Axton Betz-Hamilton now believes her mother was a psychopath.
Nobody thought so when the woman was alive. She was an attentive mother, outwardly normal, seemingly loving – nothing like the incoherent, depraved monsters we’ve come to associate with the term psychopath
But after she died in 2013, papers found in the family’s rural, east-central Indiana home showed that she was in fact the mastermind behind an 20-year scheme in which she stole the identities of her husband, her daughter and her father-in-law, perhaps to finance an elaborate double life.
The crimes – persistent and clever — had long baffled the family and had so preoccupied Betz-Hamilton that she conducted academic research on the topic of children as victims of identity theft well before the mystery had been solved. She’s now a professor of consumer studies at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston.
Axton, whose story was recently the subject of episodes 51 and 52 of the popular “Criminal” podcast, was deeply hurt, obviously, but also puzzled: What kind of person could appear sweet, caring and devoted while brazenly ripping off her immediate family for 20 years?
“I started researching different psychological disorders that have lack of guilt as a core feature,” she told me via email Thursday. “I stumbled on psychopathy.”
Psychopaths” are “people who are so emotionally disconnected that they can function as if other people are objects to be manipulated and destroyed without any concern,” in the words of prison psychiatrist Robert Hare, who studied the phenomenon for years.
Psychopaths “often have disarming or even charming personalities,” wrote Scott Bonn, a professor of sociology and criminology at Drew University, in a 2014 article in Psychology Today. They “are very manipulative and can easily gain people’s trust. They learn to mimic emotions, despite their inability to actually feel them, and will appear normal to unsuspecting people. Psychopaths are often well educated and hold steady jobs. Some are so good at manipulation and mimicry that they have families and other long-term relationships without those around them ever suspecting their true nature.”
Doctors can’t see it in brain scans or blood chemistry tests. Researchers acknowledge that it occurs on a spectrum, and sometimes it’s hard to draw the line between can between jerks and psychopaths.
To help, Hare drew up a checklist of 20 traits. The subject gets zero points for every item on the list that doesn’t apply, one point if the item partially applies and two points if it fully applies.
Here’s the list:
1. Glibness, superficial charm
2. Grandiose sense of self-worth
3. Need for stimulation, proneness to boredom
4. Pathological lying
5. Conning, manipulative
6. Lack of remorse or guilt
7. Shallow affect (inability to experience a range of emotions)
8. Callous, lack of empathy
9. Parasitic lifestyle
10. Poor behavioral control
11. Promiscuous sexual behavior
12. Early behavior problems
13. Lack of realistic long-term goals
14. Impulsivity
15. Irresponsibility
16. Failure to accept responsibility for own actions
17. Many short-term marital relationships
18. Juvenile delinquency
19. Revocation of conditional release (parole violator)
20. Criminal versatility (commits a broad range of crimes)
Supposedly, a score of more than 30 is major red flag and sign of psychopathic tendencies.
The problem with this list and any associated scorekeeping is that just about every item on it is highly subjective. What number of marital relationships is “many”? to name just one example. How short does a marriage have to be to fall into the category “short-term”?
Still, as a whole, the checklist is pretty good at describing the sorts of people we should avoid at all costs — as friends, as romantic interests, as bosses and as political leaders.
Sometimes, like in the case of Axton Betz-Hamilton, we don’t have a choice.
Other times, like at elections, we do
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From Psychopaths: how can you spot one? (The Telegraph, 2014)
>>For their co-authored book, “Snakes in suits: When Psychopaths go to work”, Hare and another researcher, Paul Babiak, looked at 203 corporate professionals and found about four per cent scored sufficiently highly on the PCL-R to be evaluated for psychopathy. Hare says that this wasn’t a proper random sample (claims that “10 per cent of financial executives” are psychopaths are certainly false) but it’s easy to see how a lack of moral scruples and indifference to other people’s suffering could be beneficial if you want to get ahead in business….
It would, says Hare, probably have been an evolutionarily successful strategy for many of our ancestors, and can be successful today; adept at manipulating people, a psychopath can enter a community, “like a church or a cultural organisation, saying, ‘I believe the same things you do’, but of course what we have is really a cat pretending to be a mouse, and suddenly all the money’s gone”. …
“Psychpathy is probably the most pleasant-feeling of all the mental disorders,” says the journalist Jon Ronson, whose book, The Psychopath Test, explored the concept of psychopathy and the mental health industry in general. “All of the things that keep you good, morally good, are painful things: guilt, remorse, empathy.” >>>>
