Wisconsin Man Pleads Guilty To Abducting Jayme Closs And Killing Her Parents

[conuly]

He said he was trying to spare Jayme and her relatives. "Don't want them to worry about a trial"

Oh, he's so considerate isn't he. What a fucking scumbag.

Mind, it probably is for the best that she doesn't have to testify or see him again - and I surely hope her family is doing its best to keep her from his "apology" and all that garbage - but who does he think he's kidding? He's not worried about her, he's worried about himself.

Comments

[chomiji]

That story doesn't include a detail I saw in the WaPo: 'Before leaving [the courtroom], he faced the gallery and said, “Bye, Jayme,” according to the Star Tribune'.

[wpadmirer]

Yeah, he's probably afraid of what a jury would do to him.

[conuly]

So gross.

[conuly]

As he should be!

[imhilien]

What a douchebag and creepy AF.

[marahmarie]

Ewwwwwww. That is just...sick *smh*

[siderea]

So, there's this thing that people who do really reprehensible things do in their heads. After all, they went to kindergarten once upon a time, too; they grew up knowing "murder is bad" and "kidnapping is bad" and so forth and so on. So to do something like that, one has to rather actively manage the knowledge that doing what one does is Bad-capital-B-Bad. Not the official technical term but I like to call it "conscience management".

Spinning a line of performative bullshit about how caring one is, is one way of doing that.

So, in other words, chances are, the reason he's doing this isn't as much to impress anyone else – because, really, who'd have any reaction but the obvious one of being completely outraged? – but to fend off his own awareness of having done something monstrous. The person he's trying to kid is himself.

Everybody else is just collateral damage in his solipsistic shadow play.

[conuly]

Well, if that poor child is able to avoid having to see him again and testify, I guess she's not getting even more harmed. Small blessing there.

...does this performative bullshit work to help people kid themselves? Like, do they really manage to get taken in by their own garbage?

[siderea]

To a first approximation: yep.

More accurately: sort-of. It works imperfectly. One has to spend a lot of mental effort constantly reassuring one's self that one is A Good Person Anyways. And that has side effects, and, well, cracks.

It doesn't wind up making you less crazy. And it's a super brittle, constantly undermined, precarious false sense of virtue.

I mean, I suppose it's better than realizing the enormity of what one has done. But it's not a delightful romp in the park to have to spend the rest of one's life fending off consciousness of what one really knows about one's crimes.

(By saying he was doing this for his victim, he admits that he knows that, morally, he's supposed to be concerned for the wellbeing of other people, and that other people's suffering has moral meaning. Which means he has a conscience. He just chose to ignore it. Well, he certainly has his work cut out for him.)

I tell ya, working with prison inmates and seeing what this did to them deeply cultivated my cherishing of my capacity to be ashamed of myself and obviated any lingering immature fantasies I might have harbored about wouldn't it be nice to get my sociopath on.

[conuly]

I mean, I suppose it's better than realizing the enormity of what one has done.

I dunno. I'm a "pop the pimple" type of person. It's gotta be better to lance that festering boil rather than pretend it's not there.

Well, he certainly has his work cut out for him.

So long as he's safely locked up, it doesn't do me harm to wish him well in his moral development. (I wouldn't ask his victim to do the same, of course.)

[siderea]

I'm a "pop the pimple" type of person. It's gotta be better to lance that festering boil rather than pretend it's not there.

With thinking like that, you're never going to be much of a bank robber.

[conuly]

Robbing banks is, I think, on a somewhat different level than this particular crime.

[conuly]

No argument here.

[divinemusings]

I thought the same thing. Like, if you didn't want to worry them, maybe you shouldn't have killed her parents and kidnapped her in the first place...

[greghousesgf]

eurgh. he even looks creepy. I'm just glad he's going to jail.

[archangelbeth]

Corroboration: My late sire apparently had literal amnesia moments of the times when he physically attacked my mom. Or other things that didn't fit his self-image. Couldn't remember 'em!

Meant he couldn't ever change, either, and he didn't go digging around to try to remember, so... *disgusted shrug*

[conuly]

Welp, now you can dance around on his grave whenever you want. I hope your mother is all right.

[conuly]

Seriously.

[conuly]

Yes. I hope Jayme is getting all the help she needs, too.

[greghousesgf]

she's probably going to need a lot of therapy.

[conuly]

Ya think?

[conuly]

(That was needlessly sarcastic. It's a subject that makes me so angry, but obvs you're not the person I'm angry at. I can't yell at that asshole, though, and it wouldn't help if I could. I'm sorry.)

[archangelbeth]

She got some therapy, and re-married, and I haven't been talking to her for some time now because she lied about who she voted for, and then was "proud" about her choice on Facebook.

[conuly]

Oh, dear. Well, I still hope she's not being abused.

[archangelbeth]

Don't think so. I mean, the not-talking-to was pretty recent, and the re-marriage was like 20 years ago now.

[conuly]

Then that's good, even if it sucks that you're not talking. (I mean, I guess it's better than not not talking, given the situation, but the situation sucks and I'm sorry.)

[archangelbeth]

*nod*

Thanks. I'm currently of the opinion that she's been possessed, because I cannot fathom why she would've voted for a psychological clone of my sire. -_-