Jack – Hello, stranger.

Stranger – Hey.

Jack – Alright, then. Share with the readers what it is we are having a conversation about, if you will.

Stranger – We’re going to talk about a man I killed and how I got away.

Jack – And my entire purpose in this conversation is simply to ask the questions that move things forward and in the most interesting direction. How’d we meet?

Stranger – I emailed you through your contact page.

Jack – And what did you email me?

Stranger – I emailed you some case work and pictures of newspaper articles briefly mentioning the story I’m going to share to prove it happened.

Jack – And your point was proven. Why’d you email?

Stranger – I read one of your blogs about a conversation with a rape victim. Thought the story would fit with the tone of the site.

Jack – “Blogs”, and it does because this site is about whatever you want it to be.
You refuse to publicly share your name. Explain why and what else you are unwilling to share, before we start.

Stranger – The people involved have personally asked me to keep these details a secret. They don’t want to be associated with the publication of this information. I won’t share my name, town or state.

Jack – You are a fellow person with clinical psychopathy, correct?

Stranger – Yeah.

Jack – When were you diagnosed?

Stranger – When I was around seven or eight.

Jack – Why were you studied for it?

Stranger – The death of a close relative in the family, and my lack of an “appropriate” reaction led to therapy.

Jack – In your words, describe what Psychopathy is in general, and then for you.

Stranger – In general psychopathy is a condition/personality trait in which you feel little or no emotional connection to things without choosing them yourself unless you can’t feel emotion at all.

Jack – Elaborate on your view on emotion.

Stranger – To me they are a choice.

Jack – So, you do feel emotions?

Stranger – Yeah. I choose where I put them, but there is an off switch.

Jack – What does psychopathy mean personally to you?

Stranger – To me, psychopathy means I get to respond to things starting at logical reasoning first.

Jack – Agreed. Take us to the night of December 31st. What did the events of the night look like?

Stranger – I was at a New Year’s celebration at my girlfriend’s family’s house.

Jack – Did you drink at the party?

Stranger – I did.

Jack – How much? Were you drunk?

Stranger – I believe I was.

Jack – Were you drinking age?

Stranger – No. I was 19 years old.

Jack – Your girlfriend’s family was okay with you guys drinking at that age? Was your girlfriend the same age, too?

Stranger – They were. Her family was easy going. And she was 20 at the time.

Jack – Let’s fast forward to the end of the New Year’s party. What time did you head home?

Stranger – It was about 2am the next morning.

Jack – So, it’s January 1st, early morning. What’s the first thing you do when you get home?

Stranger – I went to bed immediately. Knocked out after a minute or two.

Jack – Okay. So, you were asleep. What woke you up?

Stranger – A crash of glass in the kitchen. It sounded like someone dropped glass cups and plates.

Jack – Did you go to check what it was?

Stranger – Not instantly, no. I tried to fall back asleep. I figured my stepfather was drunk and broke a couple of things by accident.

Jack – Other people lived in this apartment with you? Who were they?

Stranger – Yeah. My mother, stepfather and two brothers were there with me.

Jack – When did you head to the kitchen?

Stranger – Between 30 seconds and 1 minute after the sound. I don’t know why though. I tried to sleep a minute after the sound then left my room.

Jack – Okay, walk me through the next couple of things as you enter the kitchen. What did you first do? What did you see?

Stranger – The lights were off. The light switch to the kitchen was on the wall shared with my room, behind a large bought cabinet.

Jack – Bought cabinet?

Stranger – Yeah, like the ones you buy at target and build at home yourself. It was made of cheap wood.

Jack – Okay, you turn the light on. What’s the first thing you see?

Stranger – First, I see bottles of soda and fruit punch, still sealed, scattered across the floor. I notice what I think is spilled fruit juice or ketchup on the floor. Glass, which sort of confirmed my cups and plate theory.

Jack – You walk into a mess of a kitchen, basically.

Stranger – Yeah. Then I notice the window is broken and at that moment I hear my mother say, “What is wrong with you?”

Jack – Was she saying that to you?

Stranger - At first, I thought she was. This was suddenly my fault somehow. I looked over to her room thinking she’d be standing there. Her door is open, lights are off and her and my stepfather are still in bed. She was talking to the man standing on the bed over the two of them.

Jack – What did you do next?

Stranger – I didn’t really understand what was going on just yet.

Jack – What do you mean?

Stranger – The man standing over them began to hit my mother. Punching and kneeing her.

Jack – What the fuck, dude. What did you do?

Stranger – Before I could make my way to them, my stepfather sprung up and flung him, in one shot, from the bed to the living room. He then ran out after him. The man slammed my stepfather against the floor.

Jack – Was he okay?

Stranger – He was. The time it took him to get up was long enough for me to grab the guy’s arm and throw him at the door. He hit the door and then the floor.

Jack – What’s your stepfather doing now? Where are your mother and two brothers?

Stranger – My older brother is calling the cops, my little brother was in my mother’s room. My stepfather had opened the door and together we threw the guy outside.

Jack – Alright, so the cops come now?

Stranger – No. When the guy landed in the hallway, he picked up a led pipe. We shut the door, but he just slammed his body into it and hit it with the pipe.

Jack – What the fuck is this guy’s problem? He sounds like a zombie.

Stranger – That is exactly what I thought in the moment! I swore he was a zombie or something like that. I thought rabies.

Jack – How much like zombie are we speaking?

Stranger – He didn’t appear at all reasonable. He looked confused and angry, but I was sure none of us had ever met the guy.

Jack – So, he’s trying to break in. Did he succeed?

Stranger – He doesn’t but in the middle of slamming into the door he ripped it off the hinges.

Jack – Holy shit. This dude rips your door off?

Stranger – Yeah, pretty fucked up, right?

Jack – Yes. That’s insane. Go on.

Stranger – My stepfather and I just hold the door up between us and him. While I stand there thinking of what else to do I start thinking about the guy.

Jack – What guy? The dude who broke in?

Stranger – Yeah. Trying to break down his behavior I came to the conclusion that he was either on drugs or out of his mind. I weighed the odds based on where the apartment was located and assumed he was on drugs.

Jack – Where your apartment was located?

Stranger – The ghetto.

Jack – Getcha, go on.

Stranger – Well, if its drugs then he’ll, in all probability, not stop just because he gets arrested one day. He’ll do it again and one day he could attack me.

Jack – Why is this information relevant?

Stranger – It’s the reason I got the knife in the first place.

Jack – Explain.

Stranger – It makes sense that if he won’t stop doing drugs, and he’ll continue to get out of jail, one day I could potentially come across the same guy and have to deal with similar situations. I left my stepfather at the door alone, went to my room and grabbed a dagger my older brother gave me a couple of years back. If I solve the problem, there will be no more problem to deal with. I understood I’d go to prison and I was fine with that.

Jack – Okay, here we go. This is it? Keep going. You are there with the knife.

Stranger – I tell my stepfather to let the door go.

Jack – Why would he?

Stranger – He doesn’t at first. I pull him off.

Jack – How does he take that?

Stranger – I don’t know. I pulled him and then let the door fall open.

Jack – Where is the man?

Stranger – He’s standing on the other side of the door.

Jack – Doing what?

Stranger – Nothing. He’s confused that I stopped resisting and stood there with a strange look on his face.

Jack – Did he see the dagger in your hand?

Stranger – Not until I lifted it for him to see.

Jack – What’s that about? Playing with food?

Stranger – You could say that. This was in all possibility the only time a choice like this would make sense.

Jack – Killing a man?

Stranger – Yeah.

Jack – Right. So, he sees the knife. How does he react?

Stranger – His eye open wide when he realizes it and he starts to say “No, no, no” and backs up.

Jack – He starts to run?

Stranger – No. Behind him is a wall. He had to turn to run, he just walked up against the wall with his hands up. I walked in closer.

Jack – Does he still have the led pipe?

Stranger – He did, but he wasn’t swinging it.

Jack – So, the shock of seeing the knife must’ve been enough to make him forget he had a weapon.

Stranger – That’s what I thought was going on.

Jack – Okay, so then what.

Stranger – I stabbed him.

Jack – Just like that? Just, one two and in? How’d you hold the knife?

Stranger – For the first one I walked into him with the knife by my hip.

Jack – Where’d the first one go?

Stranger – Into his stomach.

Jack – How’d he take it? No pun intended.

Stranger – He didn’t react.

Jack – Which confirms the drugs in his system?

Stranger – Correct. I pulled back and then gave him the second one.

Jack – Did he react now?

Stranger – Kind of. His face looked sad, but unaware.

Jack – Which takes you to the third?

Stranger – Yeah. On the third he collapsed on the floor and watched me.

Jack – Watched you?

Stranger – Yep. Just watched while I kneeled over him and kept stabbing him waiting for some sort of reaction.

Jack – Where were you stabbing him?

Stranger – They were all in the chest and the stomach.

Jack – Did you stop or get stopped?

Stranger – I stopped.

Jack – Why?

Stranger – After a certain number, whether I get a reaction or not, it’s enough.

Jack – Did you reach that number?

Stranger – I went way over.

Jack – How many are we talking? How many times did you stab him?

Stranger – 16.

Jack – You stabbed him 16 times before you stopped?

Stranger – Yeah.

Jack – Then what?

Stranger – I got up and went back inside to wait for the cops.

Jack – Just like that? How’d your family react?

Stranger – They watched me do it. It must’ve been a surreal moment for them.

Jack – Right, they were probably frozen in place.

Stranger – Yeah. They looked as confused as the guy did when he saw the knife.

Jack – What’s your interpretation of their reaction?

Stranger – They might have thought I snapped and they were next.

Jack – Did the guy die?

Stranger – No. He was still alive, bleeding out in the hallway.

Jack – No one did anything?

Stranger – No. My mother was picking up in the kitchen, my little brother sat in the living room, my other brother went outside to wait for the police and the ambulance and my stepfather kept an eye on the guy.

Jack – What were you doing?

Stranger – I was helping my mother pick up the mess in the kitchen. And figuring out that the spilled fruit juice was actually the man’s blood from when he first crashed in through the window.

Jack – How long did it take for the police to show up?

Stranger – About half an hour.

Jack – Did the guy survive the half hour?

Stranger – Yeah. He made it to the hospital.

Jack – The cops, when they showed up, how’d that go?

Stranger – When they arrived they put the guy in handcuffs until the stretcher arrived. Then they cuffed him to that.

Jack – The cops didn’t ask why he was stabbed?

Stranger – They did. They wrote a report and questioned all of us.

Jack – Did you tell them the truth about what happened?

Stranger – I did. I didn’t share my motivations, but the order of events, even when I left the door to get the knife after he’d been outside, all of it.

Jack – How’d they react to that?

Stranger – They didn’t do anything. They put it under self-defense.

Jack – Aren’t they obligated to arrest you in case you are lying?

Stranger – I think so, but they didn’t. They made the report and left. They said that only if his family presses charges will I have to deal with anything.

Jack – When does the man die?

Stranger – He dies in the hospital later in the morning.

Jack – And no cops show up afterwards?

Stranger – Nope.

Jack – You killed a man and faced no consequences?

Stranger – I went to court a single time for it. It was the man’s family and myself present to discuss how they wouldn’t press charges.

Jack – Extremely strange.

Stranger – I thought so too.

Jack – So that’s it? You kill the guy and then it all goes away?

Stranger – More or less. First I found out that he wasn’t only on drugs, but he took the drugs legally. They were antidepressants. He was addicted to them.

Jack – Does that have anything to do with why the family didn’t press charges being given the chance?

Stranger – Yeah. It’s actually the entire reason.

Jack – How do you know this?

Stranger – His family came by once to explain to me why they made the choice they made. And they also invited me to the funeral.

Jack – Did you go?

Stranger – I didn’t.

Jack – Why not?

Stranger – I didn’t feel it was appropriate.

Jack – So this is the end of the story? You killed a guy, faced no consequences and had a conversation with the victim’s family afterwards?

Stranger – Pretty much. The time I went to the court they explained how this was only appropriate because the guy had done this many time before. It wasn’t even the worst case. They gave the situation special treatment and brushed it under the carpet.

Jack – Seems like you don’t agree with how they dealt with it.

Stranger – I don’t.

Jack – But you got away with murder. Why not take the win and move on?

Stranger – Because if I clearly did this under my own agenda and it’s a fact I’m guilty, it makes me wonder how many others cases have vanished and there could be serious killers out there doing it more than once, getting caught for only one and being let slide. Real killers that kill good people could be anyone around us.

Jack – How has this affected your life?

Stranger – It hasn’t. Those events had to happen in order for one man to no longer endanger other people’s lives. Outside of that, I get up in the morning like everyone else.

Jack – Do you attribute this disconnect to the psychopathy.

Stranger – Yeah. It’s the reason I was able to think clearly in the moment and make a decision that turned out for the best. I gambled on whether this could have happen again or might have in the past and it turned out I was right. That ability to consider the information rather than the feeling is what made that accurate estimate possible.

Jack – I thank you for sharing what you’ve been through, or done… How do you look at it?

Stranger – What I’ve done is fine. I’m not ashamed of it. People look down on me for it, but that’s their emotional reaction to it.

Jack – I agree. Many people get sucked into things like this and their first response is to react with how they feel about it first and then move on to how it impacts anyone else or the bigger picture of the matter. I thank you for sharing with us. Is there any ending message, any advice you’d like to share with readers, fellow psychopaths, and people with other mental conditions/personality traits?

Stranger – Don’t be afraid to explore how your mind works, and don’t let anyone tell you that something that is part of you is what’s wrong with you. How many of the “sane” ones believe in something they’ve never seen? Don’t let anyone tell you that you are crazy. You are simply different and that scares people.

Jack – Thank you for your time.

Stranger – Thanks for having me.

 

By Jack Thomas