Alizé Bland

Violent Criminal Behavior

Dr. E. Wheeler
Week 5: 2021

Psychopathy and Crime

This week is all about psychopathy. Four different individuals are provided to you via video or
external text in the PowerPoint. Review these videos/text and pick one of the individuals that
you'd like to focus on.

Based on the information in the PowerPoint, why do you believe the individual you chose is a
psychopath? Be specific. Were you able to observe something from the videos? Did it relate to
any of the charts provided?

Honestly, I do not think that they are psychopaths...

Yes, they may have all had some characteristics of psychopathy and did some distressing things
but I wouldn’t call them psychopaths for it. What I got from the slides and interviews, is that
you have to truly show remorse if you are not a psychopath. As a few of them stated, “I don’t
have any remorse for my actions.”

In Aileen’s case, they did not take her seriously because she was a woman. A woman who had
killed 7 men and they were threatened by those actions, so instead of trying to get her side of the
story and allow her to tell her the truth, they exploited her and her story. During her trial and
interviews, to me, she showed anger, sadness, and hurt. Psychopaths cannot express these true
emotions. If it is true that female psychopaths are the way they are due to environmental
deprivation and physical and sexual victimization then her story of self-defense might have some
truth to it. Looking at Charles Manson’s interview, he only reacted to the questions and
statements made about his case; admitting that he hadn’t killed anyone but told the reporter he
would after his release because they were labeling him as a killer. Something both Aileen and
Manson had in common is that they reacted to the negative labels of evil and wished they would
have shocked the world by multiplying murders they have committed out of anger. As for
Tommy Lynn Sells, I believe that although he internalized his childhood abuse and took that
anger out on his victims; he was still conscious enough to know what he was doing was wrong
and able to recall those encounters in vivid detail when responding to the police and reporter's
questions and being brutally honest when addressing that he has a short temper and it would be
best not to go outside of the line of questioning. Fred Darma did what he did to survive and
should not be under the category of a psychopath but a conman. But if one of the four were to be
labeled a psychopath; it would be him. According to Table 7-2: he has many of the core features
of psychopathy. He was impulsive, irresponsible, conniving, manipulative, lied, stole,
persistently engaged in criminal behavior, and did not accept the consequences of his actions as
the other 3 did.