If Nobody Got Told
"The biggest fuck-up with killing people, if nobody, if nobody got told then nobody would've slipped information," he added.I was reading this story of a Calgary murder trial in Toronto's Globe and Mail and I was surprised by the above quote. I'm not used to seeing "fuck-up" in a newspaper but then again I'm reading mostly American newspapers. Not only would the obscenity cause problems for American editors, but the grammar would give them another reason to reject the quote. It's a choice between decency and realism, and I liked the Globe and Mail's choice, which gives me greater insight into how this awful man thinks and acts.
I can't resist summarizing the crime story, which is tragic, but it sets up another astonishing quote from this 25-year-old murderer. He and his then 12-year-old girlfriend killed her family because they didn't want him seeing her. These cold-blooded killers fled but were caught, presumably because they told friends how to find them. On the way to a psychiatric evaluation, the man gave details of the murders, bragging to a fellow traveller who was an undercover cop. He was already thinking about what life would be like with his girlfriend after prison.
He ruminated about their plans once they get out to have a "gothic wedding," move to Germany, buy a castle and raise a couple of kids. He talked almost proudly about the notoriety the murders had given them. "Me and my old lady have become legends," he said.
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That sounds a lot like Charlie Starkweather...
There's an old saying for this: "Loose lips sink ships".
The truly bizarre thing about the publishing of the story is that his (already convicted) 12 year old girl friend can't be named because of her age. Apparently if you plan the murder of your family and aid in their death, you are still so sensitive that you might be upset if your name appears in print.
#3, Woodwose:
Or perhaps susceptible to vigilante justice?
The Darlington Cannibal was similarly only caught because he boasted widely of his crime. It took a long time before anyone believed him, though.
An acquaintance of mine was imprisoned (with three of his friends) after mentioning his grave-robbing to a stranger at a party, who turned out to be an off-duty policewoman.
How can you be an "old lady" at 12...?
@ Woodwose
Publication of the names of most youth offenders is not allowed under the Youth Criminal Justice Act. If someone's between 14 and 17 and considered dangerous, their name might be released.
The idea is a) to prevent vigilante justice; b) to allow reintegration with the community once released -- which may seem lax for rape or murder, but that kind of stuff makes up a tiny proportion of youth crime. It's probably also to make things easier for their families.
Kids under 12 can't be convicted because they're considered too young to be held criminally responsible.
@ Stratosfyr
In this case, there's also c) the fact that she's a minor who was coerced into it by her 25 year-old boyfriend.
I remember reading about case a couple of years ago. He had her convinced he was a werewolf from the 17th Century. If she believed that, she could have been talked into anything.
As for cursing in print in Canadian newspapers, I think this only made it in because it was from a quoted source. Canadian media isn't a cesspool of profanity just yet.
The best thing to do with this guy is to have him charged and convicted of child abuse and statutory rape. Then put him in prison with the general population, because even hardened criminals have a code. They would take care of this child rapist.
Well, anonymity is not going to make it easier on HER family.
Re: #7:
http://tinyurl.com/698m95
Also, a number of other news sources (local papers, mostly) have been reporting the girl's name. So much for that publication ban...
People like this truly scare me. I was at a party a few weeks ago, dude a friend of mine was dating had just got out of jail and I'm trying to be empathetic towards him...say something like "yeah, a lot of things I use to do as a kid would have gotten me thrown in jail these days" and just tried to drop the subject.
Oh no, he kept continuing...he says "If he would have minded him own f*cking business, he ain't get his neck broked"...to which I say, what do you mean? Protecting a loved one or something? "He should have stayed in his bedroom and not be a hero"...
Guy broke into someones house, and blames the victim for trying to defend his property and life, to the point of claiming if the guy would have just stayed in his room, he wouldn't have gone to jail and wouldn't have been thrown in jail...only reason the criminal didn't get longer was that his buddies told the victim that if he testified, he would be killed.
The criminal mind is interesting...something called locus of control...they believe that everyone but them causes the circumstances for which happens to them. Never any personal responsibility. It is both horrifying knowing that people like this exist and fascinating to see it up close.
How's he going to pay for that castle? Book deal?
#9 Pipenta:
Quoted for hilarious awesomeness.
Also, how much you wanna bet this guy says the reason he's so messed up is because people played on his last name in school, calling him either "Stanky" or "Stinky"?
How does one raise a child that turns around and kills you, or assists in killing you, or just stands by while watching someone kill you?
These two have some notoriety by now. What they don't have is heart, or sense of what is right.
I have nothing against goths,- some of my friends are goths. These two, however, are not goths; they are cold-blooded murderers that will not hesitate to take somebody's life for a cone of ice cream.
I'm not a judge, but both their sentences should be like life without parole. And yes, the 12yo should be tried as an adult she thinks she is.
Thanks Clif for the Locus of Control bit, makes an interesting read on Wikipedia.
For a little while in the 90s, the San Francisco Chronicle printed whatever people said. The paper was littered with obscenities. That was at the same time that they began widely using 'queer' instead of 'gay'. Sadly, the obscenities got cleaned up again after a few months. But it was a treat to feel like the newspaper was reporting what actually happened and treating its readers like adults. Fortunately, 'queer' is still a style option for writers.
@ nuclearmoose...
"The best thing to do with this guy is to have him charged and convicted of child abuse and statutory rape. Then put him in prison with the general population, because even hardened criminals have a code. They would take care of this child rapist."
Not cool. Don't advocate or hope for such things. Prison is bad, bad, bad. Vigilantism, even on criminals, reduces our civilization, it does not increase justice. What you advocate may actually happen, but it doesn't make it right or just.
You also have no evidence that this guy is a 'rapist' in the conventional sense... only the statutory sense. Your anger is understandable; making stuff up is not.
It's just horrible in every way imaginable, for everyone involved. What humans can do to one another saddens me, and I hope these folks do get what they deserve. One of the worst punishments is that they grow to regret their actions, and fully grasp what they did. It's almost too much to hope.
"The criminal mind is interesting...something called locus of control...they believe that everyone but them causes the circumstances for which happens to them. Never any personal responsibility."
Sounds like the GOP base.
"You also have no evidence that this guy is a 'rapist' in the conventional sense... only the statutory sense."
Wow...just wow. Where does one draw the line? If you can't draw it at a 25 year old humping a 12 year old, where is the line? 40 year olds on a willing 6 year old...that ain't rape...its just a law that uptight people have!?!
I don't care how willing a 12 year old is, it is rape. (Ignoring the gray areas such as what if the dude were 14 or 15...this is well past the gray lines).
@ Fauxscot:
"Your thumbs - give them to me."
@ Anonymous:
No she shouldn't. The reason that we have different punishments for minors is that a 12 year old is not and adult. They don't have an adult brain. There are huge portions of their brain related to empathy and forethought that are simply no where near as developed as an adult's. To think that they see the world as an adult, and so have the same rational choice-making abilities as an adult, is simply wrong.
This is compounded many times over when they are under the influence of a psychopath, as this girl clearly was.
We all know this, but when we see crimes as shocking, as adult, as murder, we forget it and figure that anyone that can commit such adult crimes must essentially be an adult. They aren't.
An adult with a 12 year-old's brain would quite literally fail any sanity test a court might administer. They would completely flunk any section that involved the prefrontal cortex (rational decision making) and particularly the medial prefrontal cortext (empathy, social interaction).
Wait, wasn't this basically the plot for 'Natural Born Killers?' Mickey & Malory 4evar!
There's an 8 year-old in Arizona being charged with two counts of pre-meditated murder.
You can't expect too much more from a 25 year old goth kid, with a 12 year old girlfriend.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tEgzGnzojc
Clif Marsiglio @11;
I think the criminal justice system should be rehabilitative rather than punitive; guys like you're describing should, once identified, be kept away from society until such time as they've been fixed. Forever if necessary.
There's no way that someone who thinks like that can become a functioning member of society; he will continue to cause harm up to the point that he finally kills someone and is put away for good.
The question is, how do you rehabilitate a psychopath?
"The question is, how do you rehabilitate a psychopath?"
With a small yet very fast application of lead.
Santa's Knee @28;
It's cheap and effective, definitely. I will write to my congressman demanding a policy of psychopath perforation.
Another productive morning down the tubes (from reading the full account of events):
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=7c72ae9c-5d12-4dc7-8bbd-854f075e581f
I hope it's never optioned for a movie. That would be a sick, tragic irony.
@Bobo Dole --
I agree. They need to be locked up for a long time and we need to treat them as humanely as possible. If we need to lock them up the rest of their lives, we apologize that our society let them down and throw away the key in the process.
Personally, I don't see rehabilitating a true psychopath. I've studied personality and associated disorders to know some people just aren't going to pull out of it. By the time one is 18, their personality is going to be stable enough that even if they change, it is most likely going to be degrees of change and not a full turn around to being anything close to what is acceptable in society. Trying to think, but I have a few books by Robert Hare on the subject...never mind...look up his work (even if I'm thinking of someone else!)
Non-psychopaths (and a lot of what people think is such, is not...a lot of people can do horrible things, yet be horrified by the fact that they are doing it)...lots of room for improvement and getting them the help to parse thoughts rationally so that they never do what they did again.
I just don't like the punitive nature of our prisons. It goes completely against my Christian nature...as an imperfect human, yeah a bullet sounds like a good solution, but it makes us worse people in doing so...
Clif,
I would rather have imperfect bullet-firing people in the world rather than perfect psychopaths in storage awaiting "mercy"...
Only in America.
@Fauxscot:
"Not cool. Don't advocate or hope for such things. Prison is bad, bad, bad. Vigilantism, even on criminals, reduces our civilization, it does not increase justice. What you advocate may actually happen, but it doesn't make it right or just."
Are you perhaps being a bit too liberal? This person seduced a 12-year-old into being an accessory to (if not participant in) the murder of her family. I say throw him to the wolves.
Are you perhaps being a bit too liberal?
Hmmm. I might have gone with compassionate and thoughtful. Admittedly not as exciting as vengeful and bloodthirsty.
The 12-year-old can hopefully be rehabilitated to some kind of reasonably well-adjusted life, and should be given every chance. The criminal who seduced her into this crime, however, appears to be a psychopath, by definition beyond redemption, and one is faced with a stark choice: put them to death (calling it "capital punishment" in the spirit of Old Testament retribution, or the more sterile if Orwellian "involuntary euthanasia", as if dealing with a vicious animal), or else warehoused under high security, with no prospect of freedom, slowly going mad in a solitary cell for the next 50+ years, at the taxpayers' expense. How much would you pay for the luxury of a clean conscience?
@Antinous: compassion is all very well. In a perfect world, after a good talking to and a cup of tea, he'd see the error of his ways and spend the rest of his days trying to undo the damage he has done. However, this is not that world.
In a world without prisons (as the original poster appears to have been advocating), how would one deal with such a psychopath? Move him on to the next town, like a paedophilic priest? Ask him nicely not to kill anyone else? It appears that the offender was in that tiny minority of psychopaths who have no conscience and no internal sense that it is wrong to kill people. He needs to be taken out of the company of other human beings permanently, one way or another. The only matter for debate is the convention by which this should be accomplished (i.e., should society be barbaric enough to kill him, or should it lock him in a box until he expires of old age?)
Wow, acb. Nice way of framing it. Compassion equals letting serial killers go free after a cup of tea.
I would give violent criminals far longer sentences than they receive now. But I'd do it because they present a danger to society, not because of thinly disguised bloodlust. If you believe that compassion and security can't co-exist, you live in a very frightening reality.
"If you believe that compassion and security can't co-exist, you live in a very frightening reality."
Hey, I live in this reality, it's called California! (Prison guard union stranglehold on rationality for the win.)
It's actually in the CP Style guide that if you're going to print "fuck" in the newspaper, you should actually print fuck. Not f***. Not "f-word". Fuck.
is just about money. Rich societies can afford to cage the hopelessly dangerous, poor societies buy one bullet.
Never trust the government with the death penalty.
@#19:
"Sounds like the GOP base."
NOEN, you're cracking me up. LOL.
Another reason not to have children.
I was puzzled by the seemingly vontradictory beliefs of the Pro Life/Capital Punishment crowd until I saw their logic: Give the bastards a running start.
The post immediately before this one -- the BBTv Unicorn Chaser post -- is causing my (up-to-date) Safari browser to crash.
@28
AMEN!!!
@35
Exactly who is your compasion for? It is certainately not for the victoms.
@47: explain to me what compassion they can be shown? Explain to me how executing the murderer would show compassion. I simply do not see the link between capital punishment and compassion for *anyone*, victims included.