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.
Darwinsmom,
oh, I didn’t read that the images were violent, it only said emotional but didn’t specify positive or neg emotions. Then there were the calming pictures, which I thought meant “neutral”, as in a gray rock or a brick wall. Hmmm… semantics can add to the confusion, I suppose.
I don’t have any doubt that intuition exists, as it has been exemplified in my own life, but I just didn’t think the experiment was very “clean”.
When I was 20 years old, right before my spath started poisoning me, I bought two 80cc dirt bikes to ride in the mountains. After a long day riding we stopped at mountain tavern and they had pulltabs behind the counter. In case you don’t have them in your country, they are tickets you buy for $.25 or $.50 cents, then you pull the tab to see what you have won. They are dispensed from machines or from clear plastic buckets from which the bartender pulls them out.
Spath sat at the bar and started buying a few pull tabs. It irritated me because I really disapprove of gambling – especially when he was always broke and I was always paying. He spent about $10 and kept losing. Finally, I said, “OK, I’ll buy one for $.25 cent.” I asked the bartender to pull out a specific ticket which was facing me and “felt lucky” to me. There was an overwhelming feeling that it was a winner. She gave me the ticket and sure enough, I won $25.00 The spath was not pleased. He kept playing and kept losing more money. I got really irritated again and again told the bartender exactly which pull tab to give me. She handed to me and I won another $25.00. The envy must’ve been killing the spath because it was about a month later that I became sick for the next 20+ years.
I’m not saying that happens every day. It rarely happens, that’s why I remember it. But I would have to say that it was more than dumb luck since I felt an overwhelming attraction to those 2 tickets and chose them based on that feeling. I didn’t buy any other tickets that day.
Darwinsmom,
what I noticed when I was with the spath, was that I had MANY dreams in which I saw in pictures that I was in danger. There were also many Freudian slips where, for no reason, I said, “my boyfriend is probably a serial killer.” or “There is an evil entity in my house.” or “you sound like a demon from hell.”
Also, I had NEVER had a fear of heights until I met the spath. My fearlessness was to the point that I dropped out a second story window one night so I could sneak out without my parents hearing me. (dumb, it hurt my legs!) But once I was with the spath, I got severe vertigo at the THOUGHT of going up a ladder. Well my spath has an MO of killing people by having them fall from great heights. And in the end, he told me, “before I destroy someone, I like to make them really happy and get them really high so they have further to fall.”
So although I have an intact corpus collasum, I am pretty sure that my right hemisphere cannot talk at all. It can only communicate in pictures. It was screaming at my left brain to tell me things, but the left brain would not accept what my right brain knew all along. Instead, my left brain made up stories and excuses for why the spath was so odd.
One day, I had the “flu”,but I just KNEW that my spath was poisoning me. It was an overwhelming knowledge. But my left brain said, “well this proves you are crazy because he would never do that. Don’t tell people about these crazy thoughts you have, it would just be embarrassing. Having the flu really affects your thinking, isn’t THAT interesting?”
As much as we might think that the 2 hemispheres speak to each other, I think we let the left brain boss the intuitive right brain around, more often than not. We suppress a lot.
That’s true… we do suppress intuition too much. Most of intuitive knowledge got shown to me through dreams as well. Dreams are emotional conduits and is always almost related to emotional messages or issues. Since intuition is often registered and described as a feeling, dreams are a good conduit to bring intuitive information to the conscious cognitive part of the brain. It’s also true that imagery is typically right brain, but even part of language is right brain too…
When I analyse a dream I often find wordspeak in the imagery… The imagery are symbols for words and concepts. It therefore often helps to understand a dream by writing it down, including the descriptions. For example if you dream about being at school again and ‘learning about chemistry’. Then chances are high that the dreamer is experiencing life lessons about chemistry between two people.
I do think that more intuition tests should be done and it seems there have been several the past decade. Several variations ought to be done and redone. I actually wrote the organisation an email and suggested to do intuition tests on people that score high on Hare’s list of psychopathy. I think it’s at least far more informative rather than the tests done in the 20th century in the 30s regarding healers thinking of a person in another room and measurements with the healer and receiver, or someone seeing an image and then trying to pass the image along in thought to someone else and concluding that 21% success is significant in comparison to 20% chance of being right.
Darwinsmom,
that’s exactly how I interpret dreams too. When I ask someone to tell me their dreams I pay close attention to the words they choose to describe the imagery. Since memory is accessible by both halves,it would seem that the right brain is “presenting” the pictures while the left brain describes what it sees using words. The imagery then becomes symbols for the left brain.
That’s cool that you wrote to them about doing a study on spaths. I hope they become intrigued.
I’m still not clear how the spath brain ties it all together, but my observation of the spath seemed to be that he was very right brain oriented. He is a mechanical genius who can see how parts go together in space, not just statically, but also dynamically in motion. It is this skill that he applied to the cons. He would see people as moving parts and their interactions as part of a huge dramatic production where he would achieve his evil ends.
It is because people are so unaware of their emotions being manipulated, that he could predict the desired outcome. And when things changed, he was able to make changes to suit. Once a person understands the spath, the spath is utterly powerless despite his mechanical genius.
Anyway, as much as I would call him a right brained person in that aspect, his left brain the seat of his will power and ego, is actually directing everything.
I also think that his right brain is supremely suppressed by the left brain, rendering it mute. Which is why it explodes in fits of rage and envy. I think it is acting out the different feelings that it can’t express or is even ALLOWED to feel and that his need to make others feel shame and envy is his right brain trying to express its own shame and envy.
So, maybe it’s a power struggle between the two halves. The left brain won’t let the right feel anything, so the right brain presents painful imagery to the left side. Then the left creates stories about what it has seen and projects the evil onto scapegoats, blaming them for the pain.
All conjecture on my part. That’s just how it seems to me.
Sky,
Here’s my blog (which I haven’t written for in the past 2 years) but it tells a dream I had while I was the spath and he was living in Belgium with me. I started to have a feeling that everything was falling apart.
http://ssr-spirihumanism.blogspot.com/2010_01_01_archive.html
I also made an overview of dream science in that blog
http://ssr-spirihumanism.blogspot.com/2009/10/short-overview-of-dream-science.html
http://ssr-spirihumanism.blogspot.com/2009/10/content-purpose-of-dream.html
Oh my! I’ve just reread some parts regarding that period, reflections on some of the tarot day cards I pulled or the dream…
Quite painful to read: all the stupid stuff he pulled… they were so clearly outrageous and me despairing about it, lucid comments about getting the feeling he was doing it on purpose (and at the time I thought it was a passive aggressive response of him for being dependent of me in a strange country), and then me trying to be loving and forgiving, etc… Especially the latter part mixed in those blog posts of mine are heartbreaking to read for me now. I feel so much compassion for the woman who wrote it at the time.
darwinsmom says:
“Here’s the thing” this intuitive pre-sensation about a future outcome suggests there is some (probably quantum mathematical) dimension where info about all times (past, present and future) can be got. There are actually mathemathical models that propose an 8D reality: 3d of what we see, a 4th time-space dimension and duplicates of those 4 in the imaginative math dimensionse (number i, which is the square root of -1). Because we can somehow tap into that dimension to get data automatically from it, that would also give us an intuitive sense of an absolute, independent truth being out there. How else could we sense a future outcome otherwise 4 to 17 secs beforehand? Sensing that there is a truth out there, predictable outcomes based on setting things in motion, would hold us back from lying and irresponsible acts on a deep subconscious level. It may even be a source or basis for our moral thinking…”
While much of this is highly theoretical, I believe in the concept of multi-universes and one could postulate that visions of the future happen when parallel universes get their “wires” crossed.
On my second date with the x-spath, I was so certain of the “connection,” I actually asked him why we had not met before.
Interestingly, we had met before. I saw several of the he had posted on Xtube…
behind blue eyes…I’d say most of that is highly “hypothetical” 😉 in science a theory is a proven hypothesis. 🙂
The math 8d model is not a multi universe… since 3 of the dimensions are the 3D we see every day, and the 4th the space-time continuum. But I understand you mean that you believe in mutli universes. But if they sometimes have their “wires” crossed then such a knowledge would occur by “chance”. But if all the participants’s hearts know on average 1 sec after clicking the mouse button what the outcome will be 5 secs later for each of the 15 emotive pics, then this wire crossing is far from chance.
😀
darwinsmom;
For a while, I believed there was something cosmic about meeting the x-spath. So many weird things, from not only seeing his Xtube “performances” but several others, including a picture taken ogf him with my apartment building in the background, before he knew where I lived, right down to an important early date on World AIDS Day…
Nevertheless, we cannot put too much emphasis on these “cosmic” things. Not the least being that such could easily be construed as being disordered, even when you are not.