Russell Williams was a colonel in the Canadian Forces, a pilot who flew dignitaries including Queen Elizabeth II, and commander of the largest airbase in Canada. That is, until he was arrested for breaking into women’s homes and stealing their underwear, sexual assault and murdering two young women.
Lovefraud has written about Williams before: For Halloween: A real monster who liked to dress up.
The question, of course, is how did such a predator achieve the rank of colonel? Should he have been flagged along the way? How was it that Williams received nothing but stellar reviews, and turned out to be a murderer?
The Canadian Forces, stunned by what happened, launched an inquiry into how candidates are selected for senior command positions. Could enhanced psychological testing have revealed Williams’ true nature? Here’s what Macleans reported:
The answer, sadly, is no. Among hundreds of pages of internal military documents, obtained by Maclean’s under the Access to Information Act, is a draft version of that review. It confirms what leading experts have long maintained: there is no off-the-shelf exam that employers, armed forces or otherwise, can use to detect sociopathic killers. “Given the recent events in CFB Trenton, it is natural for the CF to question whether or not the organization could have identified a sexual sadist or predicted that an individual would become a serial sexual murderer,” the report says. But that “would be unrealistic to expect.”
Read There’s no way to spot another Russell Williams on Yahoo.com.
It’s probably true that no one could have spotted Williams. His case, however, is highly unusual. As I wrote in Sudden psychopath: The horrifying yet strange case of Col. Russell Williams, this case is unique in that Williams showed no signs of disorder before he suddenly became a sexual pervert and predator. Unlike most sociopaths, he didn’t have a history of lying, cheating and abusing. That’s why his case is so weird.
Judged by behavior
Although I don’t know much about the various psychological tests that are available, I doubt that any self-report inventory, where the subject answers questions about himself or herself, would work. After all, sociopaths lie. They lie about everything, so of course they’re going to lie on a personality test. Even if the test is designed to spot inconsistencies, how would anyone know which part is true?
To diagnose sociopaths, you need to know about their behavior. Most sociopaths leave a lifelong trail of destruction, ranging from overt crime to subtle emotional and psychological abuse. Dr. Robert Hare developed the Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R), and it has become the gold standard for diagnosing psychopaths (the term he uses). The PCL-R has two parts—a semi-structured interview, and a “file review.” This means that the individual’s criminal and psychological records are included in the evaluation. In other words, the psychopaths are identified by their behavior, not by their answers on a test.
The Gift of Fear
We, of course, don’t want to experience a sociopath’s behavior. We want to avoid them, so they don’t have an opportunity to inflict any damage of any kind. Can we do it?
I believe the answer is yes. The way to avoid a sociopath is to listen to our intuition.
Several people on Lovefraud have posted about a book called The Gift of Fear, by Gavin de Becker. Oprah Winfrey called de Becker the nation’s leading expert on violent behavior, and his company helps hundreds of people, including celebrities, stay away from stalkers and other predators.
De Becker’s whole point in The Gift of Fear is this: Your intuition will tell you about danger. Listen to it.
I can back this assertion up with data. In the Lovefraud Romantic Partner Survey, conducted earlier this year, I asked the following question: “In the beginning of the involvement, did you have a gut feeling or intuition that something wasn’t right about the person or the relationship?”
Seventy-one percent of respondents said yes. Let me repeat that: 71% of people who became involved with sociopaths knew early on that something was wrong. Unfortunately, most of them stayed in the relationship anyway.
Trust your intuition
I think it’s unlikely that an accurate paper-and-pencil test for spotting sociopaths will ever be developed. However, we all have a built-in early warning system. The system isn’t designed to identify sociopaths in an abstract sense; it’s designed to warn us when we are in the presence of danger.
Here are the three steps to protecting yourself from sociopaths:
- Know that sociopaths exist.
- Know the warning signs of sociopathic behavior.
- Trust your intuition.
The key is to pay attention to the warning signals that we receive. But often we don’t. We doubt ourselves. We give the person another chance. We wait for hard evidence. In the end, we are damaged and filled with regrets.
Would listening to their intuition have saved Russell Williams’ victims? We’ll never know. But Gavin de Becker did relate a story about a woman who was assaulted in her apartment. The assailant told her to be quiet, promised he wouldn’t hurt her, and left the room. The woman, filled with fear, didn’t listen to him. She listened to her intuition and slipped away. The guy returned with a kitchen knife, intending to kill her. But she was gone.
Donna,
The Williams’ case has interested me because my former fiance also is a high ranking military officer (a line officer the US Navy) and has, to the best of my knowledge, remained undetected by the Navy despite the rigorous psychological exams that his particular line and security clearance require. To be clear, he, to the best of my knowledge, has never treated anyone with physical violence.
To draw an analogy with a medical disaster, I do agree with you that preventive medicine is valuable and one should be aware of one’s circumstances and one’s experiences, but it is rare for victims of medical disasters (or natural disasters) to spend much time dwelling on “what I should have done differently to prevent this” or “why my broken past led me to this experience.”
I wonder if your survey results can be explained by the strength of hindsight and the passionate desire to wish that such a disaster had never happened. It is easy, in hindsight, to find signs that should have been followed but were not because one’s “intuition” about a positive outcome was stronger. A lot of things happen during any relationship and a laser-like focus on these issues may just well lead to finding them everywhere (“perceptual vigilance”). It is also easy, in the hindsight that comes from being injured like this, to fall into a negative shame spiral that includes self-blame and self-loathing.
Those paths may be easy, but they are not helpful and I would suggest that they are destructive towards the victim.
“Intuition” is a funny concept and usually arises when one talks about a decision (stay with someone or leave them; leave the house after an intruder enters or stay; go to work on time on September 11th or get another cup of coffee) and one wants to feel better (or worse!) about the choice that was made. If the other choice had been made, the tug in the other direction might be labeled “intuition.” Thus, some who marry a “bad boy” but have an “intuition” that he is a good man beneath it all, actually do turn out to be fortunate and can delight their grandchildren with how important it is to trust ones intuition because it leads to a happy life.
I spent the past 32 months badly frightened by my experience and was, like so many other victims of this sort of psychological violence, diagnosed with PTSD. One of the hallmarks of PTSD is hypervigilance. Speaking from experience, hypervigilance means that one’s intuition can not be trusted. It can not be trusted because the brain has suffered an injury as a result of the experience and not because it was always untrustworthy.
I mulled and mulled about “what I should have done differently…” and wished I had seen a way that would have allowed me (a psychologically very health person). With that mulling, I can now look back and see signs that were there but were subtle (he once hung up on his ex-wife in the midst of an argument over their child; I realized once that he was not as forthcoming as he might have been about former relationships, he made wildly-exaggerated comments about violence in a clearly mocking tone (including, as an extraordinarily extreme example, using “shooting him in the face” as a metaphor for a bad fitness report for a junior officer); and so on); they were subtle in the face of many positive actions. As far as my “broken past,” my childhood was filled with sand castles, snow angels and a very loving family which led me to a very successful adulthood.
None of these things foretold the extraordinary depths he went to deceive me, at least two other women, his wardroom, and the US Navy. No amount of “intuition” prepared me for the enormous pain that he caused me.
To go back to my medical analogy, in the outpouring of articles about Steve Jobs, there are only a very small number of articles about the fact that Steve Jobs initially resisted modern medical treatments and instead trusted his “intuition” about the proper course of action. He died needlessly. Few would use Steve Jobs death as a lesson on ignoring the part of his intuition that suggested he follow medical best practices, although surely there was some part of his 21st century mind that suggested it. This lesson is just as apt as any other lesson one might draw about intuition. I think the reason we don’t give that lesson is that it is currently viewed as unseemly to blame the victim of cancer.
I would like it to be as unseemly to blame the victim of a sociopath as it is to blame the victim of cancer, even if one of the consequences of our particular “cancer” is a damaged brain that persists in self-blame for not choosing a different path.
missyj:
I am not a doctor, but pancreatic cancer is usually not survivable. Even with the rare type that Steve Jobs had that allowed him to live longer than the common type where people tend to succumb quicker, he would have died eventually from this cancer. So he didn’t die needlessly because he initially resisted modern medical treatments. God could have performed a miracle and had him live out a full life, but that was very unlikely to happen. I have never personally seen anyone survive pancreatic cancer in its advanced stages and it is seldom caught in the early stage so that it is curable.
Missy,
there are layers and layers to each story. I don’t know yours but I’ll fill you in a bit about mine. When I ran from my spath, I met a stranger, a successful lawyer, in a sushi bar and I told him what was happening. He said, “oh, that’s a malignant narcissist.” With those words, this stranger saved my life. He had experienced N’s and P’s in his family and had learned about them. Later he asked me, “is there anyone you can say you REALLY trust?” I answered, “yes, my parents. I trust them COMPLETELY.” OMG, Was I off the mark. They are evil spaths and they are the reason I ended up with a spath. It’s covert spathiness and almost undetectable. It appears in the guise of love and concern. I had to look from a new perspective and stand waaaayyyy back from my emotions to understand.
My own spath had almost everyone who knows him thinking he’s such a nice guy.
Donna,
my brother in law, the trojan horse spath, has been a police officer for almost 2 decades. He is now working for Homeland Security. They investigate everything before hiring, but the spath KNOWS that and has taken precautions to put on a veneer. Before marrying my sister, he had terrible credit, no money, owned nothing. And that was on a police officer’s salary. He married my sister and used her credit score to clean up his veneer. He’s blown through most of her nest egg, but that doesn’t show up in any investigations. All that shows up is what he wants people to see.
But my accountant met him ONE time and KNEW what he was. She told me he liked to show off by breaking traffic laws and his comment was, “laws are for the sheep to follow so that us wolves can get around them.” If he gets stopped by a cop, he just shows his badge and they extend him “professional courtesy”. These red flags are there and my accountant is familiar with them. She refused to do his taxes after that, not because she didn’t like him. She said she found him amusing. But she knew that he is a liar and would lie about his taxes, so she wants nothing to do with him. She said nothing to him. She just wouldn’t return his calls.
I believe that Russell Williams probably displayed many red flags throughout his life, but very few people know what it means.
Thinking you can break the law because you’re a cop is a form of narcissism. It’s the “I’m special” type of thinking.
Currently, I have a potential wholesale customer from Russia, requesting a sample product. They offered to pay for shipping with a Mastercard. But they didn’t want to give me the cardholder’s address. They said that it was a special card and that they didn’t need to. “special” yeah, right. It’s the same red flag.
missyj- thank you for your insightful post.
i agree that my PTSD injured (and chemically injured) brain is not so trustworthy. i don’t trust my intuition NOW, as it is based on my sense of trust in my own abilities and perceptions (laid waste by the spath). I am one part victimized person, and one part injured brain.
one of the hardest things now is feeling safe – safe in my own perceptions. instead i bumble through the days, trauma bonding to anyone who appears to slight me in any way, and living behind a wall. Behind this wall, hate brews.
I am working on figuring out how to take down the wall, because i am suffocating behind it.
MissyJ –
The Lovefraud Romantic Partner Survey had more than 1,000 respondents. 71% of them said that they had clear intuition, gut feelings and hunches that the sociopaths were bad news. They also had an opportunity to explain what they felt, and how they responded. People described distinct knowing that something was wrong with the person, but talking themselves out of their perceptions. They also saw many of the “Red Flags of Love fraud” – signs that the person was a sociopath.
The problem was that they did not know what the warning signs meant. They did not have the empirical knowledge to interpret what they were seeing and feeling.
It’s said that we can only see what we know. Since they didn’t know about sociopaths, they couldn’t really “see” the danger. And, they couldn’t make sense of the internal warnings they were receiving from their intuition for the same reason.
It is not my intention to blame the victim. The same thing happened to me. My ex-husband proclaimed his love for me within four days of meeting me. I did not know that his actions were a classic red flag – “moving fast’ to set his hooks in me.
The survey question related specifically to the beginning of the relationship. Although many respondents said they had PTSD as a result of the relationships, I did not ask any questions about how many people had PTSD before they became involved with the sociopath. No one volunteered information that they already had PTSD before the sociopath came into the picture.
I believe that knowing the warning signs of sociopathic behavior, coupled with paying attention to the warning signs we receive from our intuition, are the best defense we have against sociopaths.
MissyJ,
I agree with Donna on this. As for Steve Jobs, I (as a retired Registered Nurse Practitioner) was stunned when I read that he had waited 9 months and tried to use “alternative” methods to “cure” the cancer. From what I have read, he had a SLOW GROWING kind, that was discovered VERY EARLY by accident and surgery might well have cured it before it spread….but with the BEST available medical care in the world, he went into “denial” and chose to WAIT—and the wait probably did kill him. He might very well have been one of the RARE survivors of pancreatic cancer.
I don’t “blame” him for his decision, it was just that the CONSEQUENCES of that decision were most likely his death. He is not a physician or medical practitioner and he didn’t act on the BEST advice he was given. We all do that and I think the psychopaths we have dealt with were like his cancer, we went into denial (like Jobs) and tried to find ALTERNATIVE ways to “cure” the disease without SURGICAL REMOVAL of the “tumor.”
In fact, the ONLY cure for a relation-shit with a psychopath is SURGICAL REMOVAL of the person from our lives before they KILL US or disable us so that our life is essentially destroyed.
TRAINING our intuition what to look for, in other words WHAT is a SERIOUS and what is NOT a serious “symptom” is KNOWLEDGE (Knowledge is power) is important.
My step father was bad to “diagnose” himself medically (and was very often WRONG) One day I was at his house and noticed that he was lying on the couch during the day which was not usual for him. I asked what was wrong and he said he had a “sinus infection”—so I asked more questions and discovered that he had been running intermittent fevers off and on for several months. Hummmmm????? Plus he had none of the Other symptoms of a sinus infection. The first two things that went through my mind were CANCER? and Tick FEVER.
So, long story short, I was praying it was a tick fever (though serious mostly curable with antibiotics) but as it turned out it was indeed cancer, and he died 18 months later. He felt something was wrong with him, but he did not have enough KNOWLEDGE to make an informed decision about treatment and since he didn’t continue to feel bad or get “sicker” he DID NOTHING and in that case, it didn’t hurt anything as far as his longevity with the disease because it was an incurable cancer, and he was 82 years old besides. However, if it HAD BEEN A TICK FEVER it might indeedy have been a fatal decision.
We have to TRAIN our intuition to know what is a DANGER sign, but we also have to TRAIN our rational brain to LISTEN to the intuition, so it is a mixture of “gut feeling” and “education” we need to keep us safe.
Some of the things we are taught as kids “it takes two to fight” or “there are two (valid) sides to every story” or “forgive those you love” (meaning also to RESTORE TRUST) and so on, are NOT necessarily TRUE. There are NOT two VALID sides to every story, and it does NOT take two to fight…only one person to throw the first punch…so we must listen to our intuition and we must then decide if what we are FEELING is valid.
I also have PTSD and had for a while a very severe case of hyper-vigilance and jumped at every sound. Now I am CAUTIOUS but not terrorized. I am probably more vigilant than the average person, but I don’t want to be any more “laid back” than I am now. I have reached a balance between complacency and hyper vigilance.
I think they can be spotted by intuition. But as I read in an article the other day- society at the present, at least, is so constructed that it diminishes the importance of intuition- so perhaps people are so conditioned not to listen to it… we are taught that logic is king… well I think intuition is even stronger than logic… intuition reads between the lines… what you don’t see… And as Donna has illustrated in her post, no victim is at fault for being targeted by a sociopath- you are innocent. Perhaps at least here on LF, we can attempt to change this societal conditioning by educating each other and reinforcing truth.. which is that our intuition is there for a reason. yes. And it is important to tune into it.
As an aside, I also want to post a quote which I thought was appropriate to share here..
“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.”
That- I think sums up a whole lot.
With my socio, my intuition definitely told me that I was dealing with something bad, but I couldn’t figure out rationally what it was… so I stayed too long. By the time his mask was coming off more and more, I was too hooked in, and he had the advantage of knowing my weaknesses and drawing me back in, though I really tried to get away numerous times.
Intuition helps, but you’ve got to have the guts and bravery to go on your instincts and not look back. Don’t second guess.
I believe my intuition will help me with locating a possible narcissist or sociopath – but what’s even better, I can pick up on the tell-tale signs and look for them. AND, I will always be very slow to develop relationships with new people, allowing time to for both intuition and red flags to work together.
For the two years in my life when I had a potentially dangerous job, I practiced psychic self-defense rather than carry a weapon. I kept my heart open to my customers who were were maybe a little toxic but not totally dangerous. However, there were a few situations where I walked into a situation and just got a bad feeling. I couldn’t explain it, but I just knew it was a dangerous situation. In every one of those instances, I made an excuse and got out as quickly as I could. Because of my keen intuition, I was able to keep myself safe the entire two years, and never had any major incidents. The other employees who worked for the agency had a lot of incidents and most of them carried guns or at least mace. I always thought I was just lucky (and this is probably true, too), but I could tell who the really dangerous ones were.
Strangely, my intuition failed me with the spath I met in 2008. I thought he was a little needy and stalkerish in the beginning. But I never felt that fear in my gut. Strange.
Dancingnancies,
I agree with your quote! Thanks for posting that here….we must all I think keep in mind that the “devil does exist”—evil exists, and keep our eyes out for the TIP OF THE ICEBERGS of EVIL that stick up out of the water, there may not be much visible, but the bulk of the evil hides underwater, but that is where it can SINK OUR SHIPS if we are not vigilant in watching for the TIPS that stick up out of the water.
A couple of years before my husband died, I made a conscious decision to “cull my rolodex” and to spend more time with fewer people rather than spend so little time with so many people and I sort of started deciding who I wanted to spend more time with and who less. We had some people who rented a house from us, a couple and their kids and the couple started to really “love bomb” us. At the time I felt sort of “uneasy” at the love-bombing they were doing, though at the time I didn’t realize what it was, just that it made me “UNEASY.”
Later, I found out that my “uneasy” response was my INTUITION telling me there was something OFF about this couple. I think now, that the man probably was very high in P-traits, and the woman just dysfunctional and a victim. He ended up in jail and she ended up divorcing him.
Sometimes I have HAD the intuition, and sometimes NO intuition at all, I fell for the love bombing—-and every time I have been “had” by a psychopath it has been BECAUSE I fell for the love bombing.
Now, I see the LOVE BOMBING as a HUGE RED FLAG….whether or not it comes from a potential love interest, from a neighbor, or a business association….or any other type of relationship, and just stand back and see what happens.