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.
I like the insight about humility… It has come a lot into play the past week, but cannot really say whether it has lessened spath attacks.
Last Saturday I went to a birthday party of a female friend of mine. The theme was Trailer Trash party, so that was the dress code. There are friends present of course but also often people I don’t know or only acquainted with. Turned out there was this DJ I used to know roughly about a decade ago. First he tried to compliment me, meanwhile not keeping his hands to himself, as he used to do in the past. This time I warded him off and stopped responding positively automatically. Net, I went to the bathroom, and a couple had a drunk brawl in there. Me and the bf of my friend who organized the party calmed them down and freed the bathroom. With all the commotion I forgot to lock the door. Guess who opened it while I was seated? Yup the creep. And instead of closing the door he kept staring, even though I said, “Please close that door and respect my privacy.” Another guy intervened and shoved him away and guarded the door for me. Later on he was crawling on his back on the floor to try and look under my skirt. I told him that the party may be called Trailer Trash and that we were dressed like it, but that it did not mean I was trash, nor needed to be treated like one.
Some closer acquaintances told me he was drunk, but he was definitely targeting me in a nasty way. I made no scene though, just kept out of his neighbourhood and ignored him. Eventually a slight scene did ensue, when my cigs were not where I put them. I went straight to him and checked his pockets. He didn’t have them, but another less trustworthy girl had found them and put them somewhere else for her to take away later. First she didn’t know where they were, but when I pressed, she eventually suggested where I might find them by coincidence.
Anyway, today I went about decluttering facebook friends, and one of them was this DJ, to then also notice he had a gf. He’s one of the people I unfriended today.
Yup, yup… What the humility does is not that this guy targeted me any less, but that I cared nothing for his initial compliments. When he realized he got nowhere, that’s when he became obscene and obnoxious. But after the cig pack incident he left me alone. I guess it had gotten through to him that I didn’t care one way or the other, and he only made himself out to be a creep.
Sky,
I don’t think humility and humiliation are even in the same ball park. The ROOT WORDS may be the same but the meaning I think is entirely different.
“Humility (adjectival form: humble) is the quality of being modest, and respectful. Humility, in various interpretations, is widely seen as a virtue in many religious and philosophical traditions, being connected with notions of transcendent unity with the universe or the divine, and of egolessness.”
Whereas Humiliation is:
hu·mil·i·a·tion (hy -m l – sh n). n. 1. The act of humiliating; degradation. 2. The state of being humiliated or disgraced; shame. 3. A humiliating condition
The psychopath does enjoy humiliating another person, but our humility doesn’t correlate to our being ashamed or shameful or feeling disgraced or degraded.
I think that we should have a HEALTHY amount of egocentrism, a healthy amount of narcissistic self interest in order to be BALANCED, but PATHOLOGICAL NARCISSISTIC THINKING where someone thinks they are “God” with a capital G and that the rest of the people in the world are “beneath us” or that they are the “smartest person in the world” that their opinions are the only ones that count, etc are what the personality disordered think/feel.
I think that kind of narcissistic thinking can be fostered by someone, a dictator for example, who only has “yes men” around them, because to contradict them would be political or literal suicide. It is also an inbred part of psychopathy I think probably because of the lack of the “connectedness” to other people and the lack of value seen in other people.
I do agree totally with your comment, Sky, about “When you think about it, the love-bomb appeals to our ego and the pity ploy appeals to the “rescuer” in us (our super-power). The spaths use these tricks because when employed, It’s a direct hit to the ego and our intuition gets dulled.”
Oxy,
the root is the same because they are both about the ego.
In humiliation, the ego is attacked and one feels shame about their very essence. In humility, one discards the ego and accepts their essence as the will of a higher power.
I think the litany for humility describes it best:
To understand the prayer more fully, think about what it’s like when one desires the opposite of these things. That is the root of envy, which as we know is what drives spath behavior.
Note also, that the prayer does not ask to never be esteemed etc… but that we be free from the DESIRES of the ego.
Darwinsmom,
Good thoughts in your earlier post. It sounds like you have an excellent therapist, by the way, and I like her attitude about not labeling. Especially these days, there is a tendency to label as a pathology just about everything that doesn’t fall within a very rigidly defined “normal” range. When I was teaching, I saw this on a daily basis: all the interesting, sensitive and artistic kids were almost as a matter of course labeled “manic depressives,” ADHD, etc. – and I could literally go to the Health Office and find rows and rows of pill jars with all of my favorite students’ names on them! But from my perspective, many of them were far from needing medication, and should have been reading Keats or Shelley (or writing poetry themselves!), painting, playing an instrument, etc. rather than filling their young bodies with dangerous drugs, or going to therapy essentially for being a teenager!
On the other hand, if there is an overreadiness to label some things, there is probably an underreadiness to label stuff like sociopathy and malignant narcissism. I love the Dalai Lama, but with his delicious knack for understatement, he says somewhere or other that sociopaths are “people with less than fully developed human lives.” (!) (I’m quoting from memory.) Well, in the same way, it drives me nuts when therapists speak like that to an S victim, and dance around calling a sociopath a sociopath. (Which has the further negative effect of doubly victimizing the victim.)
But for the other stuff, I agree with you entirely: less is more.
Sky,
Darwinsmom also makes a good point about egotism verses narcissism: I think what you are describing is simply the egotism we’re all afflicted with to one extent or another. So as far as that goes I’m totally with you.
In a similar vein, I would never have thought to describe you as “self-loathing” – just someone who’s had a very rough twenty five years with a sociopath, and perhaps in consequence, tends to not give herself enough credit for her obvious strengths.
Constantine,
Great post above about the kids!
The thing about it all is to me that there is NO WAY you could expect to NOT HAVE AN ABNORMAL RESPONSE TO AN ABNORMAL SITUATION. IT WOULDN’T BE NORMAL. LOL
There is starting to be scientific proof though that a traumatic event does have a CHEMICAL AND PHYSICAL CHANGE upon the brain itself. We are DIFFERENT after a trauma than we were before the trauma. Our brain functions differently. The stress hormones released by the trauma effect our entire bodies not only our brains and CHANGE the way our body and our brain both function afterward. There is a physical assault to our selves from the emotional trauma.
I agree that there is some reluctance to label someone as a psychopath/sociopath or to even admit that there is NO CHANGING THEM, or that THEY ARE EVIL. I’m not sure where this “politically correct” idea came from that all people are EQUAL, or that everyone has “good” down deep, or that all cultures are noble and good, when it is obviously not true in western thought.
Some people are tall, some short, some smart, and some dumber’n dirt, some are nimble and some are clumsy. Some skills are paid well and some skills are paid less well and some people have no salable skills at all.
That doesn’t mean that we don’t have or shouldn’t have “human dignity” and that we should not respect others as human with basic human rights, but somewhere we have to come to the concensus of what those rights are and that also depends on WHERE you live.
In Saudi a woman’s “human rights” are not the same as a male’s “rights”—does that mean that culture is “bad”? It is DIFFERENT than most of the culture in the US. I do not agree with that culture’s thinking, and so I would label that as “bad.” The Saudis would label my thinking as “bad” because I am a woman and I do not worship as they do, so I would have in their eyes NO RIGHTS at all. I would be labeled an infidel as well as a woman, therefore worthy of death.
Back when Columbus thought the world was round, and most everyone else thought the world was flat, it didn’t change the shape of the world, but that is an OBJECTIVE FACT. Cultures are subjective, not measurable by a ruler or a compass, so what is “right” is basically what is acceptable to the majority of the people or to the ones in power. Two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. I wouldn’t think that was fair, but it seems to be the way the world is run.
In the meantime, psychopaths are a fact of life in all cultures, and RECOGNIZING them for what they are, and dealing with them, is about the best we can do. Hopefully our culture will come to recognize that they DO exist and more people will be able to defend themselves from them, but while I have that WISH, I don’t have a lot of HOPE that I’ll see any great progress in my life in our culture as a whole.
Oxy,
Yes, and depression itself is in many cases a “normal reaction to an abnormal situation.” In truth, what could be more “abnormal” than being a sixteen year old in today’s society? For me, to NOT have a reaction of despair towards a world that is to all appearances singularly fixated on things like Kim Kardashian, is either a sign of a very thick skin – or something worse!
Constantine,
The thing is, in reading The Bible or Greek and Roman history, it is NO DIFFERENT TODAY than it was back then, people are still as shallow now as then, as mean now as then, the only difference is that there are now cars instead of chariots or wagons, planes instead of magic carpets, and guns instead of just knives….I’m not convinced that there is “anything new under the sun” as the writer said. I think it is all just a rehash of the same old sheet!@.......
Oxy,
I would have to say that today’s nadir of bad taste and widespread public vulgarity is matched only by Nero’s Rome, and perhaps a few of the later worst decades of the Empire. Admittedly, there have been other deplorable epochs of human history, when there was a general surrender to all that is base and unseemly in human nature: England under Charles the Second comes to mind, as it was a time well known for debauchery and libertinism. But even there, there was an artistic flowering, and at least a deference to the outward forms of manners and good taste. Now I fear we have the inner rot, as well as an almost complete breakdown of the old external forms of decency and restraint – things which once served to temper and modify the less pleasant aspects of human nature. But at this point I sense the dam has broke and it’s just “in your face” all the time, 24/7. And while this may not be entirely “new,” it is nevertheless something (or so I would argue) that we haven’t quite seen before.
But then again, I’m just a curmudgeonly forty one year old contrarian, so what in the hell do I know?!
Constantine
You have jumped the gun Mr Curmudgeon Contrarian! You’re not supposed to arrive at such cyncisms until much older. 41! Young whippersnapper! And an obvious sage as revealed in your final humble remark, “what the hell do I know?!”… is proof of your wisdom b/c only the ignorant think they know.
I had a friend who announced on his 50th that he finally had it all figured out and the rest of us shared “that look”, b/c poor ol’ Blowhard Bob still can’t get that if he has to tell us he’s got it figured out, then he does not.
I do agree it seems the dam (freudian?!) has broke, but it’s not new at all. That dam’s been flooding a looonnngg time. What’s new is b/c of current technology, we know about it now.
The ebb and flow of organized society, the changing tastes in art, the hoolaganisms of youth have always been with us. I visited the roman ruins in Bath and was amused at the discoveries from the well where Romans threw little bits of their desires in order for the gods to grant their wish. 2000 yrs ago and they were SO petty. “a curse on soandso b/c she ridiculed my comb”, etc. It serves to remind us that the stuff of civilization such as art or literature, like 20-20 insight, is reviewed in hindsight. In short order, the good stuff is prized, the crap is pretty much gone. I do wonder what will be saved/prized of us 2000 yrs in the future. One thing I bet will last… chocolate. death. and taxes. 🙂