A reader emailed
this article with the subject line, "What happens when you don't
properly break up with a sociopath." I was excited for a possible sociopaths in the news post, but disappointed to read that it looked like a simple crime of passion:
Carol Anne Burger killed her former lover by stabbing her 222 times with a Phillips-head screwdriver and then took pains to hide her crime, police said Wednesday.
Jessica Kalish, who shared a house with Burger despite breaking up with her more than a year ago, was found last Thursday stuffed in the backseat of her gun-metal BMW sedan, abandoned behind a medical office at 2300 S. Congress Avenue. Her blood was splashed around the rear end and undercarriage of the car, as if her killer had tried to load her into the trunk. The driver-side window was shattered.
Examining the body, detectives absorbed what had been done to her. Stab wounds were clustered around the back of her head and stitched across her back and arms and face. Most were between an inch and an inch-and-a-half deep. A blow to Kalish's neck probably killed her, investigators determined.
Okay, murder with a screwdriver, not bad. I feel like I have seen that before in scary sociopath type movies, but that's where the sociopath connections end:
Burger, a 57-year-old writer, did yoga, had a fondness for Shark Week on the Discovery Channel and preferred to watch musicals in theaters with Dolby Sound. She recently stopped drinking coffee. She thought Jackson Browne's "For a Dancer" was good to listen to when you were sad, and she refused to take anti-depressants despite her relationship problems with Kalish.
Okay, so not a sociopath. I mean, maybe with the "fondness for Shark Week," but you keep reading the article and can only come to one conclusion: crime of passion. Yes, sociopaths can kill, maim, or otherwise injure "loved ones," but at least we act predictably. Empaths! They are the scary ones! They'll get all worked up about things, get into this emotional frenzy, and next thing you know you have a screwdriver shoved in your neck. "Watch out for empaths" warns
this article:
On the morning she realized her husband and son would learn the family was losing their house, Carlene Balderrama, 53, faxed a note to the mortgage company, then went to the basement and shot herself.
"I hope you're more compassionate with my husband than you were with me," she wrote in a suicide note left for the company.
It is a dramatic picture of the worst that financial stress can wring. As home foreclosures and unemployment mount, so do their companion tales of fraud, robbery, arson and even murder. And though suicides remain rare, evidence that financial stress is erupting in rash, often illegal behavior isn't difficult to find.
Not just suicides, murder-suicide--like that man who killed his his wife, mother-in-law and three sons, and then shot himself at their Los Angeles home. Empaths are on the rampage!
I admit that sociopaths are sort of scary. But that's just because we don't have the same boundaries for human behavior that you expect in neuro-typical individuals. But what is scarier? Being out in a jungle where you know there are tigers and you take the appropriate precautions? Or being in a zoo with your family when the tigers suddenly break free from their enclosure? Empath boundaries don't do any good when they can just hurdle over them whenever they're upset. That's what empaths are like: ticking time bombs. Screwdriver-murderer's friends know what I am talking about:
Her friends, the ones who can bring themselves to believe what police said about her, turn the question over in amazement.
If this could happen to someone like her, they said, what does it mean for the rest of us?
