Disordered Persons in the News: The Crumbleys

[Redwald]

Wherever there are true life accounts of crime and violence, I invariably look for evidence of disorders among the perpetrators and frequently find them: psychopathy especially, but other disorders too. Eric Harris for instance, the prime mover in the Columbine school shootings along with his sidekick Dylan Klebold, was seen as a textbook psychopath despite his age. So how about Ethan Crumbley, the perpetrator of last month’s Oxford school shootings? And how about his parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, who undoubtedly made him what he is, whether genetically or by the way they raised him?

The question of “nature versus nurture” has always been an ongoing debate. On the “nurture” side,. when offspring do something terrible, there are those who would say “It’s all the fault of the parents. The child was raised wrong.” And indeed, too many children are not taught the values of responsible citizens, or do not have responsible behaviors modeled to them by their parents. In addition, many children are neglected or outright abused by their parents. They will only grow up “centered” if they’re lucky. Some abused children are conditioned to become lifelong victims. Some on the other hand store up rage at their childhood treatment, and vent it on the world at large when they grow up.

But none of that means an offspring’s antisocial behavior is necessarily the parents’ fault. On the “nature” side, some children are born monsters from the start, regardless of their hapless parents’ efforts to raise them. I recall for instance a nice lady who used to post on this site whose son was clearly a psychopath. Apart from his lesser misdeeds, he was shopped to the cops for a drug offense by a girl to whom he bore a grudge. He avenged it by taking her out into the wilds and shooting her. He served a sentence for murder, but unfortunately was eventually paroled. I can only sympathize with his poor mother, who always feared he would kill her too on some whim or other, like “not giving him money” when he demanded it. I hope this good lady is still alive and safe. It must be both terrifying and mortifying o know one has quite unwittingly given birth to a monster and let it loose upon the world.

These psychopaths are the product of Nature, but does that mean they inherited their disorder from their parents? Not necessarily. It’s possible that they’re mere mutants, the way any genetic accident can inflict a disorder on a child. More likely psychopathy and similar disorders are an atavism, a “throwback” to previous generations. In this lady’s case I know of nothing wrong with her husband either, who had the bad luck to die in an aviation accident. Perhaps their son inherited bad genes from q prior generation. Heredity, after all, is a crapshoot, where parents can be lucky in their offspring or get nasty surprises.

However, in all too many cases we do find that at least one parent is disordered, and has fathered or mothered a disordered child. Unfortunately the child of such a parent is likely to be made worse than he or she might otherwise have been by abusive treatment from the disordered parent, getting “double whammy.” A coldhearted psychopath is bad enough, but may avoid antisocial behaviors out of rational self-interest, if nothing else. A psychopath who has been abused, taught that such behavior is “normal” and filled with anger on account of it is a raging threat to anyone around. Frequently the disordered offspring is a product of both nature and (bad) nurture.

So where does the killer Ethan Crumbley belong in this constellation of disordered people? Who and what made him what he is? It’s hard to say with certainty, or what specific disorders might be involved. However, it is clear that there are problems throughout the entire Crumbley family.

To start with, anyone who would commit such a heinous act should automatically be suspected, prima facie, of being a psychopath with no regard for human life, if not of some other disorder.

How about his mental state at the time? Was this reflected in what he wrote and drew on the paper discovered by a teacher? Quoting from the Associated Press:

“Tuesday, Nov. 30: A teacher finds a note on Ethan’s desk that alarms her enough to take a photo, the prosecutor says. It includes a drawing of a handgun and the words: “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.” Also depicted is a bullet with the words “blood everywhere” above a person who appears to have been shot twice and is bleeding. A laughing emoji is drawn below the figure. The note also says “my life is useless” and “the world is dead.” The teacher reports the information to school counselors and the dean.”

What state of mind does this reflect, and what could be its cause? Some of the words admittedly suggest a state of despair (“my life is useless” and “the world is dead”), while others suggest powerlessness. So this could be read as a pathetic plea for help from a boy who has been abused, whether by parents or bullying and rejection in school, with a natural wish for violent and bloody revenge on those who were ruining his life.

But was this necessarily the case? Was his life so hopeless, and had anybody made it so? I’m not so sure. Instead, this may express a form of sheer nihilism that can be found among some psychopaths. It is all too easy to think of psychopaths as predators who always have in mind their own self-gratification, albeit at the expense of others. But “self-gratification” does not always imply “self-preservation.” The peculiar nature of the psychopathic mind, with its profound lack of “feeling” about anything at all, sometimes means that “everything is meaningless” to the psychopath, including even his or her own existence. We’ve all heard of psychopathic criminals who would rather commit violent acts resulting in the needless loss of their own lives, preferring to go out in a “blaze of glory,” apparently just for the thrill of mass destruction they need to relieve their rage and frustration at their own chronic, intolerable boredom. Was is something like this, rather than “maltreatment by the world,” that drove Ethan Crumbley’s murderous rampage?

Than too, there was his response after this note was discovered and he was taken to a school counselor. We read (again from the Associated Press):

“A counselor removes Ethan from the classroom and takes him to the office with his backpack. The counselor obtains the drawing, but Ethan has already scratched out portions. He says the drawing is part of a video game he is designing and that he wants a career as a video game designer, the superintendent says.

The parents are summoned to the school for a meeting that occurs around 10 a.m. While the school tries to reach them, Ethan remains in the office for an hour-and-a-half as counselors continue to observe and speak with him, Throne says. Ethan expresses concern about missing homework assignments and asks for his science homework, which he works on while waiting. The counselors do not believe he will harm others based on his behavior, demeanor and responses, according to the superintendent.

The parents arrive and are shown the note. The counselors ask Ethan about his potential for self-harm or harming others. They again conclude he is not a risk due to his answers, which are affirmed by the parents.”

What I find noteworthy here is Ethan’s ability to fool the counselors into believing there is “nothing much wrong” with him, concealing the fact that he has already, the previous evening, recorded a video in which he discusses shooting students. If he were truly a “troubled teen” seeking help, you’d think he would be agitated and perhaps take the opportunity to confess some of his problems to the counselor. Instead, his deception takes two forms. First there was his calm demeanor on being called to the office, carrying on with his homework as though there were “nothing wrong.” This calmness and lack of fear reaction under pressure is common to psychopaths.

There was also his ability to lie amoothly and convincingly to the counselor that his bloodthirstly drawings were nothing but part of a “video game” he was designing. Again, this sllck persuasiveness and ability to “pull the wool over people’s eyes” is a psychopathic trait–while all the time he had in his backpack, right under their noses, the weapon with which he would shortly kill four students and wound others.

None of this is sufficient to diagnose him conclusivelh as a psychopath, but it is nevetheless suggestive.

Bit what of his parents, James and Jennifer, and what if anything did they contribute to making Ethan what he is, whether genetically or by way of upbringing? Did they, for instance, abuse him?

That’s hard to know, but it is clear that they neglected him at times. Specifically, a neighbor has said that when he was young they frequently left him home alone for hours while they went out bar-hopping.

I do want to make it clear that I am NOT condemning parents in general for leaving children home alone. It all depends on circumstances, the age and capabilities of the child, and other factors. On the contrary, there is far too much government persecution these days of parents simply allowing their children to play outside unsupervised. The law should never be used to indulge interfering busybodies on a power trip. Sadly, too many children today have lost the freedom to explore the world on their own that I enjoyed as a boy. A classic Daily Mail article is entitled How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Four Generations
.

As for staying home, my own parents would routinely leave me home alone when I was no older than eight, perhaps younger, while they attended religious meetings. It was never a problem. We lived in a safe neighborhood, as most neighborhoods were; they were gone for two hours at most, usually less. and it never worried me. I knew they cared for me; I was never afraid; I knew when they’d be back; and since I was always an avid reader, I could always entertain myself and never felt lonely.

However, in Ethan’s case he was left alone for hours without knowing when his parents would be back, and unable to contact them by phone. He was plainly in distress, repeatedly forced to go to a neighbor for reassurance and comfort. That’s something my own parents would never have done to me. What this neglect did to him, anyone can guess, though it hardly seems adequate to turn a child into a mass murderer. However, if there is one vice that characterizes the Crumbley parents, it is IRRESPONSIBILITY, and this was irresponsible behavior

A few years later, they were irresponsible in giving him a gun and leaving him access to it. Again, this is like the “home alone” issue. Can the child handle a gun responsibly? Generations of fathers have given guns to their teenage sons–and daughters too–taught them gun safety, taking them hunting, target shooting or whatever, and relatively few accidents have happened. Certainly only a minuscule minority of such children became insane mass murderers. The problem is not with “guns”; it’s with defective people, a problem that needs to be identified and addressed. Ethan Crumbley was not fit, not responsible enough to be in possession of a gun.

What’s more, his parents knew it, or anyway suspected it. Suppose we had given our son a gun for Christmas and we were normal, stable people. Then we heard there’s an ongoing massacre at his school. Why should we suspect our son was the shooter? Wouldn’t we be concerned instead for his own safety and that of others at the hands of some unknown maniac? This was not the Crumbleys’ reaction. Again from the Associated Press:

“About 12:51 p.m., Ethan emerges from a bathroom with the gun his father bought four days before. He fires at students in the hallway, killing four and wounding six students and one teacher. Deputies capture him within minutes of the shooting. When news of an active shooter becomes public, Jennifer Crumbley texts her son at 1:22 p.m.: “Ethan don’t do it.” Fifteen minutes later, at 1:37 p.m., James Crumbley calls 911 to report that a gun was missing from his house and he believes his son may be the shooter. The gun had been kept unlocked in a drawer in the parents’ bedroom,..”

That makes it clear that both of these parents KNEW their own son could be dangerous. Yet they did nothing when their son was called to a school counselcor after his alarming drawings and writings were discovered, refusing to take him home as requested. and obviously did not bother to check whether the gun was still in its place at home. They simply shrugged their shoulders and went back to work. Here they were grossly irresponsible, failing to take action where action was sorely needed.

An incidenr the previous day is also instructive about their moral values, Jennifer’s at least. Ethan had been caught using his cellphone in class to search the Web for sources of ammunition, and was taken to see a counselor. To be fair to the school, who accepted his explanation that his family was keen on shooting sports, this only took on significance in the light of the subsequent tragedy. What I found significant was the comment his mother texted afterwards: “Lol, I’m not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught.” Admittedly there are times we all have to learn “not to get caught,” and using a cellphone in class is the most venial of offenses. In spite of that, in the broader field of life at large, this seems a disturbingly immoral lesson for parents to be teaching their children: “You can do anything you want as long as you make sure you can get away with it.” It seems typical of the Crumbleys’ attitude.

This couple manifested their irresponsibity after the shooting when, faced with possible prosecution, their reaction was to RUN AWAY rather than face the music. Heaven knows whether they expected to escape, to another country perhaps. I don’t think they stood a chance, so they were stupid as well. But their behavior speaks for itself.

And in a final act of uncaringness, they chose to appoint high-priced lawyers to defend themselves while leaving their financially indigent son to the mercy of a public defender, not known for being the best of advocates. He might be a monster, but he is their son, and they threw him under the bus while doing their best to take care of themselves.

Is there such a thing as “Irresponsible Personality Disorder,” or “IPD”? If there isn’t, perhaps there should be! However, it is clear that “IPD” is a syndrome that can result from other disorders, including but not limited to psychopathy and narcissism, where the coldly uncaring abuser pays no regard to the rights or wellbeing of others. So what are James and Jennifer Crumbley like as individuals?

One spokeswoman on this topic has been James Crumbley’s ex-girlfriend Michelle Cobb, with whom he had a son a couple of decades ago. Quoting the Daily Mail, Michelle called him bluntly “a piece of shit.” He abandoned her and their son and she had the devil of a job trying to get any financial child support out of him: yet one more example of irresponsibility. Michelle also added that he abandoned another ex-girlfriend in Florida with whom he had a daughter. Apart from his irresponsibility, this promiscuity could possibly be psychopathic behavior.

But Michelle reserved some of her harshest criticism for James’s wife Jennifer, whom she described as a “monster.” Quote: “She could do no wrong and she was right about everything. I mean, this is exactly the kind of attitude she has. Like, she, literally, thought she was better than everyone.” There are hints here that Jennifer could well be a narcissist. Among other things, Michelle believed that Ethan had been “spoiled,” and despite the Crumbleys’ neglect of him in some ways, there is no reason to suppose they treated him badly enough to make his life miserable. After all, he did get a nice shiny new gun for Christmas, and was delighted with what he called his “new beauty.”

We normally expect that if there’s disordered person in the family, one or more other members may be victims. But in the Crumbley family it appears there were no real “victims.” Two disordered people, James and Jennifer, were able to live together in sufficient harmony to raise their son Ethan for fifteen years at least. They’re like a family of vampires, where two vampires mated to give birth to and raise a vampire cub, a mass murderer who was worse than either of them. Whether or not it’s unusual, it certainly happens. These monsters walk among us, sometimes whole families of them. In the case of the Crumbleys, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Ethan’s disorder was genetically inherited from one or both of his parents.

I hope I’ll be forgiven for concluding with a bad parody of Edward Lear:

Far too nigh, far too nigh
Are the lands where the Crumbleys live.
Their heads are sick and their tales a lie,
And their morals as void as a sieve.

[polestar]

Hi Redwald – your analysis of the whole situation was very insightful. But as they say, hindsight is always 20/20 “. From watching Donna’s You Tubes, she seems to be putting more emphasis on genetics as one of the main reasons for sociopathic behavior. Another issue to consider is that upon being confronted with sociopaths, if a person has not been educated to see the signs, they will generally miss them because we have what I believe is called a “ normalcy bias “. I think what is key is for information about character disorders and sociopathy to be taught more and more wherever and whenever possible. We also need to be aware and protective of the younger ones. Yet I totally agree with you about the sad state of affairs today in which children cannot have the same degree of freedom that children used to have. It just is not safe to let’s kids roam around anymore. It’s quite a tragedy. My neighbor told me about when he was young ( referring to your description of your freedoms as a child ) , and he didn’t live in the city but by a river, and his parents would just tell him and his siblings to be back for dinner. He said he had the happiest childhood, running around freely and building forts and stuff like that. So the restrictions that are put on youth today, plus all the violence they are continually exposed to on videos and video games etc. desensitizes them and is part of the “ nurture “ argument of the causes of psychopathology. But apart from the nature/nurture causes of these problematic people, I would like to say that though we can’t be ignorant, on the other hand, we also need to put our attention on the fact that there are so many people of all ages who are growing, loving and becoming more and more noble. I think it behooves us to recognize all the goodness in so many, no matter how these sick people try to darken our perspective.
Thanks for your thoughtful and informative post.
Blessings

[Donna Andersen]

Hi Redwald! Thank you for your thorough analysis.

The former Lovefraud contributor with the psychopathic son was OxDrover. I do remember her saying that there were multiple disordered individuals in her family, including one she called “Uncle Monster.” So even though she did not inherit the disorder, her son did.

Interestingly, she also saw no signs of disorder until her son was about 11. Before that he was a delightful child. This can happen with psychopathy. Often children as young as 3 or 4 exhibit symptoms, particularly lying, but sometimes they don’t. Then puberty starts, and the symptoms either emerge or get worse.

It does sound like the Crumbleys are disordered. I can add one comment to your analysis – Ethan has an older half-brother — same father, different mother. The brother was living with the family until about a year ago. Then he left to live with his mother in Florida, citing some problems with Jennifer Crumbley. He also said he saw no indications of problems with Ethan, calling him a “normal kid.”

To me it does sound like Ethan inherited genes of disorder, plus got terrible parenting. In other words, the recipe for another psychopath.

[Redwald]

Hi Donna,

Yes, I remember “Oxy”! Actually I “”met” her on the Web some time before I came here, in some very small chat group. If I remember correctly, she had posted in the past on a site of Sam Vaknin’s, the “narcissist extraordinaire,” and there was some discussion about him. I’d visited his site myself, and while it has helped some people, I was not impressed with the way it was run. Neither, I think, was Oxy. I must say in all honesty that yours is the best and healthiest of such sites that I’ve seen. I’d forgotten about Oxy’s monster relatives, so thank you for reminding me.

Yes, it’s well to remember that while psychopaths have the same underlying disorder, with respect to other human traits they can be as different as chalk and cheese, including their development. It’s interesting that some don’t show their symptoms until their teens. It does seem likely that puberty is the trigger. After all, the teens are the time when an independent and frequently rebellious personality starts to assert itself in most humans.

But I also wonder whether some psychopaths, the smarter ones, are simply successful at learning to hide their symptoms. Adopting a fake “benign” personality is a classic skill of psychopaths. Could some children learn to hide this even from their parents, at a tender age? Unfortunately it’s the intelligent ones who are often most dangerous, because they’re so clever at fooling people and getting away with it–especially those “corporate psychopaths” who wreak such widespread havoc in society. How many poor victims ruined by the Enron scandal were driven to suicide, I wonder?

If Oxy’s son didn’t show any symptoms until he was 11, that reminds me of a little boy named John, who became infamous as an adult. Little John did have an unusual upbringing. He was raised in Yorkshire, England, as the only child of a strictly religious family who believed the “outside world” was evil, and allowed him very little social contact as a child. He did go to school, however. He was bright, and as a child he had all the appearance of a little angel to his parents, perfectly behaved in their eyes. He won a scholarship, sang in a cathedral choir, and seemed to have a sincere interest in religion.

Apparently it wasn’t until his early twenties that he embarked on his long career of crime, starting with a car loan scam to defraud finance companies. But his parents said years later that he was never any trouble while he was living at home. This wasn’t quite true, since they had to bail him out and pay restitution after the police got onto that first scheme of his. So there were certain things his parents chose to forget, or were in denial about. No parent wants to think they’ve raised a criminal. Apart from that, reportedly even in school John was fond of playing nasty little “sociopathic” tricks on some of his classmates, which he got away with. So he was always clever at not getting caught, even as a boy, and none of this got back to his parents’ ears.

As an adult, he did get caught several times. But after seeing the inside of a prison once too often, he resolved never to get caught again, and devised the most diabolical means of doing so. It wasn’t until later that the law caught up with his most monstrous deeds, and then only because he was reckless or desperate or both, as if he thought he could get away with anything at all. Unfortunately that story is too long to tell right now…

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