Gasoline and Fire Psychopathic Relationships and Last Minute Redemption

By Ox Drover

Most of us know that when you combine gasoline and fire there is not only a larger fire, but an explosive one. Our here in the boondocks we have occasion to burn brush piles or even trash sometimes and anyone except some pure idiot knows you never use gasoline as an accelerant for burning anything, you use diesel. Diesel fuel is more akin to what they call fuel oil up north and they fuel their household heaters with it.  It ignites slowly without a lot of vapor and burns steadily, not causing an explosion.

Gasoline on the other hand, starts to vaporize as soon as it is poured out and when you strike a match to it, that vapor cloud explodes into a huge fireball, engulfing anything in the area. As a nurse I have taken care of many patients who were unwise enough to use gasoline as an accelerant to start a fire. Many of those people received life threatening and extremely painful injuries; some patients died.

In a relationship where there are two people who are both personality disordered, there is always the potential for a lethal explosion caused when the one of the participants acts like the gasoline and vaporizes a cloud of toxic and very volatile gas, and the other personality-disordered of the pair strikes the match. The explosion may engulf one or both of the parties, like a murder-suicide, or it may involve the deaths of someone else outside of the couple when one of the couple uses the other to effect a murder-for-hire, a murder-for-love, or some other highly explosive situation.

One example of a situation where a male psychopath looked for and planned for a relationship with a female partner who was high enough  in psychopathic traits that she would go along with his plan to kill for money. This lethal combination came together in the relationship of Teresa Lewis and Matthew Shallenberger.

Teresa Lewis is scheduled to die in by lethal injection this coming Thursday in the first female execution in Virginia in many years.

Read: In Virginia, a woman on the verge of execution, on Time.com.

Shallenberger, who was given life without parole for being the trigger man, committed suicide after admitting the only reason he slept with Lewis was to get her to give him the money from the insurance obtained by killing her husband and step son. The other killer involved in the double murder also received life without parole for his part.

The judge who sentenced Lewis called her “evil’ and “the head of the serpent.” But like many psychopaths facing the prospect of death at the hands of the state, Teresa found not only Jesus, but a purpose in life, helping others.  (Tongue-in —cheek, I say.)  I am sure this is because of the redemptive power of our state correctional institutions on redeeming psychopaths. It does seem that many of them do find a semblance of redemption and remorse in the final hours before execution that is not afforded them when they are given only life sentences.

Teresa’s appeal for clemency was rejected. Read Virginia governor declines to stay woman’s execution on Time.com.