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.
Has anyone read People of the Lie by Scott Peck? I was just about to order it but the part of the title which says “the hope for healing human evil” puts me off. Can someone please reassure me/or confirm and tell me Peck does not go into waxing about any movement towards “healing” psychopaths because that’s just enough to keep me from reading the book entirely. Thanks… 🙂
Nancies, I don’t agree with everything Peck says in his book, but, and that is a BIG BUT…he has some really GREAT POINTS that I think would help some people. The thing is in reading about psychopaths, like learning about any subject, there are those that write with “great authority” who are full of BS and others who are not putting themselves forward as “great authorities” yet have a good message. I guess what I am saying is that reading different opinions is a GOOD THING. Looking at this thing from a physical science sort of angle, from a psychological angle, from a philosophical angle, and from a spiritual angle will give different views of the same subject, and ALL those different views will serve to have a HOLISTIC PICTURE of psychopathy.
Remember the story about the blind men who were led up to an elephant. One guy felt the legs and said “an elephant is like a tree” another one felt the side and said “an elephant is like a wall” another felt the trunk, and another the tail, etc. but none of them had a COMPLETE PICTURE of what an elephant was like. So putting all the pictures together gives a more complete picture of the psychopath I think. It has been a long time since I read the book, but I do remember that there were things about it that I really liked.
I would suggest the following reading, in this order though. “Without conscience” by Bob Hare (first) then “if you had controlling parents”, and then “The betrayal bond” and then take it ad lib from there on. Look through the book reviews here on LF and read them ALL….keep on reading and absorbing different aspects from the different books, articles, etc. I think you will get something from every one you read…..even if it is just an opinion you disagree with. LOL
Hens:
I am OK. A little tired, but otherwise just OK. Thanks for making me laugh!
dancingnancies:
I did read the book and it was pretty good, but not as good as the “Betrayal Bond.” One thing that it made me realize is that people I would have normally never thought of as evil, the author penned as evil. It opened my eyes to that. I remember more cases in the book about parents and children than anything else.
nancy,
that was the book I read when I first met the spath in 1983. I had never met anyone who would lie SO MUCH. ABOUT NOTHING.
There was no internet back then so I went to the library and that was the only book about lies. Because Peck kept talking about evil, I dismissed the book as relevant to MY situation since MY liar didn’t have horns and a tail, so he must not be evil.
I was 17 or 18 and I already knew everything, so of course I would know EVIL if I encountered it…right.
25 years later, I read it again and I believe it is a very good book. Peck was one of the first to write about spaths he had encountered in his psych practice. With this in mind, notice that he begins the book by saying that he isn’t sure he SHOULD write the book. He worried that spaths would use the book to further hide the red flags which identify them. He was a pioneer in calling them “evil” and in equating lies with “evil”.
The book takes the subject even further than evil in personal relationshits and expands to the evil in social structures and government. It’s a comprehensive book in that way. I think the reason he says “hope for healing human evil” is because he really offers no answers to healing evil, but he hoped that by writing the book he could unveil what evil looks like and put an end to our tolerance of it. That’s why, despite his misgivings, he went ahead and wrote the book.
It didn’t help me the first time I read it, but another man read it and he did understand it. I met him 25 years later. He explained malignant narcissists to me and my eyes were opened. Then he said, “there’s a book you should read.” I said, “I know the book, People of the Lie.” He asked, “how did you know?”
Sky,
True people can project things willingly and unwillingly. In order to communicate there must be a communicator that signals data and a receiver who picks up the signals. The signs are words, body language, tone and volume, and imo any physical data from smell, touch and temperature. The more data sent and received, the more likely the message will be understood. And when it comes to non spoken and non-blatant physical signs the receiver needs a whole lot of experience with people and translation to make an accurate translation. I do not think you could have dreamt or come up with the poison answer without an ability to receive, process and translate the projected signals.
Yes, my cats always now hours beforehand that today is the day I’m gonna put them in the kitty basket for either the vet or a stay-over at my parents. I guess the packing of stuff, and me approaching them with the utmost care not to frighten them has a lot to do with them comprehending something’s up and it’s most likely the kitty basket. They know other stuff as well. Once again, I’ll act, move, behave and sound different depending my mood.
I’m mostly a visual-emotional thinker, more than auditive (words). When I think of people I get a visual of a ball with colours, textures, etc. Most of my dreams, as is for most people, are visuals of word-plays… like my ex spath literally selling himself on a market, or another ex allowed to stroll of with me as an innocent child in a buggy, away from two ‘guardians’ (think spiritual guardians wordplay here). When I’m studying the math courses I’m getting, which is very theoretical and abstract, I spend most of my time searching for background information to somehow make a picture in my mind, or at least a method or some exercise. I then only need to memorize the more concrete visual form to the more abstract theoretical and understand and remember it. When I have to study nothing but text, I read it, create a mind-map (a drawing) and write a question above it to which the mind map is the answer. One of my early childhood memories is about the word ’emancipation’. In Dutch there was another word, which I can literally translate to ‘role pattern’. I read it in a letter from school to my parents, and I asked for its meaning to this unknown word. My parents explained the concept. And I used a visual tool to memorize the word. There was this carpet shop along one of the highways we regularly passed, and its sign were several coloured circles which formed a pattern. It was a ‘pattern of roles’. I linked that image to the meaning of ’emancipation’ and ‘role patterns’. I was 6 when I learned the word. When we had to draw what we wanted to be when we were grown ups, I drew a female policewoman, and during talking hour the teacher confronted me about it, saying out loud, “isn’t that a guy’s profession?” I instantly shut him up with, “Sir, that is role pattern thinking!” (I was 7 then).
Audutive (word) thinkers are a minority. Most people think visually. I would suspect that most spaths are visual thinkers with a minority thinking verbally. But I doubt that it is a specific trait to identity the spath mind.
darwinsmom:
Wow, you are brilliant! 🙂
I love the story about the role pattern when you were only seven years old!!
Darwinsmom,
That’s very interesting about the connection, in dutch, between role-pattern and emancipation. I’m having a difficult time linking “releasing from authority” with “role pattern”. Could you expand on that?
I suppose you and I can agree to disagree on the issue of how some information gets transferred from one person to another. I’ve had so many experiences where there was no physical or auditory signals. With my cats, especially. They respond, like the dog did to spath, to unexpected changes in my emotion. Things that are unplanned like something I’m watching on TV.
I also had an experience in a store where I walked in and caught a figure in a black coat out of my peripheral vision standing at the check out. I knew immediately that he had a desire to kill me. So I didn’t even look at him. I felt fear and kept my face averted. Of course I continued to tell myself that I’m nuts because that is ridiculous, but I couldn’t override the need to protect myself. So I paid for my purchase and walked to my car. He walked out behind me. He was parked 2 cars away from me. I continued to avoid looking at him and as I was unlocking my car, he said, “Hey! Do you know anyone who wants a puppy?”
WTF? The old “come pet my puppy trick”. LOL!
So I went to meet my spath and his friend for dinner. I told him what happened and he says, “Yeah! that’s what pedophiles do, they ask you if you want to pet their puppy! He was definitely a pervert. What did he look like?”
Well my spath is a pedophile (unbeknownst to me at the time), he should know.
Anyway, my point is, that I’m sure I pegged this person correctly as having malice toward me without even seeing him. In my mind I received it as “wanting to kill me” and I have no idea how accurate that was. Perhaps it was just the spath predatory instinct getting activated and as a prey, I “smelled” it.
The other time I remember feeling this was the very first moment I met my spath. He walked in off the street with a flower and put it on my desk. I was terrified. Obviously I ended up ignoring my intuition for 25 years.
But when I was hitchhiking and I met Gary Ridgeway, the Green River murderer, I really didn’t get much of any sensation… so much for my intuition. It works when it wants to and other times I just tell it to shut up.
Sky you mentioned “smelling” evil or something being “off”—actually, people have two sets of sweat glands and one set is for cooling the body when it is hot, but the others are actually like “musk glands” located in the arm pits and the groin and they are responsive to STRESS and to SEXUAL EXCITEMENT and the smell is actually very STRONG and entirely different from the salt and water in sweat caused by being hot or working hard.
I don’t know if you ever heard the phrase “he smelled like a fresh farked chicken” but it is the smell of “just had sex since having a bath last”
STRESS with also make those sweat glads produce copious amounts of liquid and if I am really scared or stressed it will POUR out from under my arms like a water faucet even if the weather is COLD.
A person may not be AWARE of that smell, but your cats and dogs are aware that your sweat smell has changed and the last time they smelled that they got put in the kitty carrier and went to grandma’s house….or the vet….or you were gone for several days. Cats and dogs have noses a million times more sensitive than us…but even our noses can smell stress/sexual smells on other humans. Some people have a more distinctive smell than others, but everyone has some stress hormone smell.
My husband had a “peculiar” smell if he was stressed. It smelled like GREEN TOMATOES to me. It was not unpleasant to me because I associated it with HIM, just like there are several other smells that I associate with GOOD things and that most people would say “stink” but because of a good ASSOCIATION to me they are not unpleasant…anyway….after my husband died, I took a dirty shirt of his out of the laundry basket and slept with it pressed to my face until eventually the shirt no longer smelled “like him” and I was able to put it away.
I think our SUB-conscious picking up the smells of other people may be part of that “intuition.” The smell that maybe we don’t consciously realize is a SIGNAL that person is under stress…we just have a “feeling” that something is “off” about them….the same way our cave man ancestors might have smelled a lion and retreated to safety.
Oxy wrote,
“My husband had a “peculiar” smell if he was stressed. It smelled like GREEN TOMATOES to me. It was not unpleasant to me because I associated it with HIM, just like there are several other smells that I associate with GOOD things and that most people would say “stink” “.
Mine had a peculiar body odor when he was idle. Freshly bathed or not he smelled like hot cooking oil and something musky I can’t name. It was not at all unpleasant as gross as it sounds. His mother even noted that he had a smell that was all his own. When he was stressed he smelled like the soap he used. Very strange.