Female Murderers

As often happens, I missed a trick in the news that I should have picked up on right away, because it was part of my career.  I just didn't apply what I knew to this story in the news. I have noted before that rumors attach to sex offenders like no other category of patient.  I was going to link, but all of the good examples in my writing have distracting information about excess deaths during Covid, types of treatment, and whether sex offender registries are a good thing,* so I will extract a longer section than I usually do from a previous post.

Long sections of my career were spent working with sexual offenders.  The behavior of staff is worth noting. There are rescuers: 

He's developmentally disabled and he mooned some schoolgirls from his bus.  There's no way he belongs on the sex offender list for life.

He was 19 and she was 16 and she has accused other men.

And there are punishers:

After he raped her he knocked her out and tried to set her on fire.

He molested all the girls in that family but only one had the courage to testify against him. 

Versions of these statements had made it into the chart, the hospital's official record of the patient's history, which can be brought into court and used as a reference for expert testimony.  Thankfully, that information cannot in and of itself be submitted as evidence.  Normal rules of evidence apply in court. This is a good thing, because all four of the above statements were false. For example, the man started forcibly raping the neighbor girl when she was 11, she first reported it when she was 16.  No one tried to set anyone on fire in that other case, or even knocked them out. He groped her while she was asleep and the house burned down two years later. People get activated around sex offenders.  They want certain things to be true. I shouldn't say "they."  I should say "we."

Usually the corrective can be fairly low key, with someone saying "I don't think the evidence for that is very good.  I've been doing the psychosocial history/talking with his attorney/going through the old records and I think this got added in.  It seems to come from a neighbor saying 'We always knew something was going on in that house.  I'll bet he molested all those girls.'" But sometimes it has to be a bit harsh, and though I was not a confrontative person by nature I learned to be, because sometimes you are sitting at a table and have to say. "I have put a note in my official eval that this is not true and previous records claiming it should be ignored.  We have to stop saying this, both formally and here in the team room." Not easy when one of those claims is by your supervisor, who is sitting right there. I have experienced this in reverse as well, of making a statement and having another staff member saying  "That's just a rumor, started by her previous girlfriend while they were divorcing. There's no evidence for it."  It's pretty humiliating, but if you don't want to be part of keeping non- or low-level offenders locked up or dangerous people let out, you try and be a stand-up guy. When something isn't true you can't let that go.

There is a second group that also attracts stories that just won't die, and that is female murderers or attempted murderers.  As with the sex offenders, something about them just activates all the wrong parts of our brains. Or something. The narrative is so unlike our everyday experience that we seem to want to attach explanatory stories to them, whether they have any basis in evidence or not. I had some females in that category (usually the "attempteds" rather than the actuals, because there are just many more of those) on my caseload over the years. The same sort of stories attach, some trying to exonerate or excuse, some trying to accentuate what a monster she is: He had been abusing her for years...there was a letter to her sister fantacising about cutting him into little pieces...she made his daughter watch...` 

So it should have clicked for me, of all people, that the whole Karen Read case down in Canton was going to attract this sort of stray energy and people were going to convince themselves of strange things. I got distracted by all the conspiracy-theory stuff. Which is also fascinating.  Yet I should have been alert right from the start that as soon as there was a female suspect in this murder, the discussion was going to turn weird.  Because it usually does.

*They aren't. Half the people on them are only marginally more dangerous now than the average person, and more that half of the dangerous sexual offenders aren't on the lists, so it's mostly just an excuse to Do Something.