Your welcome! Sigrum can you elaborate axis 1 and axis 2 with DR in mind? I know you started to earlier. What else do you think?
Well, for our purposes an Axis I disorder generally refers to personality features that are amenable to change and are likely transient. Axis II disorders are disorders one is usually born with and are more ingrained and resistant to treatment or change. Personality “features” can include things like narcissism, histrionics, etc. When people observe comments DR makes and try to put his statements together as a kind of “tell” this is usually erroneous since doing so likely, even if accurate, is an Axis I feature. When certain personality types such as Anti-Social, Narcissism and Histrionics appear in, say, populations of persons convicted of capital crimes these are almost always Axis II. As you begin to become more intimately familiar with them you realize that this distinction is more than just academic. It really relates to predictability.
So, perfectly normal people can have narcissistic or histrionic traits, for example. But when those features become so pronounced that they reliably influence a person’s interaction with others and the public, it crosses into a different realm. It is persistent, resistant to change and is likely a feature of that person’s behavior at all or most of the times of their lives. When you’ve known one personally or intimately, you understand this intuitively. You know them like yourself, to some degree. This is not a widely accepted academic view, but those who have this experience know that this boundary is really defined by predictability. Human beings are notoriously unpredictable in virtually every behavior. But what you learn with some who are past this boundary is that certain behaviors characteristic of their feature set are robotically, almost perfectly reliable (increasingly predictable with severity). That doesn’t mean everything about them is predictable, just that this limited feature set is. What a lot of psychologists and psychiatrists who don’t have this experience can’t really speak to is this personal knowledge, and the realization that the academic classification of Axis I and Axis II really revolves around predictability. So, I would distinguish the types I’m referring to operationally with Axis I being unpredictable and transient and Axis II being, “hey, I know you, and I can predict you. And you can’t help it or stop yourself from being predictable.” What often doesn’t get published in plain English however, is that this distinction between Axis I and Axis II on the basis of predictability is pronounced and salient.
For criminology, this intuitive understanding of personality disorders is a gold mine because someone like this can tell you what a perpetrator is planning step by step in an uncanny way. Yep, that’s right, I said tell you what someone is planning, and I know the significance of the claim. I also know it to be true. But it’s nothing more magical or remarkable than intimate familiarity. So, knowing that perpetrators of almost all capital crimes, and those crimes that involve behaviors (feature sets) that come up with personality disorders, all have a weakness turns out to be a useful tool: a person who knows them can track them and predict them. You can’t do that with normal people. So, in the case of DR the first step is to observe and see if I recognize him. Simple as that. And I recognize him. But the next step is to ask which feature sets am I recognizing? Is it narcissistic, histrionic, anti-social, etc.? And am I trying to diagnose him? No, I don’t need to. All I’m trying to do is see what feature set is present because once I know, I can predict how he will behave when direct evidence for the behavior is absent. And it will be eerily accurate. Obviously, you can’t convict someone on that, but that’s not the point. The value in this is that what you are actually doing is identifying the underlying framework of his or her
modus operandi. And that is an investigative tool.
But before I say anything, keep in mind that this entire conversation about DR depends entirely on understanding that the behaviors we DO know about that night actually are attributable to him.
So, when I see an adult personality picking up an 11 year old boy onto his back, who is a stranger or near so to him, and when I see his clown act down by the street, when I read about the questions he posed, when I see how he fled, when I recognize his sick jokes and dark humor and so on, I am tracking a consistent, single personality. And I know it’s likely the same one because of its rarity and predictability. Now, let us suppose I see an indication that he harbors the magical belief that the boy is sexually attracted to him. And I see he is running with this boy on his back. I can’t track JEW the same way because I can also tell from the crime scene he is in the normal range. He was cooperating but not willing. He experienced
fear. The personality I’m tracking does not
feel fear. A big mistake academics in my field make is thinking that increased heart rate represents fear and these people are reacting by
feeling fear. In reality, one of the few emotions they are wired to actually feel is
anger. They aren’t afraid or remorseful. They are
angry that things aren’t going their way. And a personality like this will commit the most gruesome acts without flinching, batting an eye or drawing a breath. They will do it like they are drinking a glass of water. If they’re excited it’s only because they are angry. Other than that, it’s just a glass of water, a fork in scrambled eggs, pouring a glass of milk, whatever. This strange lack of wiring in the brain for certain types of emotions has been substantiated by brain scans, but few have recognized what this really means on a crime scene. But noticeably, various U.S. government agencies have known this for over thirty years and articles have been published on this.
So, I don’t know what the boy will do. Suppose something happens near the wood pile. Suppose the boy falls or tries to escape. I can’t know JEW will try to escape, but I certainly do know what the personality I’m tracking will do. He will quickly grab the nearest weapon and chase him. He will preserve his life for future exploitation, overpower the boy, and take him to a private place. He will continue his script. And he will have the presence of mind to fetch anything scattered about in that altercation. Likely finding his shoe if it came off, for example. He might not have time to find everything else, but his penchant for deception will absolutely demand that no one realize he passed this place, or carried this boy on his back. He will not feel fear, pity or remorse in his gut the way the rest of the world would. But more importantly, he is too full of himself to admit he had to attack the boy to gain his compliance. This defies his fantasy. It is a blatant contradiction between his imaginary, magical world and reality. And people, including their victims, exist to serve them in the same way that cardboard serves to package groceries. The concept of LIFE doesn’t exist in their brain. Everything is already dead. To them, words like “sorry” are not only meaningless but the object of considerable laughter and seen as just one manifestation of the naïve mind. But I’m not saying I can know this altercation happened from this alone (mainly because it would be instigated by chance or a normal person). But what I can see easily is how this kind of personality will obsess with that which undermines his ego and his fantasy of being desired by his obsession, which in this case would be JEW. All of this, of course, is magical thinking, but it is intensely real to the sufferer. And the really nice thing for tracking this is that they can’t help themselves, they just keep doing it, consistently and reliably.
The truly explosive scenario occurs when reality collides with magical thinking. This is a profoundly mysterious and troubling phenomenon for the sufferer. So much so it can become like a paranormal experience for them; a religious crucible. So, if an altercation had occurred, I’d expect this personality to exhibit a lot of focus on it, to be preoccupied with the scene (and wanting to return later and often, like it is a shrine). The inexplicable, super mysterious, enigmatic contradiction he experienced eats at his narcissism for years. How could this boy reject him? Why isn’t reality agreeing with … me? Didn’t he understand I was God? And if evidence were left there, or it is suspected that evidence might be there, this person’s ego alone will cause him to be very worried, not about going to jail so much, but about someone discovering his rejection; about someone discovering this all-too important contradiction. His belief in invulnerability and not going to jail is magical and supreme, but this personality’s need for ego affirmation runs
deep.
Now
fast forward and play this backward. Suppose I see indications of an undue focus on the log pile. Then I know something happened there that touched his disorder directly. And it likely had to do with narcissism because this is the primary feature set he displays.
that is how I know a significant event happened there during the abduction. Altercation? Maybe, but something happened there and it ran
deep. But given that fact, I also suspect that evidence might have been found there that night. Funny, but police intuition seemed to draw them right to the log pile. I wonder what they keyed on? This was off to the side of the driveway and it was at night. As was the case with Lizzie Andrew Borden and her barn loft, with Jon Benet Ramsey and the chair and with Amanda Marie Knox and the locked bedroom door, the log pile is that out of place oddity that only squares with a narrative when a personality disorder is introduced into the scene. This is one of the first things I look for in a crime scene. When I looked at this case I knew right way it was something that happened or existed near the driveway. And what DR ultimately did the night of the abduction was to, without realizing it himself, convert his “fear” or concern about something being discovered at the log pile by police into
anger toward the police. The police were, at that point, operating against his interests and as is always the case with narcissism, were thus promoted to DR’s “enemy”. They were “bad” people because they did not serve his purpose. His supposed “upset” attitude when he called 911 was almost certainly anger at the attention being drawn to his pathology played out in his yard in living Technicolor that night. The police, the flashlights, the dogs the helicopter; all of this would drive a
ferocious anger at being “highlighted” for his perverse behavior. Sadly, it is likely the victim who would be the target for venting it and I have zero doubt what would have happened.
So, seeing how messed up moderate to severe Axis II can be, this puts some perspective on Axis I and the “normal” population. When we see statements and behaviors that seem to comport with the same feature sets of personality disorders, there is about a 99.9% chance it corresponds to Axis I. Why? Because Axis II is so rare, and the presentation of Axis II will likely be evident in Axis I features well before its full extent is understood as a more permanent, stable feature. By definition, picking up on words and phrases a person uses is not likely to be reliable because of its transient nature.
You have to look at behaviors that are more ingrained parts of their everyday living to pin down an Axis II pattern.
~ svh
