Looking into the Dark - Chapter 1.2

Narcissists, Psychopaths and Sociopaths. How do we recognize them and protect ourselves? Chapter 1.2

Chapter 1.2: How Does a Psychopath Behave?

Ann Rule worked the night shift at a suicide hotline in Seattle in the early 1970s. Her desk partner was a young man named Ted, who was handsome, articulate, unfailingly considerate. He walked her to her car on dark nights. He brought her coffee. He was, she later wrote, “the most solicitous” coworker she’d ever had. When the murders started, young women disappearing from university campuses across the Pacific Northwest, one after another, Ann Rule was among those asked to write about the investigation. She spent years refusing to believe what the evidence was slowly making undeniable.

“His mask was perfect,” she wrote, after his execution. “I’d been a cop, had all that psychology, but his mask was perfect.”