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.

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.

Ted did not deserve this. He was a good guy.

Again, there are such stories to no end.

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.

The distinction between psychopath and sociopath is somewhat vague. I wrote about it before here:

The terms are often used interchangeably, although some see subtle differences.

A few tips: neither definition involves any inability to tell right from wrong, nor are psychopaths or sociopaths insane. Their inabilities and deficits have to do with empathy, taking responsibility, and behavior (which in psychopaths is not always criminal by any means).

But one of the main characteristics of psychopaths/sociopaths is that they can talk a good line about learning the error of their ways, but they do not actually learn. They are good con artists and can fool people, although they can also manage to temporarily check their antisocial behavior if they see the benefits. They know how to mimic what people want to hear.

Read Cleckley’s book if you want to learn more.

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.

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

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.