By Guest Contributor (a specialist in psychopathy)
Mr. Jingles is a mouse that captures the hearts of both the guards and the inmates of “the Green Mile”—an alias for death row in a 1999 film starring Tom Hanks and Michael Clarke Duncan. In this bleak place, the mouse that skirts from cell to cell, entertaining everyone, is a rare source of solace. However, prison guard Percy Wetmore finds pleasure elsewhere: in crushing the darting mouse to death with his boot, just as everyone is watching.
A mother in family court said Wetmore reminds her of her children’s guardian ad litem. “Sadism is a feature of psychopathy,” I educated her, based on my decades-long career of treating individuals with psychopathy in jails and prisons as a mental health professional.
We think of humans as all striving for love and desiring to support life, but this is not always true. At least one percent of men, and a smaller percentage among women, actually thirst for the destruction of life and derive pleasure from obliterating the very things others hold dear (and they feel deprived of).
This is what the mother could not understand about her husband. If their children were enjoying themselves, rather than joining in the fun, he would become insanely jealous and have to demolish the source of their enjoyment. For example, once while they were delighting in looking at the many icicles outside their windows, calling them “colonies” and “nurseries”, their father, who almost never did maintenance around the house, went out with a shovel and smashed them to the ground “for the gutter.” The children went off wailing.
A little over a year ago, when this father first started thinking about divorce (probably because of one of his many girlfriends), he suddenly decided he needed to take charge of the children–the same children that he used to care so little for that acquaintances mistook him for a single man. Cries and screams reverberating through the home did not matter: if he said he was a good father, they had better accept it and act like it. Their time with him became such living hell that they tried to set the house on fire, saying time with him was “torture” and “worse than death.” They begged their mother, aunt, and grandfather, “Please don’t leave us alone with that maniac!”
Fortunately for him and tragically for the children, there was family court to enforce his interests, and a guardian ad litem it would appoint to muzzle the children. Indeed, by this time the father had obtained a separate residence, and police would escort the children if they locked themselves in their rooms, refusing to go to him. Not only did the family court protect him from accountability for his crimes—from the neglect of regularly starving his children while he ate, to the abuse of inflicting crushing injuries on them, once almost killing his infant daughter. But also the court punished and threatened others with jail time if they were not at the father’s beck and call.
The guardian ad litem, therefore, had to have a certain personality herself: she needed to have a thirst for the harm of children and the cruelty to make the persons she was in charge of suffer. Indeed, for the corrupt purposes of the family court, well-outlined in multiple articles of this web site, she had to be a sadist, even possibly a psychopath.
The mother did not recognize this at first, mistakenly trusting that a guardian for the children was there to protect her children. She waited patiently through excruciating months, as she witnessed her children decline, regress in their development, grow more and more traumatized, and finally dissociate from reality, wondering when the guardian ad litem would finally see what was happening. But the law guardian had no such intent in mind: these were once perfectly happy and thriving children, full of life and superior intellectual and emotional development, and therefore all the more she had to crush them!
Only much later did it dawn on the mother that the guardian ad litem was there to victimize her children rather than to protect them—just as the family court was there to destroy families, not to safeguard them. Doing what they are supposed to does not bring profit, since the healthy parent will spend whatever she can to rescue her children. It does not bring pleasure, either, since breaking apart the mother-child bond, one of the most powerful and splendid manifestations of life, is too compelling an opportunity for the sadist to miss.
The caring mother’s brilliant children recognized this in their guardian ad litem sooner than any adult, calling her their “enemy”, just as they called their father, “that maniac.” The capacity for children to recognize adults who are incapable of loving—and therefore without the empathy or conscience to care for them—is uncanny. Adults are regularly fooled unless they meet a “Jack the Ripper” stereotype. Psychopaths usually pass as normal—even exceptional—disguising themselves as the ideal father, husband, coworker, or boss. They can hold respectable jobs, such as being a lawyer, as both the father and guardian ad litem in this case are. They have had a lifetime of honing perfect pretenses, so as seamlessly to carry out their predatory plans. Children, on the other hand, instantly know what they need to survive and to grow emotionally; they can spot what is authentic and what is devoid of substance for them.
The above guardian ad litem would subsequently do whatever it takes—her perjury alone is over a dozen counts—to obstruct care from the above children when they became suicidal and begged, “Stop dad!” She forced them to go to a “therapist” who locked them in her office if they objected and eventually ripped them away from their loving mother through use of the police to transfer them to their sadistic father. This happened just before Thanksgiving, and they would not see their mother or the only home they knew for all the important holidays of their lives: Thanksgiving, their mother’s birthday, Christmas, New Year’s, Lunar New Year’s, and all their birthdays, which happen to fall at this time.
Mr. Jingles in the above film, fitting of the original Stephen King novel, is resurrected through loving, supernatural powers. Psychopathy, sometimes described as “human evil,” can only destroy, but love rescues, revives, and creates new life.