When I was a young man an older gentleman I knew who was a veteran of the Pacific theater in WWI told me that you have to have a code to live your life by. He started with the suggestion, "No women, no kids" meaning you don't kill women and children. He also admitted that he had a deeply rooted dislike of the Japanese people even though he knew it was wrong to hold a grudge by his own personal code.
Being deliberately cruel, from my personal observations, comes from have an emotional response to the cruelty that you are inflicting and the fact that there were 4 shovels indicates to me that this woman was invested emotionally in what they did.
I agree with that conclusion, and also what they veteran said. You have to have your own code regarding how you interact with the world. If you don't, you are not holding yourself to any personal standard.
You create the world in which you want to live, and the first place you start with creating that world is within the self. If that is chaos, then your world will be chaos. If you are the best version of yourself then you are better able to keep your world at peace, and your influence on the world will be greater than the world's influence on you.
I imagine you are this meticulous with all your life activities just about, am I right? This was so beautifully (if that is even possible) and thoughtfully presented- a delight to read after watching J Ballen's video (I have been a subscriber of his for a while myself). Thank you for this, Athena. I agree with you on every point made. Sadly, there are scores of disturbed people like this at any given time everywhere on our planet, carrying on in similar horrifying ways.
I bet the core of Tiffany's personality is an extremely uncomfortable one.
I, as an individual, have found that defense against these types is the logical goal. Understanding them is helpful and makes for interesting science and conversation for sure, but I doubt there are any actual remedial steps that would change such a personality so I abandoned that a while back in my life. I love (love love) what you stated about being true to one's self when making decisions such as Tiffany and her companions did. I only developed my moral code through my own personal experiences over a long time, and only then could I say that irrespective of any other factor, my ethics are to be faithful to my own soul. One must have a personal standard, and adhere to it diligently.
I watched part of the video after reading, it was the video that I couldn't get through. They could only think about themselves, still no acceptance of responsibility at all.
It's concerning that the professionals seem to have missed parts of her personality and some of her lies, that you have noticed. I wish you worked in this field :)
Yet, somehow, she got the appropriate penalty for such a crime. Whether she participated fully or partially, society does need protecting from someone able and willing to commit such acts.
As a side note, the story you wrote about Junko's murder was harder emotionally than this one. It's still horrific, of course, but the other one has come back to my mind many times since and I still can't believe it happened the way it did.
Junko's murder was just atrocious, and difficult to get through because of the level of torture she was put through. Unfortunately she is one of many that go through things like that.
A friend of mine works with people who have been rescued from horrific circumstances, similar to what Junko went through, but for much longer period of time as it is usually their parents or guardians that abuse them.
Whole I wouldn't tell any of those stories without their consent, there is a large number of these stories in the world that always shock and horrify when people hear about them. Compared to those stories, the murder of the Sumners is relatively tame, as it took place over a single night.
Because of my friend who works with the results of this sort of abuse, the question "why?" frequently crosses my mind, so I have done a fair amount of reading about things like this. I have enough of these stories that I could have a Substack publication that could be entirely based on the dark side of the human species.
"I am aware that a person currently using drugs will show a distinct lack of care for those around them. They are only going to care about the drugs, their next ability to obtain, and use said drugs. However, in this case it was said that Tiffany was no longer using drugs, so altered mental state was not what allowed her to continue to listen to the victims cry and beg. My guess is that it was the lack of instructions through emotions via drug use. Nothing about what happened throughout the planning of this crime led any of the participants to step back and say, 'this is not a good idea. I don’t want to be involved.'”
Correct me if I'm wrong, but what you're saying is that, although Tiffany was no longer on drugs, the drugs had already permanently halted the emotional development of her brain.
She was quite young, twenty-three at the time, and the current understanding is that the younger a person is, the more able they are to repair that damage. They may not get to one hundred percent, but certainly enough to know that burying people alive is not an acceptable thing to do.
Had she been using drugs for a few decades, then it is less likely that she would be able to start repairing the damage. In those cases the brain damage can be permanent.
I agree with your conclusions completely. Drugs and alcohol do stop the brain from maturing,, as far as I know even if you stop using your brain will mature far more slowly. I have no idea of you ever catch up to where you should be. We did learn about studies on this when I was in alonon for my oldest. It explained a lot. Plus adding in the sexual abuse, no wonder she was a mess. Sad story, but I feel almost as sad for her as the people she killed.
Not for what she did but that her life was ruined long before this happened. The cause and effect is astounding.
Indeed it is. I think that stories like this are necessary to understand that the brain is a machine. If you pour vegetable oil into an engine and try to run it, you will destroy the engine. Can it be repaired? Sure, maybe, depends on how long you ran the engine.
Same thing with drugs. What's really interesting about this case is that Tiffany Cole also had aspects of her life that she was very caring. She cared for her terminally ill father, and raised her siblings. I can't imagine that she wanted anything to do with him after he molested her, but she did it anyway.
I agree, and I can relate to her in some ways. I too believe that her drug use and it's effect on her brain was the main malfunction in this situation. Also her need to be accepted and loved by someone probably played a part .
Far be it from me to skate past the horrific example of evil, but I'm going to skate past the horrific example of evil, and focus on RDR2 and gamers who play--or 'roleplay'--as evil.
I don't get it. Okay, intellectually, I can sort of wrap my mind around it if I squint just right, and studies show that those who play violent games are less likely to commit violent crimes than non-gamers, so maybe there's some benefit to it. Maybe acting those things out in a consequence-free setting makes them less likely to do them in real life.
But I'm always going to look askance at anyone who plays that way. It makes me think that they're refraining from doing evil in their real lives due to EXTERNAL controls, rather than internal ones. That's not someone I can truly trust.
(On the other hand, I loot EVERYTHING in video games, and I'd never loot in real life, even if I knew no one would ever find out. But I'd also never kill an innocent NPC for their stuff, so there's that....)
Interestingly I wrote something about this over on Quora using RDR2 as an example. It seems to have to do with desire to be able to act out anything that their heart's desire might be without the consequences, and yes, you concluded precisely what I did, in that it is about internal versus external controls. I might do a longer piece about this over here, as I have always found that behavior a bit vexing myself.
I'd be interested to read a longer piece about it, especially since my attempt to find your previous comments about it on Quora failed. I blame both Quora's iffy search system, and your looong backlog of answers!
Reading your articles is helping me understand my family dynamic more. My sister and I couldn't be more different, both raised by a rageful NPD mother with a once every 2-weeks father. I ended up on the INTP/ INTJ side of things (it's a 50/50 split on the last letter) while she ended up more ENTP. I remember very early in childhood realizing that my mother was "off" and started distancing myself emotionally, which wasn't difficult, she was a monster. I read a lot, thought a lot, mom called me weird but i didn't care. My sister tried to play the NPD game with mom to "win" her love, but there was no winning that game. Mom had no love or affection for anyone, she put insurmountable conditions on obtaining even a barest hint of approval, you can forget heartfelt love altogether. When younger sister discovered boys, it was all over. I dragged her half naked ass out of a few backseats and even picked her up from the army barracks at Ft. Knox after she had been going door to door servicing the service men, she was 14. I understand how her brain got wired wrong, what I cannot forgive her for is not recognizing her selfish behavior now that she is a fully grown adult aged 41 who STILL has no empathic skills. But she tells people that she is an empath, i don't know if she is even aware that she is lying, is her delusion that strong? I've apologized so many times to people she has wronged, families she has destroyed with infidelity, drugs, felonies or just plain whimsy. I'm exhausted, i'm the only person in the family she will listen to and i am out of ideas. These type of people just DO NOT CARE about anything or anyone but their own flights of fancy.
Hard to say if she is truly that delusional, or if she just likes the attention, but it is unlikely that she will ever become a different person, unless there are mitigating factors such as addiction in place, and she in turn gets sober. If so, she might make strides to being a better individual, if not, it seems that she was rather negatively shaped by your mother's behavior.
I would just like to add that the cluster B diagnosis such as BPD does not necessarily discount the ASPD one - I think you've also written that at least once. This is important because, save for the drugs, the need to be accepted by her peers might have influenced her actions.
This would be an equivalent to the concept of "herd mentality", if I'm not mistaken, and would at the same time satisfy the emotional constraints of a Borderline Personality disordered human (no cognitive empathy, affective lacking due to drugs and/or herd mentality).
I would say that this was irrelevant, but then again, you go to such great details in your analysis, that I feel like you would want to hear the additional details found if they made any sense. Not to mention how saying that would beg another question as to why I wrote the reply in the first place xD But that one I can readily answer - sometimes it helps to write things down only to (re)organize your thoughts, so I guess that's mostly why I write these replies anyway (a year after they were initially posted, as well).
Still, getting a reply other than "thanks for your reply" would be great, as it would perhaps open a useful discussion, but oh well, I'll take what I can :D
Yes, ASPD can affect anyone, and these people were certainly antisocial. As ASPD is a behavioral diagnosis only, these people most definitely qualify.
I always like new details and different perspectives on things. I can miss things, or there is a point of view that I didn't consider. I think that there is something to the herd mentality. I wonder why they didn't choose strangers though. If you are going to do something like this, they would have had a better chance of getting away with it with strangers, and if they did get caught, while people would have rightly considered it a ghastly crime, they would have dodged some of the extreme hatred that they garnered from people likely would not have even paid attention to the case had they not chosen the victims that they did.
I think this is where this part of your analysis proves to be correct:
"I arrived at the conclusion that Tiffany Cole was the main driving factor of this crime. "
In her attempt to amaze her new "friends", which are obviously problematic, she literally "sacrificed", offered the couple. Perhaps there was also this fear that the guy she was visiting with will come up with the idea to rob them anyway, so she decided to come up with it first. So it was a fear of missing out.
I'm kinda afraid to admit, but this makes sense to me xD
What really stands out is the method of killing, why they would chose to bury them alive while they are screaming rather than use the shovels to finish their suffering. It almost implies a sadistic nature to this crime. If the intention was to kill them, as you have laid out above, then the method really raises questions about not only their empathy but their rational for acting so cruelly. The only logical reason I can think of would be to avoid getting DNA on a murder weapon , although this seems very unlikely. Unless the group component came into effect and none of them wanted to be the one to give the final blow so they just ended up burying them alive. Although the fact that they were out celebrating later perhaps shows that these people weren't just lacking empathy but had developed a sadistic nature.
I know exactly what you mean, and thought about this as well. Based on my understanding of the crime, they always had plans of killing them, even if they denied it during questioning, and they didn't have a gun to commit the murders with. The seems to me to mean that they intended for this to transpire exactly how it did. Drugs dull empathy, but this seems a bit beyond that.
Humans inherently are often quite sadistic when they have someone under their absolute control, and perhaps that is what transpired.
When I was a young man an older gentleman I knew who was a veteran of the Pacific theater in WWI told me that you have to have a code to live your life by. He started with the suggestion, "No women, no kids" meaning you don't kill women and children. He also admitted that he had a deeply rooted dislike of the Japanese people even though he knew it was wrong to hold a grudge by his own personal code.
Being deliberately cruel, from my personal observations, comes from have an emotional response to the cruelty that you are inflicting and the fact that there were 4 shovels indicates to me that this woman was invested emotionally in what they did.
I agree with that conclusion, and also what they veteran said. You have to have your own code regarding how you interact with the world. If you don't, you are not holding yourself to any personal standard.
You create the world in which you want to live, and the first place you start with creating that world is within the self. If that is chaos, then your world will be chaos. If you are the best version of yourself then you are better able to keep your world at peace, and your influence on the world will be greater than the world's influence on you.
I imagine you are this meticulous with all your life activities just about, am I right? This was so beautifully (if that is even possible) and thoughtfully presented- a delight to read after watching J Ballen's video (I have been a subscriber of his for a while myself). Thank you for this, Athena. I agree with you on every point made. Sadly, there are scores of disturbed people like this at any given time everywhere on our planet, carrying on in similar horrifying ways.
I bet the core of Tiffany's personality is an extremely uncomfortable one.
I, as an individual, have found that defense against these types is the logical goal. Understanding them is helpful and makes for interesting science and conversation for sure, but I doubt there are any actual remedial steps that would change such a personality so I abandoned that a while back in my life. I love (love love) what you stated about being true to one's self when making decisions such as Tiffany and her companions did. I only developed my moral code through my own personal experiences over a long time, and only then could I say that irrespective of any other factor, my ethics are to be faithful to my own soul. One must have a personal standard, and adhere to it diligently.
I am meticulous with some aspects, less so with others I suppose.
How you describe developing your personal code is a journey that everyone should go on.
I watched part of the video after reading, it was the video that I couldn't get through. They could only think about themselves, still no acceptance of responsibility at all.
It's concerning that the professionals seem to have missed parts of her personality and some of her lies, that you have noticed. I wish you worked in this field :)
Yet, somehow, she got the appropriate penalty for such a crime. Whether she participated fully or partially, society does need protecting from someone able and willing to commit such acts.
As a side note, the story you wrote about Junko's murder was harder emotionally than this one. It's still horrific, of course, but the other one has come back to my mind many times since and I still can't believe it happened the way it did.
Junko's murder was just atrocious, and difficult to get through because of the level of torture she was put through. Unfortunately she is one of many that go through things like that.
A friend of mine works with people who have been rescued from horrific circumstances, similar to what Junko went through, but for much longer period of time as it is usually their parents or guardians that abuse them.
Whole I wouldn't tell any of those stories without their consent, there is a large number of these stories in the world that always shock and horrify when people hear about them. Compared to those stories, the murder of the Sumners is relatively tame, as it took place over a single night.
Because of my friend who works with the results of this sort of abuse, the question "why?" frequently crosses my mind, so I have done a fair amount of reading about things like this. I have enough of these stories that I could have a Substack publication that could be entirely based on the dark side of the human species.
I agree .
"I am aware that a person currently using drugs will show a distinct lack of care for those around them. They are only going to care about the drugs, their next ability to obtain, and use said drugs. However, in this case it was said that Tiffany was no longer using drugs, so altered mental state was not what allowed her to continue to listen to the victims cry and beg. My guess is that it was the lack of instructions through emotions via drug use. Nothing about what happened throughout the planning of this crime led any of the participants to step back and say, 'this is not a good idea. I don’t want to be involved.'”
Correct me if I'm wrong, but what you're saying is that, although Tiffany was no longer on drugs, the drugs had already permanently halted the emotional development of her brain.
She was quite young, twenty-three at the time, and the current understanding is that the younger a person is, the more able they are to repair that damage. They may not get to one hundred percent, but certainly enough to know that burying people alive is not an acceptable thing to do.
Had she been using drugs for a few decades, then it is less likely that she would be able to start repairing the damage. In those cases the brain damage can be permanent.
I agree with your conclusions completely. Drugs and alcohol do stop the brain from maturing,, as far as I know even if you stop using your brain will mature far more slowly. I have no idea of you ever catch up to where you should be. We did learn about studies on this when I was in alonon for my oldest. It explained a lot. Plus adding in the sexual abuse, no wonder she was a mess. Sad story, but I feel almost as sad for her as the people she killed.
Not for what she did but that her life was ruined long before this happened. The cause and effect is astounding.
Indeed it is. I think that stories like this are necessary to understand that the brain is a machine. If you pour vegetable oil into an engine and try to run it, you will destroy the engine. Can it be repaired? Sure, maybe, depends on how long you ran the engine.
Same thing with drugs. What's really interesting about this case is that Tiffany Cole also had aspects of her life that she was very caring. She cared for her terminally ill father, and raised her siblings. I can't imagine that she wanted anything to do with him after he molested her, but she did it anyway.
It's quite interesting how the brain works.
I agree, and I can relate to her in some ways. I too believe that her drug use and it's effect on her brain was the main malfunction in this situation. Also her need to be accepted and loved by someone probably played a part .
I would agree with that
Far be it from me to skate past the horrific example of evil, but I'm going to skate past the horrific example of evil, and focus on RDR2 and gamers who play--or 'roleplay'--as evil.
I don't get it. Okay, intellectually, I can sort of wrap my mind around it if I squint just right, and studies show that those who play violent games are less likely to commit violent crimes than non-gamers, so maybe there's some benefit to it. Maybe acting those things out in a consequence-free setting makes them less likely to do them in real life.
But I'm always going to look askance at anyone who plays that way. It makes me think that they're refraining from doing evil in their real lives due to EXTERNAL controls, rather than internal ones. That's not someone I can truly trust.
(On the other hand, I loot EVERYTHING in video games, and I'd never loot in real life, even if I knew no one would ever find out. But I'd also never kill an innocent NPC for their stuff, so there's that....)
Interestingly I wrote something about this over on Quora using RDR2 as an example. It seems to have to do with desire to be able to act out anything that their heart's desire might be without the consequences, and yes, you concluded precisely what I did, in that it is about internal versus external controls. I might do a longer piece about this over here, as I have always found that behavior a bit vexing myself.
I'd be interested to read a longer piece about it, especially since my attempt to find your previous comments about it on Quora failed. I blame both Quora's iffy search system, and your looong backlog of answers!
Likely true on both counts. All right, I will see about writing that up.
Reading your articles is helping me understand my family dynamic more. My sister and I couldn't be more different, both raised by a rageful NPD mother with a once every 2-weeks father. I ended up on the INTP/ INTJ side of things (it's a 50/50 split on the last letter) while she ended up more ENTP. I remember very early in childhood realizing that my mother was "off" and started distancing myself emotionally, which wasn't difficult, she was a monster. I read a lot, thought a lot, mom called me weird but i didn't care. My sister tried to play the NPD game with mom to "win" her love, but there was no winning that game. Mom had no love or affection for anyone, she put insurmountable conditions on obtaining even a barest hint of approval, you can forget heartfelt love altogether. When younger sister discovered boys, it was all over. I dragged her half naked ass out of a few backseats and even picked her up from the army barracks at Ft. Knox after she had been going door to door servicing the service men, she was 14. I understand how her brain got wired wrong, what I cannot forgive her for is not recognizing her selfish behavior now that she is a fully grown adult aged 41 who STILL has no empathic skills. But she tells people that she is an empath, i don't know if she is even aware that she is lying, is her delusion that strong? I've apologized so many times to people she has wronged, families she has destroyed with infidelity, drugs, felonies or just plain whimsy. I'm exhausted, i'm the only person in the family she will listen to and i am out of ideas. These type of people just DO NOT CARE about anything or anyone but their own flights of fancy.
Hard to say if she is truly that delusional, or if she just likes the attention, but it is unlikely that she will ever become a different person, unless there are mitigating factors such as addiction in place, and she in turn gets sober. If so, she might make strides to being a better individual, if not, it seems that she was rather negatively shaped by your mother's behavior.
Great analysis, subjectively and objectively!
I would just like to add that the cluster B diagnosis such as BPD does not necessarily discount the ASPD one - I think you've also written that at least once. This is important because, save for the drugs, the need to be accepted by her peers might have influenced her actions.
This would be an equivalent to the concept of "herd mentality", if I'm not mistaken, and would at the same time satisfy the emotional constraints of a Borderline Personality disordered human (no cognitive empathy, affective lacking due to drugs and/or herd mentality).
I would say that this was irrelevant, but then again, you go to such great details in your analysis, that I feel like you would want to hear the additional details found if they made any sense. Not to mention how saying that would beg another question as to why I wrote the reply in the first place xD But that one I can readily answer - sometimes it helps to write things down only to (re)organize your thoughts, so I guess that's mostly why I write these replies anyway (a year after they were initially posted, as well).
Still, getting a reply other than "thanks for your reply" would be great, as it would perhaps open a useful discussion, but oh well, I'll take what I can :D
Yes, ASPD can affect anyone, and these people were certainly antisocial. As ASPD is a behavioral diagnosis only, these people most definitely qualify.
I always like new details and different perspectives on things. I can miss things, or there is a point of view that I didn't consider. I think that there is something to the herd mentality. I wonder why they didn't choose strangers though. If you are going to do something like this, they would have had a better chance of getting away with it with strangers, and if they did get caught, while people would have rightly considered it a ghastly crime, they would have dodged some of the extreme hatred that they garnered from people likely would not have even paid attention to the case had they not chosen the victims that they did.
Vexing.
I think this is where this part of your analysis proves to be correct:
"I arrived at the conclusion that Tiffany Cole was the main driving factor of this crime. "
In her attempt to amaze her new "friends", which are obviously problematic, she literally "sacrificed", offered the couple. Perhaps there was also this fear that the guy she was visiting with will come up with the idea to rob them anyway, so she decided to come up with it first. So it was a fear of missing out.
I'm kinda afraid to admit, but this makes sense to me xD
It does make sense based on her personality profile, I agree.
What really stands out is the method of killing, why they would chose to bury them alive while they are screaming rather than use the shovels to finish their suffering. It almost implies a sadistic nature to this crime. If the intention was to kill them, as you have laid out above, then the method really raises questions about not only their empathy but their rational for acting so cruelly. The only logical reason I can think of would be to avoid getting DNA on a murder weapon , although this seems very unlikely. Unless the group component came into effect and none of them wanted to be the one to give the final blow so they just ended up burying them alive. Although the fact that they were out celebrating later perhaps shows that these people weren't just lacking empathy but had developed a sadistic nature.
I know exactly what you mean, and thought about this as well. Based on my understanding of the crime, they always had plans of killing them, even if they denied it during questioning, and they didn't have a gun to commit the murders with. The seems to me to mean that they intended for this to transpire exactly how it did. Drugs dull empathy, but this seems a bit beyond that.
Humans inherently are often quite sadistic when they have someone under their absolute control, and perhaps that is what transpired.