Without emotion

 

  This story comes to me from Calibre Press, one of the country’s leading trainers in law enforcement.
  A prisoner has just been sentenced at the county courthouse. Wearing an bright orange jailhouse jumpsuit and bound with steel handcuffs and ankle-irons locked onto belly chains, the man is loaded onto a van for a 15 mile ride to the state prison.
  Seconds before the van crosses over a bridge, the inmate kicks out the window glass and dives from the van onto the highway. Although injured from the fall, he struggles to his feet and vaults over the side of the bridge where he plunges 65 feet to his death in the rocky shallows below.
  Officials find a note in the inmate’s personal belongings: “Stars surround me and peace and love are mine. They cannot be taken or touched. I win.”
  This was written by a middle-aged man who made his living stealing antiques and then selling them. Over a period of several months before his trial, he confessed, one-by-one, to killing five men “as coldly and deliberately as an executioner,” Calibre Press quoted an investigator as saying.
  Some of the dead inmate’s acquaintances remember him differently. “He was a quiet, gentle, caring man — a sympathetic listener,” Calibre Press quoted a friend of the inmate. “He liked to draw mountains and write poems about freedom and the stars and pure love.”
  A psychiatrist from Yale Medical School studied the suicide report and concluded: “People like this are incapable of feeling human emotions,” he said. “Their seeming kindness and empathy are as cold and calculating as their violent crimes. They may appear to be caring, but it is a practiced deception.”
  Think about that the next time a cold blooded killer claims he was mistreated as a child. No doubt he was a victim while growing up — but does that give him the right to make victims out of others?