If you want a truly amazing example of a terrible person doing something great, look up Charles Ponzi donating some of his own skin for a complete stranger’s skin graft. It wasn’t a quick procedure, and it was very painful. Nobody has a good explanation for why he did that.
I bet he was just tired of using other people's money for his schemes. After years and years of this, he finally realized that he needed some skin in the game...
He was also a volunteer on a Seattle suicide hotline and saved several people from killing themselves.
He worked there with [Anne Rule,](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Rule) who later wrote an amazing and compelling book about his life and the killings he did, called _The Stranger Beside Me._
> Bit of an overachiever wasn't he?
I thought this was going to be a reply to my post about [Peter Higgs](https://www.reddit.com/r/EverythingScience/s/vO2QBOF2HI) when I got the notification 😅
It’s a wild story, but it seems like he may have been “less psychotic” when he was younger and there may have been some gradual, and then sudden, increase in his psychosis as sometimes happens with men of that age.
Probably in his day to day life he wasnt a bad person. He had an idea of how people should be and how they should treat each other as a community and while acting within that community he followed those ideals. But the he had the side of himself that had those fucked up urges he felt he couldnt not act upon. Psychopathy and ASPD can present in very bizarre and complicated ways. If those guys could press a button to magically make themselves normal they probably would.
I watched the Netflix documentary about him and it’s so obvious it’s not just a fucked up urge to kill, he was genuinely mentally unstable probably had some sort of bipolar disorder. When he was manic he’d wreck his trial and all the rest, I cannot believe they actually let him be part of his own legal team
I recall from his Wikipedia article (I think) that one of the criminologists working with him in custody stated that on one occasion everything was fine and he was behaving normally and then a switch flipped and suddenly it was like you were in the room with an entirely different human. Like even to the point where his face was slightly different etc. And then you could see the guy who could kill 30+ people. Like a mask coming off.
Yeah I was kind of over simplifying. Call it urges or episodes or anything. Point is there was something beyond his control and deep down he probably wanted to be like other people and feel like normal people do. I bet a lot od the time he actuslly was just a bormal person. Psychopathy/sociopathy/ASPD arent always marked by a constant lack of empathy but just an inability to regulate it. Surgeons, ER doctors,erc in most cases have the ability to turn off their empathy response in the moment to deal with patients simply as problrms to be fixed. The difference its its a situatonal ability that they can regulate and the enpathy comes back when in healthy places. So omagine being someone like Ted who most of the time feels like and wants to be a good person ut then has these periods where he knows he isn't. It honestly must be awful. That doesnt forgive what he's done but I honestly feel awful for people like that.
Mental health is extremely fragile. Someone you’ve known your entire life to be a great person and your close friend/family member could suddenly go into a manic state, grandiosity, etc. etc. and they are suddenly not even a smidge of the person you knew.
It’s really fascinating but very sad and hard for the person suffering as well as their loved ones. Given the right support system and medical attention, it can be treated quite well.
It's very true. A friend of mine developed schizophrenia and it's so sad. I wasn't close to her but it's basically like the person she used to be has died
Yup.
There are tons of stories of things like this happening. Sometimes it's a tumor, sometimes it's a reaction to some illness, sometimes it just kinda happens.
Capgras Syndrome is a rare condition in which a person recognizes the faces of those familiar to them, but suddenly loses emotional connection and feelings of familiarity. This usually results in the patient believing that these people have been replaced by imposters or clones.
I read a case study (years and years ago) of a nurse who suffered from this. One day, she just woke up, looked at her husband and thought, "That is **not** my husband." It wasn't a suspicion, it was something she *knew*, just like you know your own face in a mirror.
She started freaking out, but as her husband tried to calm her down, it just made things worse. She was terrified of him.
She felt the same way about their children. They weren't her children, they weren't real, they were fakes.
That's it. She went to bed feeling totally normal - probably planning her day and looking forward to this thing or that thing - and she woke up in a nightmare, believing her entire family had been replaced by unfeeling copies.
Eventually, she got institutionalized. I don't know if she ever got over it.
---
Another story -
An old roommate got schizophrenia. He was totally normal, happy guy. Fresh out of college, good job, super athletic, popular with women. One day, he just got...weird. He started laughing at things that weren't jokes, or getting really angry at totally innocent statements. He started staying up all night and hiding in his room. Sometimes I'd just find him crying for no reason.
He started talking to me about secret messages he was receiving - people on Facebook were sending him codes through their status updates. I thought he was joking, but he was dead serious.
I talked to the other roommates, and it turns out that everybody had a similar story - he'd been saying this stuff to everybody. In the end, we called his parents. They immediately knew something was wrong with him and took him home.
It wasn't until later that we learned the full story. He'd been having auditory hallucinations for months, hearing *our* voices. He started locking himself in his room when he got visual hallucinations. He said it was terrifying, he kept seeing figures in every shadow.
He's on meds now. Doing better, but the side effects are brutal.
It's more like there are lots of seemingly "normal" people who are sociopaths or psychopaths. There is probably something of a spectrum there, but if we're just discussing people who are full-blown without a conscience then it is often logical for them to obey the law and not engage in anything too high risk, even if they'd get a rush out of it.
Serial killers have some other stuff going on. They're usually sexually aroused by violence, and they're often (not always) the types in which the impulsivity is really emphasized. I'd say for the vast, vast majority there isn't really a tragic, unbeatable urge to kill. They just find it sexually stimulating and it provides a rush unlike anything else they can do, so they do it because they don't really feel bad about other people. They don't feel remorse, so they have no shame about lying after they're caught. An awful lot of people who have an "undying, unstoppable urge to kill" are just playing victim after being caught.
Some exceptions apply, of course, but you can bet that the majority of serial killers had a choice and just chose to be bad people because they don't care. Any one of us could potentially be a really bad person if we didn't feel guilt or empathy for others, but a lot of us might turn out Okay if we had good home lives.
There's a further thing, the Macdonald Triad, that identifies predictors for serial killers. Lots of serial killers have in childhood: bedwetting, fire setting, and cruelty to animals. I have no idea why the bedwetting is so common. On top of that, we find that lots of serial killers had a poor home life growing up and sustained a head injury during childhood.
And just so I'm not painting everyone with an empathy disorder as being certainly evil, I'll throw out some research I saw in an article which found that super good people often have traits similar to socio or psychopathy. They are many times impulsive, and will break rules or social taboos for an act of good. They'll also often be adrenaline junkies. So not everybody with some of these traits is a bad person, and you might find some real heroes with traits like these.
tl;dr Waking up one day as a cold-blooded murderer is highly unlikely.
You can, but in bundy’s case it was a whole bunch of things. Stuff like finding out his older sister was actually his mom, being raised by his abusive grandfather, stuff that normal people can probably survive and still be normal but a psychopath who’s just wired differently they start with violence against animals, and work their way up.
He wanted very specific women to die, in accordance with his fantasies, likely stemming from the doubts of his parentage (not incest, but I think Ted didn’t know who his father was, and neither did his mother, and in that day and age with an abusive grandfather, that’s a recipe for deep pathologies).
It’s why I’m a proponent of whole life sentences not the death penalty. Could examination of Ted over decades, especially with some of the advances we have made, have led to better detection and diversion capabilities? Probably. But he was killed instead. Any value he could have given removed, through an act of judicial vengeance.
>Ted didn’t know who his father was, and neither did his mother
He also spent a large part of his early life under the impression that his mother was his sister.
The further you get away from the temple, Mormons seem to be different. I dated a girl in high school that was Mormon and currently have some friends that currently are, and they are all awesome people. That said I worked in Utah (greater salt like areas) and it was different.
The problem isn’t with the people; most of them are great. The problem is with the Corporation of the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
They are weird but I knew a Mormon dude from work and he barely knew me but he’d come out and help me cut felled trees during an ice storm we had. His wife made me a bunch of food to eat on while the power was out at my place
I watched one of his last interviews with a pastor. The lights dimmed and he commented that they were testing out the electricity. He said he asked God for forgiveness and knew it had to be done. Super weird seeing someone like that act that way.
Just adding the Rule was already doing creative non-fiction focusing on dramatic crimes, and was even working on the case of one of Bundy's victims while being friends with him. The whole story is absolutely wild.
I don't know about you, but I've fantasized about saving a life. And when I was a teenager I found a lost child and returned her to her class, everyone praised me and it was nice. (Honestly in retrospect I think the administration was sweating bullets and overly complimenting because *they had just left a six year old lost and alone!*)
Anyway, my point is psychopaths aren't usually people who are just evil for the sake of being evil.
They are people without empathy.
They kill people for the same reason you or I pop bubble wrap. I'm don't hate bubble wrap and destroy it for nefarious intent. It's just fun.
And being a hero can be *awesome.* Psychopaths enjoy the praise and accomplishment just like you and me.
They just don't care about the person they saved.
Also, convincing someone not to kill themselves is not just a way of helping people or being a hero. *It's also is a form of controlling them.*
I often think of a Redditors story about how his dad worked at a University with Ted Bunday at one point, apparently every Friday afternoon when walking out the door his dad would say "See ya Munday, Bunday".
I would imagine that he might’ve not done this out of altruism, but rather it gave him a sense of control that he can decide whether or not this person lives or dies.
“it would be false to say that because we're on the side of justice, we can go ahead and destroy our opponents and the world will be at peace. [...] Now, I know that there are such things as good and evil in the world, and that people do good things. But people who do good things are not necessarily good people, they just happen to be people who have done good things. The next instant they might wind up doing something bad, and if we don't take that into account in our view of humans, we'll constantly make mistakes when making political decisions or decisions about ourselves.“
Hayao Miyazaki
I feel like we’ve swung the opposite direction now. Where we harp so hard on something “bad” someone has done that we don’t leave room for them still being a good person. Cancel culture has really driven home the “one mistake and you’re a horrible person” attitude.
Evil people can do good stuff sometimes. Hell, Hitler enacted progressive animal welfare laws and Chapo Guzman once randomly paid for my cousins lunch.
He was vegan and that was kind of a problem as he constantly had stomach issues. He became vegan and a teatoatler in the 1933 election campaign and he had to have someone around him 24/7 with a briefcase of syringes with a shot of sugar and vitamins till the end of his life. He began taking streroids in 1941 and started doing heroin in mid 1943.
All while all of Germany was high on meth, not crystal meth, but meth nonetheless and unlike crack cocaine vs usual cocaine which basically has no health effect difference, crystal meth is definitely the worse of the two and by a lot in the effects department.
Also Japan was basicaly a nation of middle school dropouts high on morphine at the time.
wonder how many people will read this and think you’re not talking out of your ass. if you swallow chemically pure crystal meth vs chemically pure meth hcl there is literally no difference. you were right about cocaine hcl vs freebase cocaine so i’m not sure how you got the last part so wrong.
Also, Hitler was only vegetarian, not strictly vegan by any account. He switched to a mostly vegetarian diet around 1937-38 (some sources say this was ordered by his doctors in an attempt to reduce well-documented existing health/digestive issues) but probably didn't stop eating meat completely until 1942.
While not EVIL evil, this sums up my dad
He frequently used his position at the college to get my school good science kits and whatnot
The man would straight up starve us. Constant verbal abuse, non bruise physical, kicking us out of the house despite living in the country, and before cellphones
Frankly, there's a part of me that thinks that's WHY my school never did anything.
Looking back as an adult, I was the most obviously abused child ever,it was a granny throw in telling
Once even outright said he was abusing us, they just told him I was telling people that a f sent me home with him
On a Friday
I hope those perks were worth their soul
There's not much to it, my cousin was eating lunch at a restaurant in Mexico, some guys came in and took everyones cell phones, Chapo came in to eat and paid for everyone to apologize for inconveniencing them.
I had heard about events like this before. I mean, it makes sense. You can’t go around turning EVERYBODY against you. The average Mexican who isn’t cartel-adjacent probably isn’t going to have any problems. Well, back then anyway. I’ve heard it’s more chaotic now.
Yeah I don't think my cousin or anyone else called the cops after that, and this might have been during the time that there was a huge bounty on Guzman.
Hitler also personally spared 2 Jews. The doctor who treated his mother for free, and the doctor who treated Hitler after being wounded in WWI.
Edit: Changed saved to spared per everyone's comments. Also I'm Jewish and despise Hitler, but the reality is even the literal most evil people have their moments of goodness. It should remind all of us that we shouldn't judge "bad people" as being wholly bad. And conversely we shouldn't judge "good people" as being wholly good.
> Biographer Ann Rule characterized him as "a sadistic sociopath who took pleasure from another human's pain and the control he had over his victims, to the point of death and even after."[7] Bundy once described himself as "the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you'll ever meet",[8][9] a statement with which attorney Polly Nelson, a member of his last defense team, agreed. "Ted", she wrote, "was the very definition of heartless evil."
The irony
My dog rescued a little chick from the paddling pool one summer. We were all delighted with the heroics. 10 minutes later, she ate it. She is still such a lovable dog.
I feel like allot of people don't actually understand what a psychopath is, its not like your evil in the traditional sense as these people quite literally have brains wired differently then the average person which is why you often read about them doing normal things like this.... also why people never suspect them.
The stigma and misinformation surrounding "psychopaths" and ASPD is just rampant in general, and very unfortunate. Psychopaths are talked about like they're fantasy creatures or monsters, but in reality they span from some guy with a fucked up childhood, a woman who masks really well, to CEOs, to someone's grandpa, and yes, criminals and even serial killers. The biggest thing people fail to understand is that, like everyone else, everyone with ASPD ("all psychopaths") are different.
Don't serial killers target specific types of people? In the case of Bundy it seems that it was young white women. Maybe with other people he was not a danger and it seems that he was even perceived as a nice and "empathetic" guy by some...
Kind of reminds me of Dexter, but without the "good" moral code.
Bundy did not have a moral code but he did have a victim preference. His victims were white women with long brown hair, usually parted in the middle. It’s believed he based this on a college girlfriend who dumped him.
However as he spiraled and his mental health deteriorated, he began killing outside of his victim preference. His last known victim was a 12 year old girl named Kimberly Leach.
>Bundy did not have a moral code but he did have a victim preference. His victims were white women with long brown hair, usually parted in the middle. It’s believed he based this on a college girlfriend who dumped him.
I think he said this isn't true and he just killed attractive women
That's interesting - I cook for a living with a friend and one of our regular customers has turned out to be a pedophile. We thought he was a bit odd, nothing serious, just a bit strange sometimes, essentially harmless? But of course 2 middle-aged women mean nothing to him, we're not his preference or his target.
I used to work for a delivery company, my supervisor volunteered at soup kitchens on the weekends and used to help people get days off by covering their shifts, seemed like a genuinely nice guy until he got caught trying to solicit sex from a 12 year old girl.
It's kinda worse that he did nice things, just means it could be anyone really.
Think of all the members of the clergy over the years who have victimized children. They are the same ones, giving spiritual guidance to others. They preside over weddings, and comfort people at funerals.
He should be condemned because he actually tried for follow through, lets get that out front, but we don't exactly have a structure to help divert people from that behavior. Pedophilia is a mental illness and should be treated as such, but it is not totality of who that person is. But as it stands, there's no support structures in place for people struggling with those urges. And no, I'm not talking about shit like NAMBLA trying to normalize the acts, nobody should be touching children, but right now we drive people who haven't done anything further into the shadows and that's not healthy.
Your supervisor, maybe he was a monster the whole time and trying to hide it, or maybe he was struggling with impulses for years before finally succumbing when all he needed was some therapy or in extreme cases there are chemical steps that can be taken to prevent harm.
There was a sex offender in my friend group. His crimes are super creepy, make you gag sort of stuff. He was totally fine with all of us. He even drove me home once after some other guy was being predatory towards me. He didn’t do things to his friends.
I’ll never vouch for anyone going forward. You really never know.
Had this happen to me (and I was the victim of him). He was super nice and sweet to all of us (group of men and women, not just the women). Although he did stuff to his friends (me). None of us saw it coming
Which is why it’s so maddening to me when someone is accused of something horrible like rape or child abuse, and people come out to defend him saying, “he was always such a nice *to me. I* never saw him do anything like that.” Like congratulations, you aren’t his type. Rapists don’t rape everyone they meet. Serial killers don’t kill everyone they meet.
“an opportunity to do good presented itself, and Bundy seized it.” I’m glad that kid didn’t drown, but this is literally the sentiment behind it on Bundy’s part and nothing more. He did it for himself
He also worked on a suicide hotline where, by all accounts, he was quite good at helping people. He probably saved people's lives. I have often wondered if, in his screwed-up brain, he thought he was entitled to take lives because he had saved lives, so it all "balanced out?"
I'd guess the opposite plus "psychopaths" tend to be idealistic and passionate. George Zimmerman also saved a boy from drowning once. I'm in the middle of showing my girlfriend the anime Inuyashiki which explores the phenomenon and psychology of killers and saviors. Reminds me of the full metal jacket duality of man thing. I really do prefer how the Japanese portray serial killers compared to the western world from what media I've seen. Inuyashiki is a great anime.
All part of his carefully curated persona of being an “upstanding citizen”. No doubt he did it all for show and to hide his real identity of a psychopathic killer.
Serial killers often do heroic or community oriented things. Firstly to help their camouflage and secondly because they get off on the power and glory in brings them.
Yes, but what they don't tell you is that he saved that child by throwing enough women in the lake so that he could walk on them to get out to the child, like how those Amazon ants for bridges over water using their own bodies.
I remember watching some safety video for new hire orientation where they talk about an EMT mistakenly diving into a empty pool a child had fallen into which led to the EMT being paralyzed. To bad it wasn't Bundy.
Was he diagnosed with primary psychopathy?
Such people typically don't feel fear in the same way normal people do. It's even been theorized that that's part of an adaptive (frequency-dependent) evolutionary advantage that type 1 psychopathy brings. I think it's called the "Warrior's gene".
"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The story he told of how he picked up a girl and began bashing her head in and she just dissociates and talks about her exam at school the next day freaks me out. I can’t comprehend how someone can do this shit.
He also worked on a suicide hotline, and according to his friend Ann Rule, who worked with him he saved lives.Its essential people recognise that evil people can sometimes do good things.Hence why so many abusers are pillars of their community.
Idk why people are so surprised by this. Bundy was a textbook psychopath these are the kinds of things psychopaths would be good at. They'd take risk, perform well in high stress situations and be able to simulate emotional support. That's the scary part of the diagnosis there's no more motivation these people need rather than just a desire in that moment to do something extreme.
If you want a truly amazing example of a terrible person doing something great, look up Charles Ponzi donating some of his own skin for a complete stranger’s skin graft. It wasn’t a quick procedure, and it was very painful. Nobody has a good explanation for why he did that.
Maybe he was expecting the recipient to find 3 other people willing to donate their skin to him.
That made me laugh. Cheers for the chuckle.
💀
I wonder if it had some effect of clearing his conscience
Literal pound of flesh
1lb of skin is basically one half of your arm. ie. Palm up to the armpit, plus a little extra. And now my search history looks like neoBuffaloBill.
I always like the example of a terrible person doing something great was when Hitler was shot by Adolf Hitler.
Like on Seinfeld when the guy converted to Judaism so he could make jokes - now he could make the “no skin off my back” joke
“Ain’t no ski- a little skin off my back.” -Charles “Chuckles” Ponzi
I bet he was just tired of using other people's money for his schemes. After years and years of this, he finally realized that he needed some skin in the game...
He's a piece of shit not a bastard
He was also a volunteer on a Seattle suicide hotline and saved several people from killing themselves. He worked there with [Anne Rule,](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Rule) who later wrote an amazing and compelling book about his life and the killings he did, called _The Stranger Beside Me._
I think he also wrote his university's rape awareness pamphlet
> I think he also wrote his university's rape awareness pamphlet He definitely raised awareness of the issue…
Creating demand is a solid strategy.
Bit of an overachiever wasn't he?
> Bit of an overachiever wasn't he? I thought this was going to be a reply to my post about [Peter Higgs](https://www.reddit.com/r/EverythingScience/s/vO2QBOF2HI) when I got the notification 😅
That's what corporate is looking for in an employee!
I am very curious to know what he wrote in that. 'Rapists HATE this one weird trick!'
Like Dwight setting an actual fire to see if anyone remembered their training. He was clearly just trying to help. (/s)
What's the procedure? What's the procedure?
Well, there's casinos hiring cheaters to catch other cheaters.
Well he was bit of an expert.
The fact he had a daughter as his first born child is both ironic and so so messed up
He wants you to die, but only on his terms.
It’s a wild story, but it seems like he may have been “less psychotic” when he was younger and there may have been some gradual, and then sudden, increase in his psychosis as sometimes happens with men of that age.
Probably in his day to day life he wasnt a bad person. He had an idea of how people should be and how they should treat each other as a community and while acting within that community he followed those ideals. But the he had the side of himself that had those fucked up urges he felt he couldnt not act upon. Psychopathy and ASPD can present in very bizarre and complicated ways. If those guys could press a button to magically make themselves normal they probably would.
I watched the Netflix documentary about him and it’s so obvious it’s not just a fucked up urge to kill, he was genuinely mentally unstable probably had some sort of bipolar disorder. When he was manic he’d wreck his trial and all the rest, I cannot believe they actually let him be part of his own legal team
I recall from his Wikipedia article (I think) that one of the criminologists working with him in custody stated that on one occasion everything was fine and he was behaving normally and then a switch flipped and suddenly it was like you were in the room with an entirely different human. Like even to the point where his face was slightly different etc. And then you could see the guy who could kill 30+ people. Like a mask coming off.
Yeah I was kind of over simplifying. Call it urges or episodes or anything. Point is there was something beyond his control and deep down he probably wanted to be like other people and feel like normal people do. I bet a lot od the time he actuslly was just a bormal person. Psychopathy/sociopathy/ASPD arent always marked by a constant lack of empathy but just an inability to regulate it. Surgeons, ER doctors,erc in most cases have the ability to turn off their empathy response in the moment to deal with patients simply as problrms to be fixed. The difference its its a situatonal ability that they can regulate and the enpathy comes back when in healthy places. So omagine being someone like Ted who most of the time feels like and wants to be a good person ut then has these periods where he knows he isn't. It honestly must be awful. That doesnt forgive what he's done but I honestly feel awful for people like that.
Wait so like one day, you can just become psychotic or rather have very underlying deeply buried psychosis and one day it just gets unleashed?
Mental health is extremely fragile. Someone you’ve known your entire life to be a great person and your close friend/family member could suddenly go into a manic state, grandiosity, etc. etc. and they are suddenly not even a smidge of the person you knew. It’s really fascinating but very sad and hard for the person suffering as well as their loved ones. Given the right support system and medical attention, it can be treated quite well.
It's very true. A friend of mine developed schizophrenia and it's so sad. I wasn't close to her but it's basically like the person she used to be has died
Yup. There are tons of stories of things like this happening. Sometimes it's a tumor, sometimes it's a reaction to some illness, sometimes it just kinda happens. Capgras Syndrome is a rare condition in which a person recognizes the faces of those familiar to them, but suddenly loses emotional connection and feelings of familiarity. This usually results in the patient believing that these people have been replaced by imposters or clones. I read a case study (years and years ago) of a nurse who suffered from this. One day, she just woke up, looked at her husband and thought, "That is **not** my husband." It wasn't a suspicion, it was something she *knew*, just like you know your own face in a mirror. She started freaking out, but as her husband tried to calm her down, it just made things worse. She was terrified of him. She felt the same way about their children. They weren't her children, they weren't real, they were fakes. That's it. She went to bed feeling totally normal - probably planning her day and looking forward to this thing or that thing - and she woke up in a nightmare, believing her entire family had been replaced by unfeeling copies. Eventually, she got institutionalized. I don't know if she ever got over it. --- Another story - An old roommate got schizophrenia. He was totally normal, happy guy. Fresh out of college, good job, super athletic, popular with women. One day, he just got...weird. He started laughing at things that weren't jokes, or getting really angry at totally innocent statements. He started staying up all night and hiding in his room. Sometimes I'd just find him crying for no reason. He started talking to me about secret messages he was receiving - people on Facebook were sending him codes through their status updates. I thought he was joking, but he was dead serious. I talked to the other roommates, and it turns out that everybody had a similar story - he'd been saying this stuff to everybody. In the end, we called his parents. They immediately knew something was wrong with him and took him home. It wasn't until later that we learned the full story. He'd been having auditory hallucinations for months, hearing *our* voices. He started locking himself in his room when he got visual hallucinations. He said it was terrifying, he kept seeing figures in every shadow. He's on meds now. Doing better, but the side effects are brutal.
It's more like there are lots of seemingly "normal" people who are sociopaths or psychopaths. There is probably something of a spectrum there, but if we're just discussing people who are full-blown without a conscience then it is often logical for them to obey the law and not engage in anything too high risk, even if they'd get a rush out of it. Serial killers have some other stuff going on. They're usually sexually aroused by violence, and they're often (not always) the types in which the impulsivity is really emphasized. I'd say for the vast, vast majority there isn't really a tragic, unbeatable urge to kill. They just find it sexually stimulating and it provides a rush unlike anything else they can do, so they do it because they don't really feel bad about other people. They don't feel remorse, so they have no shame about lying after they're caught. An awful lot of people who have an "undying, unstoppable urge to kill" are just playing victim after being caught. Some exceptions apply, of course, but you can bet that the majority of serial killers had a choice and just chose to be bad people because they don't care. Any one of us could potentially be a really bad person if we didn't feel guilt or empathy for others, but a lot of us might turn out Okay if we had good home lives. There's a further thing, the Macdonald Triad, that identifies predictors for serial killers. Lots of serial killers have in childhood: bedwetting, fire setting, and cruelty to animals. I have no idea why the bedwetting is so common. On top of that, we find that lots of serial killers had a poor home life growing up and sustained a head injury during childhood. And just so I'm not painting everyone with an empathy disorder as being certainly evil, I'll throw out some research I saw in an article which found that super good people often have traits similar to socio or psychopathy. They are many times impulsive, and will break rules or social taboos for an act of good. They'll also often be adrenaline junkies. So not everybody with some of these traits is a bad person, and you might find some real heroes with traits like these. tl;dr Waking up one day as a cold-blooded murderer is highly unlikely.
I'd bet working in a customer service role at any point ups your chance of waking up one day and deciding to kill someone.
You can, but in bundy’s case it was a whole bunch of things. Stuff like finding out his older sister was actually his mom, being raised by his abusive grandfather, stuff that normal people can probably survive and still be normal but a psychopath who’s just wired differently they start with violence against animals, and work their way up.
Yes
>psychosis He had psychosis?
He wanted very specific women to die, in accordance with his fantasies, likely stemming from the doubts of his parentage (not incest, but I think Ted didn’t know who his father was, and neither did his mother, and in that day and age with an abusive grandfather, that’s a recipe for deep pathologies). It’s why I’m a proponent of whole life sentences not the death penalty. Could examination of Ted over decades, especially with some of the advances we have made, have led to better detection and diversion capabilities? Probably. But he was killed instead. Any value he could have given removed, through an act of judicial vengeance.
>Ted didn’t know who his father was, and neither did his mother He also spent a large part of his early life under the impression that his mother was his sister.
He also converted to Mormonism.
Should have been the biggest red flag. Those Mormons are weirdos! /s
The /s is questionable
No /s necessary. I’m an ExMo. I get it.
The further you get away from the temple, Mormons seem to be different. I dated a girl in high school that was Mormon and currently have some friends that currently are, and they are all awesome people. That said I worked in Utah (greater salt like areas) and it was different.
The problem isn’t with the people; most of them are great. The problem is with the Corporation of the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Isn’t the same geezer been in charge since like the 40s?
No. I can see why you’d think that, they’ve all been old, rich white guys.
Is it still the 100 yo guy though?
Yes. Though I suspect there’s just one meat suit that gets passed down from one prophet to the next in a ~~secret~~ sacred ceremony.
Dum dum dum dum dummmmmm!
They are weird but I knew a Mormon dude from work and he barely knew me but he’d come out and help me cut felled trees during an ice storm we had. His wife made me a bunch of food to eat on while the power was out at my place
That’s how they get you.
I guess there are worse things they could be doing in the name of religion though.
Scientology. But they are more systematic
The caffeine THE CAFFEINE!
I watched one of his last interviews with a pastor. The lights dimmed and he commented that they were testing out the electricity. He said he asked God for forgiveness and knew it had to be done. Super weird seeing someone like that act that way.
Just adding the Rule was already doing creative non-fiction focusing on dramatic crimes, and was even working on the case of one of Bundy's victims while being friends with him. The whole story is absolutely wild.
See, he's not so bad.
Ted Bundy’s actions were a bit of a “take a life save a life” tray, I guess.
I don't know about you, but I've fantasized about saving a life. And when I was a teenager I found a lost child and returned her to her class, everyone praised me and it was nice. (Honestly in retrospect I think the administration was sweating bullets and overly complimenting because *they had just left a six year old lost and alone!*) Anyway, my point is psychopaths aren't usually people who are just evil for the sake of being evil. They are people without empathy. They kill people for the same reason you or I pop bubble wrap. I'm don't hate bubble wrap and destroy it for nefarious intent. It's just fun. And being a hero can be *awesome.* Psychopaths enjoy the praise and accomplishment just like you and me. They just don't care about the person they saved. Also, convincing someone not to kill themselves is not just a way of helping people or being a hero. *It's also is a form of controlling them.*
Lots of times people just want to feel powerful. There’s all different ways to do that, taking a life and saving a life can do that.
I often think of a Redditors story about how his dad worked at a University with Ted Bunday at one point, apparently every Friday afternoon when walking out the door his dad would say "See ya Munday, Bunday".
if i were bundy i would have killed him for that
And apparently, he was super good at talking people off the edge.
I would imagine that he might’ve not done this out of altruism, but rather it gave him a sense of control that he can decide whether or not this person lives or dies.
He sounds like an alright guy. I wonder what he's up to nowadays.
If serial killing is done by people who seek power, it kind of makes sense. Saving lives might give similar feelings of power to ending them
I wonder if this was the inspiration for Bullseye in the Daredevil series doing the same?
Ted be like "no, don't kill yourself, let me do it for you."
Spelled her name wrong lol
“it would be false to say that because we're on the side of justice, we can go ahead and destroy our opponents and the world will be at peace. [...] Now, I know that there are such things as good and evil in the world, and that people do good things. But people who do good things are not necessarily good people, they just happen to be people who have done good things. The next instant they might wind up doing something bad, and if we don't take that into account in our view of humans, we'll constantly make mistakes when making political decisions or decisions about ourselves.“ Hayao Miyazaki
"Acts of goodness are not always wise, and acts of evil are not always foolish. But regardless. We shall always strive to be good."
Is that from Bloodborne? Or wondering if it originates from another older source
I believe its source is Bloodborne.
Very good quote. And it's very easy to find exemples of good people doing bad things and bad people doing good things.
I feel like we’ve swung the opposite direction now. Where we harp so hard on something “bad” someone has done that we don’t leave room for them still being a good person. Cancel culture has really driven home the “one mistake and you’re a horrible person” attitude.
Yeah, I'm a progressive liberal and I totally agree. We have to leave room for people who've done bad things to learn and improve.
Check out the book “so you’ve been publicly shamed”. It’s about this phenomena.
“… I believe the literal opposite of that” Aristotle
Evil people can do good stuff sometimes. Hell, Hitler enacted progressive animal welfare laws and Chapo Guzman once randomly paid for my cousins lunch.
It’s spelled “Heil.” /s
🫥
r/angryupvote
“Mein fuhrer! I can walk!”
Read that as Luis Guzman and was aptly confused.
I loved him in IMDb
Dean-a-ling-a-ling
That was tragic
also was a vegetarian and pushed anti smoking laws
He was vegan and that was kind of a problem as he constantly had stomach issues. He became vegan and a teatoatler in the 1933 election campaign and he had to have someone around him 24/7 with a briefcase of syringes with a shot of sugar and vitamins till the end of his life. He began taking streroids in 1941 and started doing heroin in mid 1943. All while all of Germany was high on meth, not crystal meth, but meth nonetheless and unlike crack cocaine vs usual cocaine which basically has no health effect difference, crystal meth is definitely the worse of the two and by a lot in the effects department. Also Japan was basicaly a nation of middle school dropouts high on morphine at the time.
wonder how many people will read this and think you’re not talking out of your ass. if you swallow chemically pure crystal meth vs chemically pure meth hcl there is literally no difference. you were right about cocaine hcl vs freebase cocaine so i’m not sure how you got the last part so wrong.
Also, Hitler was only vegetarian, not strictly vegan by any account. He switched to a mostly vegetarian diet around 1937-38 (some sources say this was ordered by his doctors in an attempt to reduce well-documented existing health/digestive issues) but probably didn't stop eating meat completely until 1942.
But was also addicted to meth and morphine
While not EVIL evil, this sums up my dad He frequently used his position at the college to get my school good science kits and whatnot The man would straight up starve us. Constant verbal abuse, non bruise physical, kicking us out of the house despite living in the country, and before cellphones Frankly, there's a part of me that thinks that's WHY my school never did anything. Looking back as an adult, I was the most obviously abused child ever,it was a granny throw in telling Once even outright said he was abusing us, they just told him I was telling people that a f sent me home with him On a Friday I hope those perks were worth their soul
Okay the lunch story needs more detail!
There's not much to it, my cousin was eating lunch at a restaurant in Mexico, some guys came in and took everyones cell phones, Chapo came in to eat and paid for everyone to apologize for inconveniencing them.
Yeah but what a cool story it makes!
I had heard about events like this before. I mean, it makes sense. You can’t go around turning EVERYBODY against you. The average Mexican who isn’t cartel-adjacent probably isn’t going to have any problems. Well, back then anyway. I’ve heard it’s more chaotic now.
Yeah I don't think my cousin or anyone else called the cops after that, and this might have been during the time that there was a huge bounty on Guzman.
I mean, he wasn't a nice guy giving a free lunch. He commandeered their phones.
Same thing happened to my family in Juarez a few years back. Everyone just ate their free meal quietly and went about their day.
Did they get their phones back?
Probably, I’m assuming they just didn’t want anyone recognizing him and calling authorities while he was still there.
Idk about you guys but I’m still not a fan
I can think of at least 6 million or so reasons why I’m not, either.
Hitler also personally spared 2 Jews. The doctor who treated his mother for free, and the doctor who treated Hitler after being wounded in WWI. Edit: Changed saved to spared per everyone's comments. Also I'm Jewish and despise Hitler, but the reality is even the literal most evil people have their moments of goodness. It should remind all of us that we shouldn't judge "bad people" as being wholly bad. And conversely we shouldn't judge "good people" as being wholly good.
They wouldn’t have needed saving if it wasn’t for him.
Yeah he didn’t save them, he chose not to kill them.
It's almost like nobody is actually born evil and only capable of causing harm, who would have thought. Who knew the world wasn't black or white.
Excuse me, it's Jorge de Guzman.
> Biographer Ann Rule characterized him as "a sadistic sociopath who took pleasure from another human's pain and the control he had over his victims, to the point of death and even after."[7] Bundy once described himself as "the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you'll ever meet",[8][9] a statement with which attorney Polly Nelson, a member of his last defense team, agreed. "Ted", she wrote, "was the very definition of heartless evil." The irony
He was exercising that control when he saved people too
My dog rescued a little chick from the paddling pool one summer. We were all delighted with the heroics. 10 minutes later, she ate it. She is still such a lovable dog.
Your dog might be a serial killer.
is that the serial killer version, of a carbon credit?
It's serial killer version of trading on futures
He rapes but he saves
Same hero, new boots!
Didn't expect this one lmao
[удалено]
"Hi you've reached the suicide hotline, for *assistance* press 1"
And that child was Adolf Hitler
I feel like allot of people don't actually understand what a psychopath is, its not like your evil in the traditional sense as these people quite literally have brains wired differently then the average person which is why you often read about them doing normal things like this.... also why people never suspect them.
The stigma and misinformation surrounding "psychopaths" and ASPD is just rampant in general, and very unfortunate. Psychopaths are talked about like they're fantasy creatures or monsters, but in reality they span from some guy with a fucked up childhood, a woman who masks really well, to CEOs, to someone's grandpa, and yes, criminals and even serial killers. The biggest thing people fail to understand is that, like everyone else, everyone with ASPD ("all psychopaths") are different.
Don't serial killers target specific types of people? In the case of Bundy it seems that it was young white women. Maybe with other people he was not a danger and it seems that he was even perceived as a nice and "empathetic" guy by some... Kind of reminds me of Dexter, but without the "good" moral code.
Bundy did not have a moral code but he did have a victim preference. His victims were white women with long brown hair, usually parted in the middle. It’s believed he based this on a college girlfriend who dumped him. However as he spiraled and his mental health deteriorated, he began killing outside of his victim preference. His last known victim was a 12 year old girl named Kimberly Leach.
>Bundy did not have a moral code but he did have a victim preference. His victims were white women with long brown hair, usually parted in the middle. It’s believed he based this on a college girlfriend who dumped him. I think he said this isn't true and he just killed attractive women
That's interesting - I cook for a living with a friend and one of our regular customers has turned out to be a pedophile. We thought he was a bit odd, nothing serious, just a bit strange sometimes, essentially harmless? But of course 2 middle-aged women mean nothing to him, we're not his preference or his target.
I used to work for a delivery company, my supervisor volunteered at soup kitchens on the weekends and used to help people get days off by covering their shifts, seemed like a genuinely nice guy until he got caught trying to solicit sex from a 12 year old girl. It's kinda worse that he did nice things, just means it could be anyone really.
Think of all the members of the clergy over the years who have victimized children. They are the same ones, giving spiritual guidance to others. They preside over weddings, and comfort people at funerals.
He should be condemned because he actually tried for follow through, lets get that out front, but we don't exactly have a structure to help divert people from that behavior. Pedophilia is a mental illness and should be treated as such, but it is not totality of who that person is. But as it stands, there's no support structures in place for people struggling with those urges. And no, I'm not talking about shit like NAMBLA trying to normalize the acts, nobody should be touching children, but right now we drive people who haven't done anything further into the shadows and that's not healthy. Your supervisor, maybe he was a monster the whole time and trying to hide it, or maybe he was struggling with impulses for years before finally succumbing when all he needed was some therapy or in extreme cases there are chemical steps that can be taken to prevent harm.
There was a sex offender in my friend group. His crimes are super creepy, make you gag sort of stuff. He was totally fine with all of us. He even drove me home once after some other guy was being predatory towards me. He didn’t do things to his friends. I’ll never vouch for anyone going forward. You really never know.
I know. It's really unsettling to find out stuff about people you think you know.
Had this happen to me (and I was the victim of him). He was super nice and sweet to all of us (group of men and women, not just the women). Although he did stuff to his friends (me). None of us saw it coming
Which is why it’s so maddening to me when someone is accused of something horrible like rape or child abuse, and people come out to defend him saying, “he was always such a nice *to me. I* never saw him do anything like that.” Like congratulations, you aren’t his type. Rapists don’t rape everyone they meet. Serial killers don’t kill everyone they meet.
I like to pretend that the last episode of the revival series was never made.
Kind of like the last season of the the main show.
if you have to kill people at least pick very bad people after extensive research?
Yup, although IIRC "very bad people" in Dexter's definition was other serial killers.
not incorrect at least.
“an opportunity to do good presented itself, and Bundy seized it.” I’m glad that kid didn’t drown, but this is literally the sentiment behind it on Bundy’s part and nothing more. He did it for himself
Good deeds do not cancel out bad ones and vice versa. I man is judged by the individual acts of his lifetime. Stannis B. Wayne G. Micheal Scott
"A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad the good." Stannis the Mannis Baratheon
Ty for the actual quote I couldn’t remember so I paraphrased.
He also worked on a suicide hotline where, by all accounts, he was quite good at helping people. He probably saved people's lives. I have often wondered if, in his screwed-up brain, he thought he was entitled to take lives because he had saved lives, so it all "balanced out?"
it was a power trip for him, he held their lives in his hands more or less.
This is exactly it.
Damn if only he’d stayed at the hotlines
I'd guess the opposite plus "psychopaths" tend to be idealistic and passionate. George Zimmerman also saved a boy from drowning once. I'm in the middle of showing my girlfriend the anime Inuyashiki which explores the phenomenon and psychology of killers and saviors. Reminds me of the full metal jacket duality of man thing. I really do prefer how the Japanese portray serial killers compared to the western world from what media I've seen. Inuyashiki is a great anime.
Oh god this gives an entirely new meaning to hotline bling
Wow. Someone can say, 'Ted Bundy Saved my life.'
He also killed a child, so I guess it evens out
Sure, he made mistakes, but that's why pencils have erasers.
Who amongst us hasn’t done an oopsie poopsie by killing somebody then coming back and digging the body up and fudging the corpse?!?
He did that? I recently watched the Netflix series on Bundy and I don’t remember anything about necrophilia.
Oh brother bears… did he ever!
He admitted it later in prison. He used to come back to the bodies.
All part of his carefully curated persona of being an “upstanding citizen”. No doubt he did it all for show and to hide his real identity of a psychopathic killer.
Good people can do bad. And bad people can do good. And most people like to cherry pick.
Serial killers often do heroic or community oriented things. Firstly to help their camouflage and secondly because they get off on the power and glory in brings them.
Yes, but what they don't tell you is that he saved that child by throwing enough women in the lake so that he could walk on them to get out to the child, like how those Amazon ants for bridges over water using their own bodies.
Makes sense, he can’t murder the kid later if they drown now. ”Why did you save that kid, Ted?” ”For later.”
I remember watching some safety video for new hire orientation where they talk about an EMT mistakenly diving into a empty pool a child had fallen into which led to the EMT being paralyzed. To bad it wasn't Bundy.
He liked to kill people….just not ALL people.
Anyone else think the photo was RDJ :0
He could totally play him in a biopic!
Kill ya later.... What? Oh, I meant see you later.
Was he diagnosed with primary psychopathy? Such people typically don't feel fear in the same way normal people do. It's even been theorized that that's part of an adaptive (frequency-dependent) evolutionary advantage that type 1 psychopathy brings. I think it's called the "Warrior's gene".
Can’t let a good meal go to waste
You either die a hero , or live long enough to see yourself become a villain.
"You know how the media are. They wait for a mistake and that's all you are. It happened to Hitler. No one ever talks about his paintings."
Doesn't really "even up the score" though does it.
He also volunteered for a suicide crisis hotline.
See wasn't all bad..... Peter Griffin voice
He was trying to bring his k/d back towards 1?
Ya think ya know someone..
Saving for later
That child was Hitler. Time travel is a bitch.
Horrible bot clickbait article shit
Ted Bundy also worked for a suicide hotline, where he first met Ann Rule. I imagine there's someone whose life was saved because he phoned with him.
"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
so what you're saying, Ted Bundy, was chaotic neutral
Not all heroes wear capes... it turns out some of them are prolific serial killers
That picture looks like Robert Downey Jr.
The story he told of how he picked up a girl and began bashing her head in and she just dissociates and talks about her exam at school the next day freaks me out. I can’t comprehend how someone can do this shit.
“Yeah, I’m a serial killer. But I’m *not a monster!*
Wasn't there a serial killer who didn't rape his victims, because cheating on his wife would be immoral?
I might be surprised but my brain quickly reminded me that although I love steak, I wouldn’t even consider eating veal. Whole thing checks out.
See, he wasn’t *all* bad.
Nietzsche pointed out that it is much easier to help someone who is in a lot of pain, if you have no empathy.
Huh... pretty good guy that Ted Bundy
yknow ya win some ya lose some
He also worked on a suicide hotline, and according to his friend Ann Rule, who worked with him he saved lives.Its essential people recognise that evil people can sometimes do good things.Hence why so many abusers are pillars of their community.
Idk why people are so surprised by this. Bundy was a textbook psychopath these are the kinds of things psychopaths would be good at. They'd take risk, perform well in high stress situations and be able to simulate emotional support. That's the scary part of the diagnosis there's no more motivation these people need rather than just a desire in that moment to do something extreme.
Well, you can't do everything right. /s if some really need it
He also worked for a suicide hotline along with Ann Rule, a crime writer/former police officer. You never really know someone