The New Neo

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.]

Now, there’s a pleasant subject, you might say (sarcastically, I hope). But I take the topic up as a public service.

Let me explain how I came to research this. Sometimes when I’m working, either on the blog or around the house, I put the TV on as background noise. It’s often tuned to the news, but I get very tired of that, and lately I’ve sometimes been watching reruns of “Forensic Files,” an investigative series that focuses on the use of forensics in crime. It’s a sort of CSI without the glam actors: just the facts, ma’m, just the facts. I’ve found that truth is often stranger—and to me more interesting—than fiction.

The other night a segment on the Porco murder case aired. It was a murder so grisly and brutal that I’m not going to go into the details; you can find the show here, or more information here. The murderer of the father, and attempted murderer of the mother, was the Porcos’ college-age son Christopher, a handsome, intelligent young man who clearly was a psychopath and had shown signs of it for years although he had never before been violent.

I became curious about the trigger that turned Christopher Porco from non-violent to violent, and I found this fascinating article about that murder and other similar cases. It describes a group of parent-killers with a pattern similar to Porco’s. They were distinguished by having previously committed a series of petty crimes involving property (usually stealing, either money or goods or both) against the parents, a lack of remorse or change of behavior, and an escalation to violence in response to a perceived threat of exposure or punishment.

Porco, for example, had forged his father’s signature on large checks, had stolen goods from the home and tried to sell them, had falsified college transcripts, and a host of other deceptions, and his parents were aware of at least some of them. They reacted by admonishing him, trying to implement consequences, and yet assuring him they loved him. In other words, they seemed more or less to be doing the right thing. However:

There were several e-mail correspondences between Porco and his parents that exemplify the tensions between the parties and accurately support research stating that conflicts and arguments are a catalyst for parricide. The parents eventually confronted Porco on his fraudulent behavior and threatened to go to the authorities to take action against him. In one e-mail, the father wrote, “Did you forge my signature as a co-signer? What the hell are you doing? You should have called me to discuss it. ”¦ I’m calling Citibank this morning to find out what you have done and am going to tell them I’m not to be on it as co-signer” (as cited in Perri & Lichtenwald, 2008)…

…Despite the chaos Christopher Porco brought into his parents’ lives, they told him how much they loved him. Unfortunately for them, though, their love was irrelevant for what he planned to do next. Less than 2 weeks from the time the father warned Christopher Porco that he would not hesitate going to the authorities for his son’s fraudulent behavior, Christopher executed his plan to negate the threat. It has been the experience of the authors that the victim’s threat of exposing the fraud will force a shift in the psychopath’s strategy from employing charm, cunning behavior, and manipulation on the victim to employing violence in an effort to silence the victim.

The article describes other several cases with a similar pattern. It also makes some suggestions for parents, and I would think that anyone who faces a similar situation—an offspring who shows a pattern of petty exploitation, theft, and/or forgeries, especially if directed at the funds of parents—or who knows someone with a similar situation, should read it; it could save your or your friends’ lives.

I did my own research on a couple of cases in the public domain in which teenage or young adult children cold-bloodedly killed their parents—for example, the Menendez case and the Dingman case—and sure enough, they fit the pattern. Most of us remember the Menendez case, for example, but how many of us remember (I hadn’t) that the brothers were already guilty of theft committed prior to the murders?:

In 1988 the Menendez brothers became involved in a burglary and a grand theft. These burglaries were not inconsequential; they involved money, property, and some serious jewelry, in the $100,000 range, taken from the safes in neighbors’ houses.

In that case, the father learned of the theft but protected the sons by extra-judicial means rather than have them face the consequences; he returned the jewels and made monetary restitution to the neighbors.

The Menendez parents were extremely wealthy (the Porcos were middle-class, however, as were the Dingmans), and one of the motives for the murder was that the boys were the beneficiaries of the will. They apparently feared that they would be written out of the parents’ will and lose access to very substantial assets in the future. That was also a motive for Porco as well. And in the Dingman case, the older brother “was afraid Eve and Vance Dingman would find out he had stolen money and a .22-caliber pistol from the gun cabinet in their Rochester home.”

Christopher Porco never alleged that his parents had abused him. But the Menendez bothers made that accusation towards their parents and offered it as part of their defense to murder. We will never know the truth about that, but even if they did abuse their children (which I doubt for a host of reasons, but that’s outside the subject matter of the post), the young men were 21 and 18 at the time of the murders, free to come and go, and could have just left the situation and made their own lives.

The point of it all is this: be aware of the danger signs. Someone with a child behaving like that may think that a certain approach will help—love and acceptance, or its opposite tough love and consequences—but the evidence is that there is nothing the parents can do that is enough, and whatever you do it is wise to be aware and take precautions. Again, the article goes into what those precautions might be (for example, don’t give the child a key to the house or the combination to a security system, or passwords to any cyber accounts). And don’t threaten to do something like cut the child out of your will; if you’re going to do it, just do it.

This requires the jettisoning of what is probably a very natural and deep desire to deny what’s happening and the fact that you are parent to a psychopath. And of course not all children who defraud their parents go on to murder them. But realize that such a pattern of property crime and lies on the part of a child puts a parent at risk, and that the time to exercise most caution is when you are thinking of exposing the child’s crimes and having the child face the consequences of the child’s own actions.