Prostitute Kills Serial Killer

Great story with a happy ending here.

A woman in Charleston, W.Va., may have saved her own life and the lives of many other women, as well, when she shot and killed an alleged attacker in her home last week.

Neal Falls showed up at the woman’s home on July 18 after answering an escort ad she had placed on Backpage.com, according to police. He showed up with a “kill list,” multiple pairs of handcuffs and a Subaru full of weapons and tools, including a shovel, knives, a bulletproof vest, a machete, bleach, trash bags, sledgehammers and axes, according to Fox affiliate KPTV…

I grabbed my rake and when he laid the gun down to get the rake out of my hands, I shot him. I just grabbed the gun and shot behind me.”

They were just talking about the 6 missing women and the four bodies found in Ohio on Free Republic a week ago, and saying they might be linked to even more missing women in a nearby area.

To understand characters like this, as well as your more general narcissist, you have to go back in time, to when computers were more primitive.

I can remember typing for hours to produce a detailed proposal, honing it, adding to it, editing it, and then the computer locked up. Back then, the word processor didn’t save all your text automatically, and I hadn’t saved it manually, meaning all those hours of work were right in front of me on the screen, perfected, but they might as well have never happened. The thought of all that work for nothing was irritating beyond words.

For a moment I thought of just bashing in the monitor. I knew it wouldn’t do any good, but imagining it, it would have felt so relieving.

When I look back, the emotional urge was probably like what these characters have, only my version was very minor in scale. There would have been no logic in smashing the monitor. It wouldn’t have solved anything. Even if the monitor were sentient, it didn’t lock up on purpose.

And yet, the urge to go all Office Space on it was there – an emotional force driving an action that logically made no sense.

I ignored it, rebooted, and got to typing. But these characters have that anger constantly, and much more strongly. In some cases, I am sure it is all they feel, every waking moment, directed at everyone around them. They hate, purely and simply, everyone they meet. They yearn to relieve it by acting out. Often operating from a position of weakness, the weakness feeds their rage, even as it forces them to suppress it, feeding an even more powerful force – frustration. Even worse, experience teaches them how to feign normalcy, even as that monster lurks beneath.

Your garden variety narcissist will sate it, little by little, by screwing over the people around them behind their backs. Maybe a little rat poison in the coffee of a family worker (just enough to make you sick), maybe they’ll sabotage a job at work. Scott Peck wrote of the narcissist woman who, in a moment of honesty during therapy, admitted laughing at how fun it was to see everyone around her messed up because of some monkey wrench she had dropped in their works. Finally, for a moment she was relieved.

Some serial killers find jobs, like Dennis Rader as a Code Compliance Officer, and spend their days making people miserable to assuage the rage at everyone. Rader was even able to take time off from serial killing, leading investigators to think he died or was imprisoned.

That is why I love these stories so much. Nobody deserves their fate so much as these amygdala-addled little losers.

Now if only we could find all the rest of them.