Yesterday, I went to the studios of Inside Edition to be interviewed. People want to know what it feels like to have been photographed by a serial killer. How does it feel know that my life could have easily ended in June of 1979 along with the other victims? Inquiring minds also want to know how I feel about Rodney Alcala.
Do a search on “stuck by lightning twice” and you will discover that the odds of being struck by lightning once are 1/3000. The odds of being struck twice are 1/9,000,000. Since there are 300,000,000 people in America this unusual event has happened.
What does a person who was nearly struck by lightning once, and then actually struck 23 years later say about the near miss in the distant past?
An Ohio man Larry Reynolds, was actually struck by lightning twice and he says he feels “glad to be alive!” (How surprising is that?) I too feel glad to be alive. But also feel the need to say genug* and to try to get more justice for the real victims.
Justice for the victims means doing something to reduce the dangerousness of known violent psychopaths.
It is not enough to dispose of or imprison Alcala, we must change the system that enables psychopaths to strike over and over again.
At the time Alcala photographed me he had already been convicted of two violent crimes**. When he was 24, Alcala kidnapped, sexually assaulted and tried to kill an 8 year old girl, hitting her over the head with a pipe. He escaped and was a fugitive for two years before he was arrested in Concord, N.H., living under the assumed name of “John Berger.” He was arrested in August, 1971 after someone saw his picture on a wanted poster.
He also assaulted a 15 year old girl he lured in the guise of wanting to take her picture.
After these two incidents, Alcala killed at least 5.
There is no doubt in 2010 that Alcala is a psychopath. In the 1970s we didn’t have any reliable method for diagnosing psychopathy, but today we do. The PCL-R when administered by trained professionals can diagnose psychopathy with excellent reliability.
I therefore propose that all individuals convicted of violent or sexual assault be evaluated with the PCL-R and thoroughly assessed by trained professionals not hired by the prosecution or defense, prior to sentencing. The purpose of this assessment would be to inform the judge and jury of the presence of psychopathy and other risk factors that indicate the offender will do the same thing or worse again.
Juries and judges should be able to sentence an offender to life-time supervision. We need to train forensic professionals to do the job of monitoring these individuals and we need to watch psychopaths closely if they are released into society. We should stop simply turning convicted psychopaths over to their families who haven’t the slightest idea what to do with them (more on that next week).
I made the above recommendation to Paul Boyd of Inside Edition. He impressed me as a real reporter who was interested in the issues; someone who takes the ethical implications of his job seriously. I just hope his editors give him the freedom to tell this story.
Please everyone get beyond the silliness of “OMG what does it feel like to be struck by lightning twice?” and instead tackle the real question of what to do about sociopaths/psychopaths.
At the end of March, I spoke with a reporter from People Magazine for over an hour and am sorry that I failed to convince him to do a real story and exercise real journalism- or maybe the tabloid editors just wouldn’t publish the real story. However, if you want to see pictures, I am in this weeks’ issue “OMG”!
*a Yiddish word that means ENOUGH, pronounced ganoog
**for more see http://www.ocregister.com/news/alcala-236499-phase-girl.html?pic=4
Dr Leedom
Your survival is a blessing, your mission clear as day, three points stand out for me:
all individuals convicted of violent or sexual assault be evaluated with the PCL-R
sentence an offender to life-time supervision
We should stop simply turning convicted psychopaths over to their families who haven’t the slightest idea what to do with them
Yes absolutely! genug is genug!
Dear Liane,
Many of us here have complained how our friends or family don’t “get it” when we tell them about the dangerousness of the psychopaths we have or are dealing with. They just “don’t believe” anyone except the occasional Ted Bundy or other serial killer could be like that, and besides, THEY would never meet a real serial killer/psychopath. I think even reporters and editors of magazines, especially like “People,” are not really focused on the educational part of the reporting but more on the entertainment value of the reporting. I think they are like paper versions of the TV shows of “Dr. Phil,” if that makes any sense.
I do think that some version of “vetting” violent offenders is necessary as such a high percentage of violent crime is committed by psychopaths that it would lower the crime rate tremendously if they were incarcerated or supervised for life.
Thank you for doing your best to use your “15 minutes of fame” as a “teaching moment.” Sometimes those teaching moments come back to bear fruit somewhere down the line even if not immediately.
I think you were protected by the hand of God from that lightening strike with Alcala.
Liane, to your knowledge has any other photo put up been recognized (admitted to?) by other women?
Liane:
I saw your Inside Edition piece! DAMN….the media….
Let’s sensationalize it and NOT TEACH anything…..WHY couldn’t they have taken advantage of the fact YOU ARE A Victim AND A DR? YOU HAVE INFO TO SHARE….(related to this guy)…..will that show up in another piece AFTER the WOW of his sentence has subsided?
YOU looked great….BUT they did a terrible job of telling a story…INCOMPLETE at best…..
NOT one mention of your ‘postition’ and NOT one mention of a personality disorder……..
BUMMER!!!!
How about the NEWS shows? AM shows…..?? I’m sure your not done yet…….huh?
Keep talking girl……
Oxy and Erin,
If you look at the People Magazine piece you will see how many of the photographed people have been identified. I am worried about male vicitims also.
The coverage has thus far been disappointing. I am going to get a tape of the Inside Edition piece and do a video blog, placing it on Youtube with the real story.
As a university professor, I am familiar with the difficulty in reaching people with the information they need to know. We have a cultural problem with people not reading, not looking deeper. The media helps perpetuate the problem by giving the false impression they are covering a story. People are used to superficial, sound bite discussions.
Dr Leedom – you are right about people not knowing what they need to know and not doing their own research. These days they depend on the media, which is largely driven by corporate interests and not known for either indepth or impartial investigation on important subjects.
I think your blog idea for Youtube is a great one – as a professor you will be taken seriously as a reliable source for information.
I wondered if you had heard of CAPP? Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality. Some interesting research is happening at Glasgow University – unfortunately the researchers acknowledge their model is only academic at the moment, but in the future they hope it will be used to assess ‘dangerousness’ in violent offenders.
Here is a link to the basic model – I like the way they have kept the language simple and considered more domains than other researchers :
http://www.gcu.ac.uk/capp/model/index.html
I would be interested to see your thoughts and those of other LF authors about this model – whether you agree with it or not and what possible functions you see for it with regard to mandatory screening of violent and sexual offenders.
The media doesn’t get it, the courts don’t get it, our friends don’t get it….
Sociopaths are dangerous!
Rodney Alcala and many, many other sociopaths are processed through our legal system without identifying their disorder and then given the benefit of the doubt in the form of a light sentence and then sent back to society primed for recidivism.
And, why is the media so reluctant to call a spade a spade? It’s like having an 800-pound gorilla in the living room and no one acknolwedges he’s there. Hello???
Thank God you weren’t struck by lightning, Dr. Leedom. Thank God.
My feeling is that the media is about entertainment and sensationalism, period. Ratings, advertising revenue, and the whole shebang.
I have to say that a particular piece on Dateline ID (which I never watched and just happened to stumble upon) was covering the story of Barbara Bentley’s escape from her ex-husband. “Dancing with the Devil” is her publication, and it sparked fear and absolute horror for me – my eldest son was perpetrating the same crimes, just as her ex-husband was.
Try talking to any agency about physical evidence that will prove that a family member is forging military documents and using those documents to garner funding and resources, and see what happens! Even law enforcement agencies will refuse to pursue these spaths and hold them accountable for the millions that they extrude from The System. The emotional and physical damage isn’t even addressed – even the legal system revolves around money.
And, the larceny continues unabated. Sheeesh.
Oh, and by the way……I would like to ask what might be a couple of stupid questions:
Have there always been such a percentage of sociopaths, or is it a growing epidemic?
Has anyone experienced damage to their spiritual beliefs as a result of their encounters?
Dear Buttons,
Actually, just a guess now, and my opinion I would think that the genetic material that is part of the psychopathic personality is spreading fairly rapidly…as, families are becoming smaller in the middle classes, but psychopaths are spreading their seed far and wide. Dr. Leedom I thinnk, but it was in an article here on LF said in England in “public housing” that 25 % of the babies are sired by psychopaths.
I know a young man who is psychopathic and he has 9 children by multiple women, and he is not yet 35, so he is more likely to produce more psychopathic offsrping that Joe Nice who with his wife will have 2.1 children with two loving parents.
My own P sperm donor produced 4 children, one of which is a psychopath after his own father, but the other three of us seem more normal, even though two of the other three were actually raised by the P, but my son is a P, so I know that my p-sperm donor produced 25% of his offspring as Ps, and of the 7 grandchildren at least one is a psychopath and In prison, the others are still much younger than my children and I have contact with them beyond knowing how many there are and approximate ages.
So I would think, based on the above that yes, the P percentage rate is probably rising slightly due to the lowering of the number of children of those “stable” families and the rise in teen pregnancies (though it has dropped from the ultimate high a decade ago) and in single-parent-teen situations. But, that’s just opinion which is like noses, each of us has one! Or two! LOL