My memory of the murders (Lost Memories of a Sociopathic Killer) my father committed came back to me on a Thursday. On Saturday morning I called information for retired homicide detective Dan Nazerchuk's home phone number. He was the lead investigator that helped convict my father of murder 17 years earlier. I was nervous about it but knew it was the right thing to do. My biggest fear was that news of this might get out and affect my family and career. I'm married with a beautiful daughter and heavily involved with the community and her school. I also own a small business and most people & associates around me knew nothing of my father. It is hard to explain the mixed emotions that …
LETTERS TO LOVEFRAUD: I have looked into the eyes of Satan
Editor's note: A Lovefraud reader, we'll call him Jeff, sent the following e-mail to tell his story. In 1981, I met the woman who later became my wife when we worked together in a furniture factory. She was 44 and married and I was a 30-year-old single "Christian." What started out as a frequently adversarial interaction became a friendship within a year, and by 1982, she was telling me how horrid her marriage was because her husband was so loveless and mistreated her. White knight that I thought I was, I let my sympathy turn into action and eventually was convinced I loved her, which led to her inviting me to her home on an evening when her youngest daughter and husband were gone. It now …
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Lovefraud Extra: Colombian victims of corporate sociopaths riot in the thousands
Many have conjectured that the recent financial didaster in the US is due to corporate sociopaths. I do not know enough about economics to agree or disagree with that. But consider a society where drug cartels run by sociopaths have a strangle hold over the government. That appears to be the case in Colombia. To watch an amazing video of tens of thousands of people posted by the UK Guardian click on this text. The company, DRFE was apparently a money laundering front for a drug cartel. According to the Associated Press "A total of 600 million pesos ($270 million) is believed to have been lost by the investment company "Dinero Rapido Facil Efectivo," or "Easy Money Fast Cash" in English." …
Lovefraud Extra: Colombian victims of corporate sociopaths riot in the thousandsRead More
A ‘female’-type psychopathy?
We know only too well that by far the majority of psychopaths are men. Or at least we think we know that. Could it be that the criteria used to identify psychopaths are biased towards men? After all Hare began his work in male prison. Think about it. While behaving and being the way the PCL-R without doubt earns one the label psychopath, this is simply a list of symptoms. It says nothing about the underlying dynamics. If psychopathy is life centered on the principle of power (as opposed to love) and if it is therefore characterised by what Liane Leedom nicely calls 'warped empathy', then wouldn't you expect there to be more or less the same number of woman as men psychopaths? And wouldn't …
Sadism and warped empathy in sociopaths
Many who have been hurt by sociopaths develop a general distrust of others. This distrust is understandable given how difficult it often is to tell if another person is a sociopath. However, going through life with distrust is not a pleasant way to live. Victims naturally then want to know in detail what sociopaths are about so they can identify the untrustables, and go back to trusting everyone else. One of the purposes of this website is to describe sociopaths and teach people to identify them. Sociopaths are pathological liars who like to talk as experts on many topics. They manipulate others and generally have a high opinion of themselves. They also lack remorse for their actions and …
A Call for Help Denied
The Call - December 12, 1987 I came home in the late afternoon one day and put the news on before going to work. We had a sunken living room and I was standing in the middle of the room when I saw the report. I had been watching the news very closely lately (with good reason). I was looking for news about a recent murder”¦but I wasn't ready for this. It was one of the local news stations. I immediately recognized the artist sketch of the suspected murderer. It was my father. They had just identified the body of a missing woman and they described the suspect. They had found her body three days earlier, in the same field where two bodies were found just days before. My father was re …
The New Yorker writes about researchers’ struggle to study psychopaths
Two Lovefraud readers brought an article in the latest issue of The New Yorker magazine to my attention. It's entitled Suffering Souls—the search for the roots of psychopathy, by John Seabrook. The article starts off describing the work of a researcher, Dr. Kent Kiehl, who is using an fMRI machine to study the brains of prisoners in the Western New Mexico Correctional Facility, searching for physical indications of psychopathy. The author provides a brief history of the evolution of scientific understanding about this personality disorder, and describes today's conflicting opinions about it. Seabrook reviewed the literature and interviewed experts, including Dr. Robert Hare. All in all, t …
The New Yorker writes about researchers’ struggle to study psychopathsRead More
When Mom or her partner is a sociopath
It seems obvious that sociopaths make lousy parents and step parents. But the courts have not always seen it that way. One father trying to protect his daughter from a sociopathic mother was asked by a mental health professional, "So she's a liar does that make her a bad mother?" Furthermore, the texbook I use to teach forensic psychology says that professionals who evaluate parents in custody disputes "should avoid diagnostic labels" and "accentate the postitives." There seems to be a lack of clarity as to what makes an adequate parent, a good parent and a bad parent. The court also does not recognize that the biologic children of sociopaths may have special developmental needs if they …
The getting in is easy, why’s the getting out so hard?
If it's easy getting into a relationship with an exploiter, getting out isn't always so simple. What makes the getting out so difficult? In retrospect (if we're lucky enough to say “in retrospect”) it seems like it should have been a no-brainer. In truth there are many reasons it can be hard to leave a destructive relationship and destructive person. I've addressed several of them in previous posts, and the LoveFraud community in general has addressed this theme comprehensively. But here I'd like to consider a less-appreciated factor. I regard it as the factor of habituation. Optimally the best time to end a relationship with an exploiter is the very first signal you get that something i …
The getting in is easy, why’s the getting out so hard?Read More
Captive Audience for a Murderer
When my father was released from prison in 1987 I had no idea what he was about to do. Not even close. I wanted to believe that he might be successful again, but deep down I knew the truth. My father had never really been successful, it was all a lie. He had always been a conman. But the truth can be a tricky thing in certain circumstances and my denial of that simple fact was about to lead me into 17 months as a witness to my father's killing spree that would leave four people dead. For years I had been riddled with guilt, shame, physical illnesses and repressed memories as a result of what I witnessed and learned during those 17 months. Funny thing about it today is I'm still not sure …