Another psychopath: James Hammes
Here’s a truly fascinating article (link found at American Digest), which describes an embezzler who went on the lam and was finally caught after six years of running.
Did I write “running”? I actually meant “hiking”—because what Jim Hammes was doing for most of that time was hiking the Appalachian Trail and becoming a well-known and affable figure there. Oh, and he was also growing a big long beard, which made him virtually unrecognizable. He was caught, however, by someone who recognized him from a program on TV, although the photos on the program hardly resembled the man he had met. There was just something about the eyes—
I said it was a fascinating story, and it is. But the reason I’m writing about it here is that it turns out that Hammes (trail name: “Bismark”) wasn’t just an embezzler of eight million dollars. He was most likely a wife-murderer, too, and if so his crime seems to have fit the pattern I laid out in my recent post “psychopaths who murder their parents.” That is, he is a person whose specialty was a financial or property crime, and who had never shown any prior propensity for violence, who then murders a family member (in this case his wife) because that person was starting to be on to the criminal’s game and he/she fears being exposed and caught.
For a psychopath, whose question for every human he/she encounters appears to be “What can you do for me, what have you done for me lately, and how can I take advantage of you?”, it seems a no-brainer to kill the person close to you who might no longer be useful and might even be about to get in your way.
[NOTE: You may disagree that Hammes is a psychopath. I’m not entirely sure, myself. But the portrait painted in the article makes me think he most likely is.]
Maybe he has a brain tumor?
Ann Rule makes a specialty of such stories.
I read a Fever in the Heart.
I started another of her books then … stopped.
Can’t read that stuff and continue to relate to others … Need special training for that.
Remains this is planet earth …good to get a sense as to keep one’s instincts tuned.
Then overall let it go but at the same time train proactively.
People read that stuff but don’t train.
Gift of Fear.
Much like a mini Hussein, they are so paranoid that they think everyone else is just as evil and vile as them. So they’d rather kill them and get rid of their families, since those could be weaknesses.
I should fess up a bit. When I question something, I am not… completely… questioning. I’m sounding out. I gladly admit that I know nothing. Literally. Even God, the thing I am most certain of, is faith, not corporeal knowledge. Urhm… mostly. However, I am a suspicious sort. When I say, write, imply… something, I am looking for someone to answer something I may have missed. Just… so’s you know.
Ah, but about this one? I am familiar with this particular case… mildly. I remember the picture of him fully bearded. I never did come to a conclusion about particular pathos or simple sin, greed. Just heard the story. However, the press really mangles stories. More often than not, they hack the truth to bits trying to sell the sensationalism. Usually, if they say one thing, I highly doubt it. I look for reasons why they might insist on such as well. Was their target, a scumbag or murder or other… true… also conservative, of faith, or of a sort the media hate? Or against whom the media has an ax to grind? Or socially on the out? Jewish, Catholic (at least of the actually faithful sort), wealthy?
Simply, if the media is portraying someone as anything, I look for why they are doing that. It doesn’t always have to do with the target, either. They have been trying to get people off from serious crimes by trying to indicate psychological problems for… a very long time. Gotta watch them. So, that’s all I’m going to say on that.
The hints that come through about the AT culture are quite enough. Lots of non-judgmentalism. Lots of dishonesty. Trail names??
So all psychopaths are Democrats. That explains a lot. (Sorry, just couldn’t help it.)
Doom , that’s a good stance to take against enemy propaganda.
enemy is the key word here.
Civilization and its enemies. All neatly packaged in this short book.
Fight now or fight later. Later will be harder.
Doom @ 5:02 — your entire post is interesting.
If I can add (my own) slight observation to one part:
Simply, if the media is portraying someone as anything, I look for why they are doing that. It doesn’t always have to do with the target, either. They have been trying to get people off from serious crimes by trying to indicate psychological problems for… a very long time.
The media is also trying to brand people as serious criminals by trying to indicate psychological problems. In my perception, this type of branding has long since become the dominant type.
It is the type of branding which has popular appeal and reflects a deeper agenda of fomenting hatred and division.
The nature and role of conscience is simply not a topic ever discussed nowadays. That would require a discussion of human nature and the formation of conscience, with the tedious and unhelpful focus on actual human beings as actual individuals.
I can get it for you wholesale is the easier way.
Used to be a time when the bogus was almost exclusively about getting people off. That is all implicit now. The widespread and lasting disdain for the word “liberal” shows the futility of that project.
So much more effective to criminalize people. Americans, we are told, day after day, are criminals and low-life’s, as shown on the local news to the approbation and pointless bitter acrimony of the audience, The Exempt who cheer lead their own destruction.
The evidence that he killed his wife by arson is speculative at best. We have to trust that the writer is correct, something that should always be questioned. A more sympathetic writer could use the same facts and write that the tragic death of his wife in an accidental fire while he was out taking a long walk caused him to go over the edge and lead him steal and then disappear.
texasyankee:
There are several rather large problems with your alternate theory.
The first is that Hammes is alleged to have begun to embezzle the money from the company in 1998. His wife Joy was killed in the house fire in 2003.
The second is that years before her death Hammes had been supporting a mistress and had a child with the mistress.
The third is that the house fire that killed Joy began right after he went out for a walk quite late one night, at a time when their daughter was away, and the cause of the fire was unclear and disputed.
The fourth is that he has been connected to five suspicious fires in all.
The fifth is that, as the article by Browning reported, Joy’s sister said that Joy had confided to her that she was suspicious that Jim was up to something shady, and that Joy “had started asking [Jim], who handled the finances, how he could afford to take week-long scuba diving trips to the Caribbean, alone, while she stayed at home with their teenage daughter.” In other words, not only was he embezzling money before she died, but she was aware that something was not right and had let him know it.
(See this, this, and this, and watch the video at that last link.)
So your idea that his stealing came after his wife’s death just doesn’t fit the facts, no matter how you stretch them. He was stealing before she died.
I was not postulating a new theory but just pointing out that facts can be cherry picked and this author seemed to be doing so. It seemed to me that he was writing to a formula and had reached a conclusion and picked facts to fit his theory.
texasyankee:
But the facts you were positing don’t fix the basic facts, unless you leave at virtually everything, including when the embezzlement started and when the wife died.
I’m not sure what your point is. I was saying a different writer using the same basic facts but different adjectives could paint a sympathetic picture. That would seem to be non controversial.
I would also be very careful about the murder allegation. I remember this case and ever since I have been reluctant to believe allegations of murder due to arson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Todd_Willingham
neo, what is the difference between a “sociopath” and a “psychopath”? Is it the propensity for violence? Is a sociopath just a latent psychopath? Or is the distinction even meaningful at all?
texasyankee:
My point is that even the most sympathetic writer could not use the facts of this particular case to say that Hammes’ embezzlement was due to a reaction to his wife’s death. He began embezzling 5 years before she died.
So although yes, writers can frame a story to be more or less sympathetic to a person, unless the writer is going to lie about the basic facts, the scenario you speculate about wouldn’t work in this case.
FOAF:
The distinction between psychopath and sociopath is somewhat vague. I wrote about it before here:
This guys fits Cicero’s traitor lament and was “The Enemy of Civilization” since every family is a civilization in itself.
Mentioned earlier, Ann Rule makes it a career of chronicling such things, each one more inane than the other.
This inanity, What are the odds of two psychopaths in the same litter?:
Kissels Of Death.
Two psychos find each other:
Murder in East Hampton.
Ted did not deserve this. He was a good guy.
Again, there are such stories to no end.
If path in sociopath means to deviate from the path, then a sociopath is anti social to an extreme level. And a psychopath has a problem with psychology, such as empathy. However, in some societies, that is a virtue, not a vice. Check palestine.
So a sociopath is less scientific since it relies on relative cultural judgments of what is or isn’t normal in society. We’re presumably talking about our society (that’s not consistent to begin with). Whereas the psychiatrists wish to think that their psychopathy treatments extend to all of humanity’s psyche… which may or may not be true, even.
Here’s something new, which most people won’t understand.
A higher level warrior in society was often someone who could flip the “switch”. Meaning, they weren’t pro social psychopaths or sociopaths. They didn’t have insufficiently developed emotional imagination and empathy. When they were normal, they were normal socially conditioned members of their society. But when a threat faces them, they can switch off their emotions, killing their emotions, and go to town on the enemy.
People who are abnormal, are the ones that flip the switch and then can’t turn it back off again. Then they are in trouble.
This is triggered via a state consciousness shift, similar to snipers or killers that don’t need an emotion to justify their killing. The machine mind. The Zone.
This is why martial artists and other socially conditioned denizens like citizen soldiers, aren’t the most dangerous. They may get to that point after some experience, but the most dangerous are the weapons in human form. The ones that turn off their social morality matrix, their conscience, or their empathy, in order to defend X by destroying Y.
A fundamental difference is that a normal person that flips off the switch, can feel guilt. The abnormal person or the dysfunctional person, doesn’t feel guilt. He doesn’t even know that he did anything wrong, since the brain processes used to imagine it are turned off 100% all the time. He’d have to consciously think about it to figure it out.
From one perspective, a warrior doesn’t need emotions other than as motivation. A warrior doesn’t need hearing. A warrior doesn’t need to see color. All of that is wasteful brain processes that take up time, bandwidth, and oxygen. Eliminate them, shut them all down, and divert all power to the physical senses, reaction speed, and balance mechanisms, to unleash a human body’s full 100% power, rather than the 90% most people are capped at.