Question by Fannibal: Is it possible for an intelligent, non-psychopathic woman with a caring family and a normal childhood to kill?
I’m thinking of a very specific scenario, actually.

A girl grows up with a wonderful, loving family who is present and cares about her. She is not a psychopath. Aside from anxiety and mild OCD, she has nothing wrong with her. She is incredibly intelligent. She does very well in school, aside from the occasional forgotten homework from having more interesting things to think about. She’s interested in law & very liberal. Since age 8, she has been into goth culture. Her interests sort of drifted around in different areas of it, but she’s always been into that sort of dark, morbid stuff. It doesn’t scare her- it fascinates her. She is not emotionless in the slightest, however. She actually can be a little overemotional when it’s to do with a guy or girl (she’s bisexual) she likes. Her interest in death and darkness, however, grows. She has suffered from nothing traumatic and was never abused. She’s just fascinated with it. And the more she finds out, the more she wants to know. Her stack of books on Jeffery Dahmer and Edward Kamper are no longer enough. She craves more intelligence than a secondhand account can provide her with. She wants to talk to one of these killers. So she does. Of course, online, so they don’t know who she is and she isn’t in any danger (she really isn’t too thrill seeking. She’s more knowledge seeking.). Soon enough, even that isn’t enough. She has to kill someone. To eat them, too. She has to know what it feels like. She’s intelligent enough to know how to not get caught. She picks someone she dislikes so she doesn’t feel bad. And she kills them. And somehow, it doesn’t traumatize her. She keeps living her life normally. Maybe she kills again, maybe not. But it really doesn’t affect her.

Is this sort of scenario possible?

Best answer:

Answer by no
The OCD and Anxiety combined with the “Goth Culture” indicates that her family might maintain a facade of being “Perfect” but is far from it.

Children don’t act out without cause… Be it genetically inherited mental illness, trauma, or addiction.

In fact, the more a person that acts out stresses their “Perfect Family” the easier it is to dig out that “Well, mom is addicted to pain pills and daddy drinks a lot but isn’t that what everyone goes through?” or “Well, yeah… My cousin made me give him oral a couple of times when I was 9, but that was FOREVER AGO! What could that possibly do with my life now?”

So to answer your question, the odds of someone that is perfectly healthy killing for any reason but self defense are very very small BUT the reality of the person’s true health and wellbeing is never as “Normal and Healthy” as they would like you to believe.

NOTHING happens in a vacuum… It is ALWAYS the result of something. That something might not become apparent until after something horrible happens, but there is ALWAYS a “Cause” for the behavior.

Like that Steubenville, Ohio rape case… Go watch the 20/20 Special on it and you’ll pick up some nuggets they let drop that this “Victim” was going to result in a night like this one way or another…

They kept referring to her “Highly Religious Family”.

Her friends kept saying how she did this every weekend and they begged her to stop.

She routinely consumed MASSIVE amounts of drugs and alcohol at a very young age and had started acting out sexually at an age that indicates that she was already a trauma survivor…

The media, overall, tried to portray her as a perfect little angel that was victimized when the reality was that she was a spectacular victim that was following a predictable course of acting out that resulted in predicable conclusions.

She is a victim, but the victimization of TODAY is NOTHING compared to the victimization that led her to do what she did and put herself in a situation where a group of guys that should have known better took advantage of her.

Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!