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It's not often someone says you've saved their life. Especially if
you've never met them. So I was surprised to receive a long letter from
a woman in South Africa saying I'd done just that. 'I have kept your article in Hello magazine ... dating back to
2003!' she says, 'and I want to thank you so much because you saved my
life.' The article was on controlling psychopaths ... the notorious serial
killers Fred and Rose West, who sexually tortured and murdered at least
16 young women, burying them in their Gloucester, UK, house and garden
-- even including Fred West's own daughter.
For thirteen years, the letter said, she was married to a man whom
she discovered to be a liar, with no morals, who manipulated her. ‘I
knew he had no feelings,’ she says, ‘but he was so clever hiding it …
he could convince anyone of anything … he thought he was above the law
… he had to control everything, family, friends, relations, me. 'I knew there was something terribly wrong but I did not know what.’
The time came when my correspondent found he was trying to get her to sign her money over. (She was the one with money, he had none.) A strong intuition, she said, made her able to refuse him. Whereupon he tried those tricks made familiar in the old film Fanny By Gaslight, where the husband tries to make his wife think she’s losing her mind, so she can be put away and he gets the cash.
‘...hiding my keys then putting them back when I wasn’t looking, stealing money from my purse, forcing me into arguments -- anything to try and make out that I was going off my head...’
‘I felt like a rat in the corner fighting for its life -- now of course he did everything in his power to get me to go to a psychiatrist -- primed up no doubt by him to declare me insane.’
She feels she was saved by the fact he became terminally ill. He was now desperate to get her to sign her money over -- to his son by a previous marriage. When she visited him in hospital ‘I could feel EVIL oozing out of him at me -- I was terrified -- THEN I read your article a week before he died and I realised just how dangerous he was and didn’t go back … now I am sure he was hatching a plot with his son …’
When she tried telling her friends what she’d been through they didn’t believe her. Such men are so often charming. She’s had to pull herself together on her own … and the fact that this is still alive in her mind shows how deeply living with such a man has affected her.
She says in a postscript: ‘I think he must have been a psychopath.’
Yes, I think so too. She has given a classic definition … the person who can understand and manipulate others’ feelings, but himself doesn’t share them. One classic test for a psychopath is to tell him he’ll get an electric shock after a countdown from 10. Most people start getting anxious pretty early in the count … a psychopath feels practically no anxiety, maybe a flutter as the count reaches 2 …1.
The latest thinking hints at a connection with the recently discovered ‘mirror neurons.’ What are they? Well, they were found when a guy reached for a peanut … but I’ll come back to that in a later post... |
