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
Buttons,
It’s hard to help others with their problems because all I do is try and sort through my own, not seemingly doing a great job of it either.
Dear BlueJay,
Right now YOU are the one who most deserves your compassion and love and help, it is a time to take care of yourself FIRST! Then you SMALL kids and everyone else comes after that….WAY after! (((hugs))))
Buttons,
You can’t get ahead financially because of all the stuff they pull. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that I would end up the way I have. Day-to-day existence is the way for me now. Conversations with them go round-and-round, like a merry-go-round, rarely reaching a destination. They don’t give you the answers you deserve, making everything harder than it has to be. Gotta do P.I. work over-and-over again. Ridiculous! I’ve got to go prepare dinner. Take care. Appreciate your comments.
Oxdrover –
Thanks. I am crying right now. Have to stop it or it will get out of hand. I probably am overtired, having worked a double shift yesterday. That’s why I am more emotional than usual.
Dear Bluejay,
Are you a nurse? Funny thing there are so many people here who are medical personnel, nurses, doctors, therapists, or others in the helping professions.
GET SOME REST and that’s an order!!!!! Take care of you!!! It is really really important, more important than money when you get run down because you will get sick if you don’t take care of yourself. I know, I made myself totally sick by not taking care of myself! Now don’t make me get my skillet out and chase you down to make you get some rest! Way too muich effort! Just go do it! ((((Hugs))))) and my prayers!
OxDrover –
When I started college (1983), I studied nursing, but had panic attacks (probably because of upbringing, also separating from my twin sister for the first time), so got out of it. I work for a CSB, being employed in a group home setting, working with intellectually challenged (MR) adults, liking the people (clients) that I work with. It’s not a dream job, but it helps to go to work, getting away from my problems.
OxDrover –
When I was in college, I started having panic attacks, not having experienced them before. I didn’t go for counseling, thinking that I could handle it on my own. I switched majors from nursing to education. If I had the chance to do it all over again, I would have liked to have been a secretary or a librarian. That’s the past. I enjoyed college, taking different courses, learning about different subjects, just not all the homework that came with the classes. I am beat right now, so I will take your advice and relax, taking it easy. You do the same.
I have spent all this evening thinking about how in God’s name we can create a system through which we can teach recognition of, and ‘binding’ of, these individuals who do so much harm.
I have spoken several times now with the most recent casualty of my ex husband/sociopath. She contacted me out of the blue to ask if I could just tell her the truth; what exactly is she dealing with because he’d recently become violent with her and why do I have a permanent restraining order against this person. I was careful not to say too much under the circumstances, but I had to tell her the truth too. How can you not warn another human being that they are in very grave danger?!
I stuck to the facts, I told her the truth and I told her I could not interfere or give her advice. I told her to keep her guard up and to be careful and ask for help from her friends and family. She said they had cut her off BECAUSE of him. She said she had no where to turn. I sent her here to this site.
I thought the conversation that day would be the end of it, I’d heard in her voice she wasn’t ready to give up and walk out, she was still hooked, though scared out of her mind.
But she called me again today and she was sobbing. He’d cleaned out the bank accounts, packed up his things and walked out that morning leaving her with 23 dollars…and nothing else. He took everything. She didn’t tell me how much but I’ve peiced together it was more than 50,000 over the months they were together.
I let her scream and sob and say how much she hated him. She talked about the unearthly coldness, and the rage she’d felt go right through her, his monstrously debasing emotional, psychological, and physical abuse, and the terror she had felt every minute for so long….and I felt helpless and guilty and responsible. I knew, better than anyone, what this monster was capable of but I could do nothing to stop him from victimizing yet another woman.
My heart breaks for her….and I hate him all over again for what he’s done to her and for what the system allows him to continue doing. Why can’t these monsters be stopped? She said he left with that same smug sneer on his face that he always wore when he knew he’d gotten what he wanted and gotten away with it. She won’t call the police and I suspect its because she feels ashamed that she willingly turned over control of her life little by little to this monster. But she did it because he insisted, as they all do, with charm or with pity stories, or bullying and emotional blackmail and they back you into a corner and giving up the money seems like the only thing you CAN do.
There have been more and more cases of the courts going after bullies, most of them classroom and schoolyard bullies right now true, but it is leading in the right direction to state that bullying behaviors, particularly those resulting in long term harm to the victim, are not going to be tolerated. Classifying a sociopath as mere bully seems REALLY out of line but, maybe its the thin edge of the wedge.
I don’t know what or how, but this has to stop. The families are not equipped to deal with them, my own ex’s family enables him more often than not by believing his horrific lies and ploys for sympathy and then by harboring him and giving him money. What they do amounts to aiding and abetting a criminal, even though the money they give him is often just to get rid of him. They helped him do what he just did to this poor girl.
I feel horrible about this, and so far from my own pain about it for the first time….now that I’ve seen him victimize another I almost feel more rage toward him, and I know there has to be some kind of socio cultural forward movement to bring this kind of behavior out into the light so that it can be stopped.
J=
I was just writing tonight about how the system that will let the man who used to sleep here out to prey on others –
One day some other father’s daughter is going to waltz in love
with him and we know what is true and in fact fear what could happen.
the only way it seems to me is education. there just isn’t enough. just isn’t enough.
I’m with you, Silvermoon. I’m also on board with reasonable ideas to not only get the word out, but to lobby (or, whatever) for legal and civil changes in the law specifically to deal with spathic impact.
I’ve often read of “impact statements” being made at sentencing by survivors and/or victims of violent crimes. I don’t think that these statements have any “impact” on anything, least of all the spath. Alcala wouldn’t flinch unless he were forced to strip from the waist up and endure 15 lashes with a cat-o-nine for each of his victims and another 10 for each POSSIBLE victim.
I think the reason that spathy is so under the radar is that we are talking about emotions – the law has no emotion. There’s The Law, and then there’s what’s Right and Just, and never the twain shall meet. Perhaps, if we (and, others) were able to somehow address this frigging epidemic with bare facts, statistics, and the financial/legal impacts, more might be done. All I can say for myself is that we’ve got too many of them and their ranks are growing at an exponential rate.