and me to wallow in, lest we think too much about the world and how fucked up it truly is.  We are a democracy in theory only.  The criminal justice system is just that:  a system for the criminal.  In civil litigation, who makes money?  The lawyers.  The poor blighter that has to go up against a corporation in the legal system hasn’t a prayer of receiving anything resembling ‘justice’.  The politicians are all on the take and no one believes in the higher ideal of public service.  Those few that start out believing in the public good are rapidly tainted, turned or terminated.  We like to espouse the values of “everyone is equal” but the fact of the matter is that, NO, WE ARE NOT ALL EQUAL.  We are not born equal and we certainly are not treated equally.  The utopian liberal elite would have you believe that they push for this type of world, but they wouldn’t stand for it, especially when the vast majority of them would lose their status, power and influence.

And so it goes.  We (the unenlightened masses) pay the media to roll around in the gutter and dig up these juicy little stories.  We don’t want reality intruding in our lives.  We are too busy rushing to our ultimate demise to be bothered with making a difference and learning where our energies would be better directed.  When people complain about crooked politicians, nasty corporations and their monopolies, pharmaceutical giants and their stranglehold on our health, they don’t realize that we would have to ultimately all sacrifice our dirty little need to peek at the rich and famous and their all-too-human foibles and re-direct our energies, efforts and dollars to opening up our view to the world at large.

Have you tried to have a conversation with someone about, say, the rampant crime hitting South Africa?  IF the other person KNEW where South Africa was located, then you would have already pushed your luck to the max.  Forget about the other person having an up-to-date and informed mind-set about South Africa; our media in North America does not cover it.  The coverage of Europe, the UK, the former Eastern Bloc countries, that is all seen as ‘out-of-sight, out-of-mind’ so there is little, if any, items covered that would expand one’s knowledge of other countries or of other cultures.  Yes, we get plenty of stories about Afghanistan and Iraq, but only the stories related to the wars and bloodshed happening there.  We don’t hear about the fact that women are still terribly oppressed in Afghanistan, of the wretched conditions in which they are forced to live.  It is almost as if they don’t exist.  There are millions of women, right now, who are in absolutely horrible situations and they have no one to whom they can turn for “rescue”.  And what will they be talking about at the water-cooler tomorrow?

Can you believe Jesse screwed around on Sandra?????

Why do these things happen?

We often hear of “God’s will” and other such garbage, but I don’t think that we can lay all of this at God’s doorstep.  We were given free will, and therefore, this is man’s domain of responsibility.  If one can wrap one’s brain around the concept of an all powerful entity that is a collective of energy in the universe, then one cannot then ascribe the idiotic actions of a man to such a force.

Currently, South Africa, indeed all of Africa, is witnessing an epidemic of men raping young girls and babies under the ludicrous belief that sex with infants and virgin girls will cure all manner of sexually transmitted diseases, primarily HIV and AIDS.  If you doubt this, then please try a Google search on “baby rape” and see the plethora of articles available.  It has been going on for some time, as well.  Why the media blackout?  Not newsworthy?  Or would one be accused of some form of racism to point this hideous practice out?

I’m not sure of the real reason why no one is reporting on this, other than the same old reason why these atrocities do not receive air time over this side of the ocean:  crimes against women and children are simply not newsworthy events.  It is the same logic that sees a bank robber do life in prison and a murderer is back in society after two or three years in prison.  Men and property are worth more than women and the life they are capable of creating.

For all the squawking about end-times and the dissolution of our world, I think that we’ve long past the point of being able to make any changes for the better.  We are all on borrowed time.  The way some spend it truly boggles the mind.

I am looking forward to covering the human psyche from my perspective and this will invariably deal with the darker side of our nature:  yes, that means violence in all its forms.

Coming from a violent background in terms of environment and genetics, I have had the fortunate viewpoint of a psychopath, without having been allowed to give full freedom to those neat little psychopathic tendencies.  It has been a long and strange journey for me, but now, past the forty year mark, I came *very late* to the conclusion that I am, indeed, a psychopath.  Were it not for the fervent and tireless efforts of my mother, it is a statement of fact that my life,  and the lives of those who interacted with me, would have been very, very different.

It is with a sense of wry irony that I can recall conversations she and I have had over the years, and of her non-stop efforts to make me less of what is very lethal when combined with intellect (psychopathic traits + intelligence).

We would often discuss a situation at work where I would be having the most horrendous time in wrapping my head around the actions of others, and she would explain why I had to react differently than the way I wanted to.  So often I would say, “But Mom, I don’t give a shit what other people think/like/want.”  And she would sigh, and say, “Yes, but you have to *pretend* that you do, dear.”