I stumbled across this article by Pat Brown on the web today, it captures quite well the personality features of a psychopath, someone with a personality disorder that often leads to criminal behavior.
Some of the most notorious mass murderers in this country were in fact diagnosed as sociopaths; Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, Richard Ramirez, John Gacy, to name a few.
It is the sociopaths complete lack of conscience that leads him/her to become natural killers of sorts. If one is unencumbered by the ordinary human sense of "right vs wrong", then all bets are off, no rules apply - To the Sociopath, they are"special", and they often believe that their victims deserved what they did to them, for either being "stupid" enough to become a victim, or "weak", or as in the case of high risk victims, homeless or prostitutes etc, sociopaths will often claim that they "were doing the world a favor" "cleaning up the garbage" These exact words and or sentiment have actually been used by many a serial rapist killer, including Michael Ross a murderer in Connecticut who murdered mostly prostitutes although in the end he started killing little girls and anyone he could get his hands on.
By using the example of several books written by "Hurricane Carter", a famous boxer in the 60's imprisoned for murder in Chicago, profiler Pat Brown shows us how Carter, like many sociopaths, can give themselves away via their own words, attitudes and character traits, traits that can readily show themselves even within the writings of these individuals.As Sociopaths are almost always highly intelligent and articulate, writing is often a natural extension of this and in prison many do so prolifically, oftentimes an exercise in narcissism; Seeing their words printed out, being read, pored over by others, this gives them an ego rush.
Where all of this becomes important is when it relates to intervention, hopefully before the sociopath escalates their crimes to murder. But at the very leas, identifying the markers for this particular dangerous brand of criminal, will only assist the courts, probation/ parole officers, and all social service employees, to identify and intervene, using whatever means are at their disposal to ensure that this criminal does not get an easy path out of the system - to harm others, to predate, to escalate their crimes.
